Check the list of basic steps and top tactics that will make your website user-friendly and converting.
We are living in a digital world where the average person spends more than six hours online. It translates to the internet having massive potential for your business brand and what better way to advertise your business than having your website. Having a website is just the first of many steps you have to take. Optimizing your website user experience is an essential part of solving challenges that different visitors face.
Google promotes sites in organic search results that offer the best user experience. The recent Page Experience Update announcement from Google shares insights on how UX improvement can drastically improve your site’s organic rankings on the search engines.
In this article, you’ll learn what user experience is, why positive user experience is essential, and what basic tactics can be used to optimize your website user experience. Let’s start!
User experience is the behavior that website visitors show when interacting with a website and the feelings they have doing it. You need to have an understanding of what the user is going through and make their experience positive and useful.
You have to consider your user’s needs and assess how best to serve them. What you definitely don’t want is losing potential clients within the first few seconds of them visiting your website.
User experience consists of optimizing seven elements on your site:
Having a superior user experience has significant benefits such as driving lead generation, improving your search engine optimization, boosting conversion rates and increasing sales volumes.
It’s vital to make sure you meet some basic needs of your website visitors and answer basic questions such as:
Every business goal is to stay ahead of the competition. Website users take about five seconds maximum to find what they want on your website before they leave. That is a short period that you have to gain the user’s attention. About 68% of website users leave a site because of poor-design and bad user experience.
Your website’s success depends on how users interact with it, and optimizing for user experience is vital to meet consumers demanding needs in a highly digitized world. When optimizing your website’s user experience, you need to ensure your website is useful, usable, findable, desirable, valuable, credible, and accessible.
Here are some benefits of optimizing your website user experience:
In this digital era, user experience optimization is key to having loyal customers that will let your brand grow.
Here are some of the basic tactics to optimize your site for positive user experience.
The most common mistake that novice businesses make is not taking the time to understand who their business personas are. A persona is the target group that your business is aiming to provide a solution to fulfill for them. You need to understand your market target group and classify them in groups to get a picture of who they are, their needs, and how to solve those needs. It is hard for your website to fulfill everyone’s needs. However, you can still attract the attention of the majority of the website visitors and study their behavior when they are on your website to understand what ticks. For businesses, especially for startups, knowing your target market is essential. Finding solutions that meet their demands depends on identifying your company personas, the people you want to serve. Instead of attempting to please everyone, concentrate on drawing in the vast majority of website visitors. Using a website feedback tools might be helpful before constructing your website. Building a website that appeals to and better serves potential clients allows you to obtain insightful information from them and learn about their preferences.
To define your business personas, you need to research your target audience and your current customers. Perform competitor analysis and identify the target audiences of your competitors. Don’t forget to use a VPN to track your competitors so that you don’t leave any digital footprints. What do they have in common? You can do this by calling some customers and asking them about the challenges they are having.
Here is an example of a user persona.
You may also send surveys by email and compare the similarities to the feedback. Customers with the same challenges can be grouped under one category and work on solving the challenges they are facing.
More often than not, we find ourselves leaving websites that are difficult to navigate through. Let users have a familiar experience when browsing through your website for the first time. Don’t make them think and struggle to figure out how to find what they want from your site. Navigating from one page to another should be effortless. Your website information should be straightforward, and users should have a hassle-free experience. You must ensure that core navigation features, such as the menu, search, and contacts are easily visible and functional.
Make the functionality of the layout elements clear in order not to get a customer clicking on a tab that is not functioning. Don’t use technical tech jargon that people don’t understand. Amazon offers great navigation making products on the website easily accessed.
Intuitive designs and quickly obtained results improve the user experience and make website users come back to your website time and again.
To improve your website navigation, you need to:
As a rule of thumb, content is king and will remain to dominate the digital space. You must provide your users with content that is useful to them and satisfies their needs. Consider adding visual content, such as:
Videos. They capture user’s attention, especially those users who prefer viewing demonstrations than reading text. You can embed videos by using Html scripts on your website or by embedding the video URL from YouTube or Vimeo. When selecting the right video solution for your needs, it’s essential to weigh various features tailored to your preferences.
Infographics. Use infographics to capture data, images, and text to give users a comprehensive summary of information. You can hire a designer to create an infographic that is based on some statistics.
Informative illustrations and photos. Use relevant images that complement well with the text. You can use stock photos or illustrations to make your content visually pleasing and emotional.
Simple illustrations. Use simple clipart as beautiful examples in your text.
Besides, interactive content is hugely successful in improving the bounce rate and improving the overall user experience of the site. Here is an example of interactive content in action:
Interactive content is different from regular content because people actually engage with the former. When people actively participate in the content by watching, listening, or taking actions, user engagement is greatly improved. Here are some of the best interactive content types that you can use on your site:
Kindly note you should not overdo this but have the right balance of textual and visual content. For example, if you combine quizzes, interactive videos, and countdowns all at once on the website, it can result in slow loading times, reduced user engagement, and decreased performance.
Having an excellent website design and engaging content is a massive plus for website optimization. Still, it does not end there. Here are a few ways to optimize your site for an improved website performance:
Moreover, follow the basic web conventions like:
Another vital factor to consider is offering excellent customer service on your website. Some types of businesses are not that straightforward to all consumers. Answer any questions a customer may have as fast as possible. Sensitive information such as acquiring a customer’s personal information, for example, home address and bank details for a payout should have a customer service representative ready to engage with potential clients in a friendly manner.
You can offer customer service on your website in many forms, such as:
One of the best ways to assist customers is to have a live chat software on your site. Some paid live chat tools you can use are Appy Pie LiveChat, Intercom, Drift, and Olark. Moreover, having a website with client portal can also enhance customer support by offering a self-service option, allowing customers to access information and resources conveniently on their own, reducing the need for constant live support. There are a lot of client portal app options available in the market today, making it easier than ever for businesses to implement this feature and improve their customer support services. Remain available to assist your customers whenever they need you because if you don’t take care of your customers, someone else will.
Do not over complicate things when optimizing for good user experience. People tend to engage more with clean, orderly, and free from clutter design.
Your website should not be shouting all manners of colors or pop-ups everywhere, as this will chase away potential leads. If possible, avoid all modes of advertisements on your website. Your first objective is to get the attention of your visitors to turn them into leads then customers. Having advertisements all over your site will divert their attention to some other product or service, and you will lose potential income.
You should make it easy to find information and create space for each design element on your website. Learn how to format your text by using headings and short paragraphs to make it easier to read your website text content. Also, use bulleted lists or numbered lists to make key information stand out or highlight key terms in bold.
It is essential to optimize your website user experience to stay ahead of the competition and have a marketing edge over your competitors. For you to optimize your website fully, you need to combine all these tips effectively to create a quality user experience for your users. If you have no expertise in optimizing websites, consider hiring a professional to assist you; good UX is really worthy investment.
About the author: Joydeep Bhattacharya is the author of the SEO Sandwitch Blog, where he shares tutorials on digital marketing. He is also a contributing author on SEMrush, Search Engine Watch, Single Grain, and others.
Title image from Abstract pack on Ouch vector library
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