Now that the majority of us are happy to conduct our business online rather than visit a shop or office in person, it is now more important than ever that every company has a website. But just having a website isn’t good enough – it has to be very user friendly.

Everyone has access to the internet these days, and it is really crucial that whoever lands on your site is able to use it without any issues at all. Even people who rarely use the internet and normally have trouble getting to grips with technology need to be able to figure out your site. If users have a hard time getting to grips with it, they will quickly move on and navigate to one of your competitor’s websites.

Do you think that your website is as user-friendly as it can be? Here’s a checklist to help you figure it out.

Add Contact Information

Your website should completely remove the need for any customers or clients to pick up the phone and ask you any questions.

All of the answers to their questions should be easy to find on the site. This includes your contact information. Your address, phone number, and email address should be easy to find so that your customers can easily get in touch with you in a variety of ways.

Make It Easy To Navigate

How is the navigation on the site? Each one of your pages needs to be easy to find so that all the information on them is accessible.

There are two ways you can do this. Firstly, you should create sitemap so that all of your various pages are mapped out clearly.

As well as that, it’s worth adding a clearly visible drop-down menu that links to all of the pages.

Make Sure It’s Mobile Responsive

These days, most of us now use our mobile phones to view pages on the internet. Because most of your web traffic will be mobile, it’s necessary that your website is now mobile responsive.

If it isn’t, it will be very slow to load on mobile and tablet devices, and it could also mess with the navigation.

So, if the site can’t be viewed or navigated on mobiles, then you could lose quite a bit of web traffic.

Link To Social Media

Lots of web users like to follow their favorite companies on social media so that they keep up to date with all of their latest news and any deals that they release.

So, to encourage anyone who lands on your site to find your social media profiles, you need to clearly link to each profile on your website.

Most CRMs and website builders will let you add social media buttons which make the links easy to spot.

Check For Bugs

There are various bugs that could end up on the website if you aren’t careful.

Thankfully, full checks should help you find them so that you know which issues you need to iron out. For instance, dead links, poor performance, and bad functionality should all be prevented.

All you need to do to test the website is to use it. Note down any issues and problems that you come across and pass this list onto the website design team so that they can work on them.

It’s better that you find the bugs before your customers do!

Add A Search Feature

It can be really annoying when you visit a website looking for some specific information but come away without having found it.

This isn’t the fault of the user; most of the time, it’s the company to blame as they might have hidden the information.

If your website is quite dense with information, it will be worth adding a search function so that anyone who lands on your site can quickly find what they are looking for.

Cover It With Your Branding

As soon as someone lands on your website, they need to instantly know that it belongs to your company or is part of your personal brand. This is especially important if there are companies out there with similar names to you.

It’s important that you eliminate any potential confusion by covering the website with your logo and branding, so that everyone who lands on it knows that it represents your company.

Once you know that you have all of the above features and functions on your websites, you can be happy knowing that it is highly user-friendly.

Don’t forget to keep on reviewing the usability as it can sometimes get worse if you don’t keep on working on it.

The world is changing. We can see that everywhere we look. Even within the relatively new confines of online content consumption, the world is changing at a staggering place. The way in which we (and by we I mean the general public, including your customers) consume our media has undergone a sharp change, and as a business it behoves you to rise to meet them.

There was a time when blog posts were all you needed. They were a great way to not only give your SEO a little organic boost, but they also helped to give your brand a voice. They imbued your business with a sense of personality that made it all the more appealing.

They also established you, the face of the business, as a reputable and knowledgeable leader; someone who knows their onions and can be trusted with their ongoing custom.

But the times have changed, and it seems as though the busier we get, the less time we have for long form content. We know for a fact that people are consuming more media on the go through their smartphones and mobile devices than at static computers.

They’re catching their hit of content in tiny bite sized chunk on the train to work or on their coffee break.

This means that video is the best way to reach customers in 2018 and is fast becoming one of the fastest growing digital marketing trends of 2018. Thus, it’s necessary for you to make sure that your outsourced IT support provider has the facilities for you to make, edit and upload video content without clogging your business’ bandwidth. Here’s why…

Video is efficient

A gifted writer can hook and engage readers, sure. They can weave data seamlessly into prose and get information across to a reader artfully… Absolutely. But video is simply a more efficient form of communication.

A picture is, after all, worth a thousand words. Video can get dense information across quickly in an easily digestible format.

When you’re trying to reach busy decision makers who don’t have the time to read through larges chunks of text, video is the way to go.

Video is sharable

The beauty of video content is that not only is it easy to consume, it’s easy to share on social media platforms. There’s also evidence to suggest that video posts on social media get more engagement than long form written content. They garger more likes, more shares and more comments. This in turn means

Video performance metrics are easy to understand and actionable

Any entrepreneur worth their salt knows that keeping a close eye on your metrics is an essential part of any content marketing strategy. The great thing about video metrics is that they are transparent, easy to interpret and easy to action.

Shares, comments and clicks speak for themselves but you can also calculate an average of how long users remain engaged with the video for. It can help you to identify if a video is too long or that a particular element of your video isn’t working for audiences if they switch off at a certain point.

Video may have killed the radio star, but there’s no reason why it can’t breathe new life into your SEO.

The world of internet marketing, search engine optimisation and sales is littered with jargon, rules and “best practices”. When we get mired in these expectations we might miss out on our ACTUAL goal of producing revenue and get stuck in the dreary world of digital beaurocracy.

This means you need to know what success for you means. It’s different for each business & industry.
That’s why the field of conversion rate optimisation is so vital to making SEO worthwhile.

What does CRO mean? What do you need to know about it? How do you do it? These and many more questions are answered in this ultimate guide to conversion rate optimization and SEO.

What is conversion rate optimisation and should you care?

The aim of search engine optimisation is to get visitors to your site but what happens then? A conversion occurs when a visitor to your website takes an action that you want them to take. If there is no option to take an action, you cannot achieve a conversion. The action needs to suit the purpose of your business or enterprise and you get a benefit from it.  Some examples are:

• Signing up for a newsletter
• Signing up for a course
• Downloading an app
• Making a purchase

This is the outcome that you can measure. It only has two options. They either do it or they don’t.

When you optimise your conversion rate you take steps to make that action more likely to happen. However, it is not always easy to work out how to do that. It is likely to require a structured and systematic approach to the process.

You are also likely to need to improve the performance of your website and this can mean re-examining all of your IT set-up and accessing appropriate IT support for business. A successful website has to be underpinned by efficient IT support that will identify potential problems before they even happen in your organisation.

This puts you in the best position to use your analytics and feedback to improve your conversion rates. It is important that your conversion goals are defined by your enterprise’s unique objectives and needs.

Attracting more traffic to your site may be part of your overall marketing strategy but taking the traffic you already have and making the most of it is what conversion rates are all about.

If you are serious about improving your conversion rate optimization you will not rely on guesswork and gut feelings. It will be based on data and innovation.

The Jargon you need to know

A Call to Action (CTA) is nothing to do with the military. It is an element that invites the visitor to do something. If they pop onto your site, read your content and then disappear then they have not been of much use to you. You need to get the most out of every visitor. At the very least, you want them to share your content so a call to action would be text saying ‘Please share’ or ‘Sharing is caring’ and a button that they can use to quickly and easily share a link to your content on social media.

Other versions would be a ‘Buy Now’ button which takes them to your sales page or a ‘Sign Up’ button taking them to a form where they can enter their email details.

You may have read about conversion funnels in marketing articles. This refers to the pathway that a user takes as they travel from being a visitor to your site (the start of the funnel) to becoming a paying customer (the end of the funnel). The purchase that they make is the conversion. A typical description of a conversion funnel would be Home page > search results page > product page > checkout.

If your SEO is working, you will be getting a lot of visitors to your site but the best way of getting them into your conversion funnel is not always easy to determine. You could use a method that is referred to as A/B or split testing. You try out two versions of your conversion funnel methods to see which works best. This could be different coloured buttons, different calls to action or different images.

Data and conversion rates

There is inevitably some math associated with this process but it is not complicated. You can collect all the data you need by setting up Google Analytics which only takes a few minutes and there are plenty of tutorials to teach you how to use it effectively.

To calculate your conversion rate all you have to do is divide the number of conversions (the number who purchased/subscribed/signed up) by the total number of visitors to your site.

However, that is not the whole picture. You need to establish how your SEO is influencing what people are doing on your site. Is it bringing in visitors who want to be there? Do they like what they see when they get there? Are they staying for a while or they clicking off you site immediately? The figures that you gain from your analysis can inform your SEO strategy going forward.

There are a few key parameters that you need to measure. The first is the bounce rate. This is the percentage of people who leave your site after viewing just one page (the one they landed on). If your bounce rate is high, this is a problem. Perhaps the visitors are not finding what they are looking for or don’t like what they find. You need to rethink your SEO strategy so that you can attract a different type of visitor.

It is also important to be aware of your exit rate for each page on your site. This is the percentage of people who leave after viewing that page. Therefore, if a page has a very high exit rate it may be an indication that it needs some work!

You can learn a lot from the data on how much time visitors spend on your site. This tells you if they are actually reading your content or if they are leaving very quickly. The more time they spend, the more opportunity you have to get them to convert.

It is useful to take a look at the average page views which is one of the engagement metrics that you can use to inform your SEO strategy. It tells you how many pages the average visitor looked at before they left. More page views can mean more engagement and that is good. It means that they are clicking on internal links and entering the conversion funnel. However, you need to be mindful that it can also mean that there is a lack of clarity and direction on your site so they are clicking all over the place because they don’t know how to make a purchase. This is obviously a bad thing!

Why is conversion rate optimisation important?

Firstly, there is never any reason to be complacent. You can never sit back and think that your SEO and CRO are working perfectly because your competitors will not be doing that! You need to keep things under review. You need to constantly look for new ideas and innovations in your SEO strategy and in making the conversion process as easy as you can.

Another reason is to do with money. If you are relying on paid advertising, this is going to get more expensive and more competitive as the web becomes more and more crowded. Spending more and more money to attract more and more visitors is not the answer. You need to do extra with the visitors that you get. You must identify and sort out glitches in your conversion funnel so that the process is seamless.

SEO is not about getting any kind of visitor, it is about getting the right kind of visitor. In the same way, CRO is also about getting the ‘right’ kind of converters. Ideally, you want customers who love your product, come back and buy more and tell everyone how amazing you are!

On the plus side, CRO does not cost you anything. It dovetails with your SEO strategy and makes the most of the traffic that you already have. It increases the return on your SEO investment and is a highly cost-effective strategy. If you look at the math of the situation, a great CRO strategy lowers your customer acquisition costs and this maximizes your profits.

The end result is that you have more money to spend on additional acquisition strategies. Only now, they can be highly targeted at the visitors that you know are most likely to convert.

Ultimately, this has the knock-on effect of making you more attractive to affiliates and partners and this is essential to bloggers for whom this is their main income stream. You will earn more and your affiliates will earn more and so everyone is happy.

CRO gives you the edge over your competitors. Your visitors are more likely to find what they are looking for on your site and are therefore less likely to go hunting for it elsewhere.

So, it is not hard to make your SEO work with your CRO to give your business the best chance of success. Make your call to action clear, your conversion funnel seamless and protect your visitor’s security and you will have a winning formula.