If you’ve done the research, followed search engine guidelines, and otherwise optimized your site to rank highly you would expect results, right? But what happens when you aren’t receiving the results you’d expect?
You might be seeing a lot of impressions coming in, but those impressions have a very conversion rate to leads. Those leads have an even lower conversion rate to sales. If this sounds like the issue you’re facing, then your issue certainly lays in site design and overall user experience.
Site Design
Site design is more than the background or fonts you choose to use on our company’s website. The overall design will incorporate all graphic and non-graphic elements of your company page. A good site design is:
- Uncluttered
- Visually appealing
- Simple
- Optimized for SEO
- Easy to read
- Incorporates high-quality graphics
- Utilizes plenty of “empty space”
- Optimized for mobile devices
User Experience
User experience is just what it sounds like. It is the experience a user has when they come to your website. Even more important than SEO best practices, ensuring a good user experience is vital. But what makes an enjoyable experience versus a negative experience?
A negative experience would be a site with hard to read copy, eye-straining color scheme, difficulty in navigation, unclear directions, or is otherwise difficult to use.
Keys to creating a good user experience would be ensuring that:
- The site is easy on the eyes (no neon colors, hard to read fonts, etc.)
- It is easy (and obvious) to navigate from one page to the next
- Simple sign up procedures which make it clear what the user will receive
- Effective copy and content that utilizes best practices for readability (plenty of white space, short paragraphs, concise sentences, clear call to actions, bullets, numbered lists, headers)
Why This Matters
Wondering why this is important? The point is to get customers to your site, which is done through search engine optimization. Right? Kind of.
SEO will get users to your site, but user experience is what keeps them there. A bad design or ineffective copy can have potential readers leaving before they even scan your pages to see what is being offered.
A straightforward way to think of this is as a series of actions and rewards.
Action #1: Using SEO and a variety of advertisement options to increase search engine ranking.
Reward: People come to your website.
Action #2: Implementing best website design practices and ensuring a great user experience.
Reward: People stay on your site, where they find out what you offer.
Action #3: You offer your target audience something useful in return for their information. This can be content, discounts, or something else entirely. What is offered depends on your brand and customers.
Reward: You get their information, which turns them into warm leads.
The process goes on from there, but this is the part of the buyer’s journey where website design and user experience are most important.
8 Easy Ways to Improve Site Design & User Experience
Knowing how important these elements are is one thing, but how do you go about optimizing your website for them? The best option is to hire a professional design company who is efficient in best SEO and user experience (UX) practices. Often, these selfsame companies can operate after your site is live as an extension of your marketing company.
If you choose to go it your own, however, here are eight simple ways you can begin to improve your site design. Each of the following are simple steps which are broken down, so they can be executed one at a time if necessary.
1: Optimize Color Scheme
Get rid of overly bright, neon coloring which causes eyestrain and a difficulty in reading texts. Replace it with soft or dark colors. The text should contrast the background, so it is easy to read.
2: Check Your Fonts
Do away with overly stylized fonts which are difficult to read. While pretty, these offer no purpose or benefit to the reader.
3: Optimize Sign-Up Forms
Check your sign-up forms. It is ideal to have five or less boxes which need to be filled out, if possible. If your forms have more than five boxes, consider doing away with any optional ones to decrease the chance readers will become too overwhelmed to sign up.
4: Increase Readability
Check your webpage copy for easy readability. Have you used plenty of white space? Are bullets used when possible? Have you incorporated headers to break up the text?
5: Check Graphics
Make sure the graphics used on your website are just enough to help the user experience without being overwhelming. They should also be of the highest quality.
