Do Your Customers Like Your Website? 5 Tips to make your website perform better
Think of the experience you have walking into a good shop and then think of the experience you have walking into a bad one – whilst it may seem obvious what makes a better experience, many companies do not stop to give their website this consideration.
Good Shop, Bad Shop
First off – a good shop would usually be in a convenient location, like the main street where the most people are looking. The equivalent on the web would be ranking page one for searches for that business service. If you think of your website as a brochure with static pages, your website is probably out of date and not good in terms of SEO. This is a crucial point because good SEO will mean you are presented first to your customers searching for your service. The first step to being seen and making sales is improving your SEO.
Be Good Looking
The next consideration when making the decision whether to go into a shop, like a website, is based on its aesthetic appeal – does the way in look attractive and enticing? If a searcher clicks on your website link and does not like what appears – they will move onto the next one. This is a surprisingly quick decision in many cases. Research published in The Journal of Behaviour and Information Technology found that people made judgements about a website by its appearance in under 50 milliseconds – less than a blink of an eye.
Ask The Right Questions
Just like a shop would be judged by its window display and front signage, so your website must be immediately attractive to the viewer.
So here are 5 tips to help improve the performance of your website:
- Don’t hide your offerings. What is there in the form of messages, offers or otherwise on the homepage to entice you to explore further and stay at the website? If someone clicks on your homepage – give them reasons to stay. Don’t hide your best offerings deeper in the website.
- Be identifiable to your customers. Do the colours and graphics reflect the type of business – if you are selling eco-friendly products maybe choose green to indicate nature, for instance? Is the look relevant to the sector the service is in? In the same way a shop front mirrors the style of what’s inside the shop – an antiques shop front signage should look different to a technology retailer – it’s important to get the visual cues and connections to the business correct. Research in the market may be needed.
- Look professional and stylish. Is the front end stylish enough? It can be the right message, easy to see what it is selling and yet – if it hasn’t been designed well to look attractive, it could easily fail. Browsing customers might not know anything about your business, so if the front end is designed poorly or not easy on the eye – it might put them off.
- Make your selling points clear. Can you tell from the website what the company’s selling points and brand values are e.g. high quality, cost-effective, eco-friendly, discounts policy, free gifts, prides on service?
- Make navigation easy and clear. You should ask, what is there for the customer to engage with? Can someone visiting you find their way around to what they might want to know, easily? A website can have searchable content, helpful menus, social media plug-ins, e-commerce, blogs, guides and news. Also – can you get hold of a representative easily or is it off-putting to find a human being to connect with if you have a query?
A good website – like a good shop – will be easy to find, attractive to look at and easy to navigate. A poorly designed website can cost your business dearly.
If you are concerned about how your website is performing contact Varn and ask for a SEO audit. This can include research into keywords, competitor analysis, website coding, URL analysis and much more. It might be time to consider a re-design of your website with a focus on performance.
