The Keys to a Modern Website Experience

Your primary digital storefront still matters. Despite the rise of social media and contextual search results, people still return to your website to build trust with your brand, review your products and personnel, and make a decision on whether to purchase your product or enlist your services. Websites help to establish brand identity, increase credibility and filter broader audiences into buyers. However, 88% of users won’t return to a website a second time if they don’t have an initial positive experience. Developing a strong first impression, clear content hierarchy, and easy means of conversion separate the good websites from the top-performing websites.

Several key strategies go into creating a website that will satisfy and impress customers, ultimately leading to more interest and sales.

Making a Good First Web Impression

It takes the average user just 50 milliseconds to get a first impression from a website. That’s not even enough time to read a headline, so 94% of these first impressions will be design and layout related. Ensuring your website gives a professional and credible impression to viewers is essential to keeping them on your website long enough to read any of your content. This can be done in the following ways:

Minimalism: When it comes to designing your website, less is more. Minimalism, at its core, makes it easier for viewers to read and navigate through your website. This includes everything from color choices to fonts. The minimalistic design also adds a clear and professional look to your website, which is great for a first impression.

Navigation: 50% of lost sales on a website are directly correlated to users not being able to effectively navigate and search for information. Ensure that your website layout is easy to follow by including informative headlines and an intuitive main navigation menu.

Call to Action: If a user stays on your website past those initial milliseconds, make sure your website has clear calls to action throughout. 70% of users who see a call to action on the homepage are more likely to make a purchase or inquiry, and when there isn’t a call to action, it can leave consumers confused on how to move forward.

Maximizing Your Web Content

Maximizing your website content involves everything from enhancing SEO to planning and promoting new content releases. Strategically planning and placing content throughout your website will not only make you more organized internally but will also increase your potential audience and site traffic. Using the tips below will help your business grow and maximize the content being released.

Understanding Your Audience: Understanding your audience and what they want to see is the first step to successful content marketing. Does your audience use the site for one key action (e.g. logging into online banking) the majority of the time or do you have a more complicated set of interactions? Does your audience engage lead generation pages and move into the site from these campaign-oriented pages? Each website is affected by your marketing team’s media and external promotion strategies as well as your internal structure, so start with the customer to determine where their priorities lie and build from there.

SEO: Search engine optimization, or SEO, is essential to getting your website’s traffic maximized organically. Google will place your content higher on the search results page if it contains more useful keywords throughout the article. Since 75% of users won’t scroll past the first page of results, using keywords is extremely important, but not the only key to effective SEO. Meta information, page structure, backlinking, and server-side considerations all impact how your site ranks. Start by making sure your site is technically sound and then proceed to optimize and scale content and linking from there.

Promoting Your Content: Ensuring that people see your website is another essential part of maximizing your potential, so promotion is key. This can be done on a variety of social media platforms, search engine marketing, content co-promotion, or digital advertising. Instagram and Twitter are most effective when advertising B2C, LinkedIn is most effective for B2B, and Facebook’s large and active audience makes it effective for B2C and B2B both.

Balancing Your Website User Experience

Having a balanced user experience on your website is critical. What do we mean by “balanced?” A website often accommodates multiple audiences, a number of paths to conversion, and a variety of interactive or static content, questions, and contacts. Because there are so many types of interactions, user experience can quickly turn chaotic instead of feeling like a cohesive part of your overall digital brand. User experience involves many different factors, including the overall feeling consumers have when on your site (e.g. feeling overwhelmed, confused, excited, etc.) Here are a sampling of factors that will help make sure your users are satisfied with their experience.

Use Pop-ups Wisely: If a user clicks on your website and is immediately shown a pop-up they could easily become overwhelmed. 70% of users find pop-ups to be annoying, so to keep users on your site, you can place pop-ups smaller on the screen or avoid using them until the user has been on the site for a longer period of time.

Mobility: Ensuring your website appears properly formatted on a mobile device allows you to maximize your potential traffic. 57% of all website traffic in the U.S. comes from mobile devices, so if your content isn’t formatted properly, you’re already losing potential clients.

Reduce Page Speed: Page speed can be a make or break for your website. Websites like Hubspot’s Website Grader can help to show your website’s speed, allowing for fixes before any business is lost.

Legible Text: When organizing text on your website, keep in mind that most consumers will scroll through before actually reading every line. Using bullet points, bolded fonts, infographics, or shorter paragraphs will make the content easier to read and less daunting to viewers.

Use Chat Bots: When it comes to basic questions, 74% of users would prefer to use chat boxes. Chat boxes can be available 24/7 (or limited based on your organization’s needs), allowing users to receive prompt responses to their simplest questions, while being relatively inexpensive for businesses to implement. Chat bots do not solve complex problems, but mitigating your most common questions (and getting user feedback) can help lessen workloads in places like your customer service department.

Ask for Feedback: Consumers want to be heard by a company, and companies want to fix common problems, so adding in an option for feedback is a win-win. If a company sees the same negative feedback from different people, this gives a clear idea of what needs to be done to improve user experience. WordPress even has a free feedback plugin that companies can use.

Companies that make a good first impression, build an effective content strategy, and maximize user experience are going to have less bounce rates, higher sales, and a more satisfied and trusting audience. Get ahead of the competition by using these tools to maximize your website.

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