A List of Website Optimization Tactics You Can Use on Your Website
Website optimization is a science. You put yourself in your visitors shoes, come up with a hypothesis (or idea), implement an experiment, and measure the results. Then lather, rinse, and repeat. Try it. Before you know, you’ll have a long list of best practices that work for you and your business.
You may be wondering what I mean by website optimization. This is the practice of designing, writing, and developing your site to increase the number of people who contact your business. It is basically web design with a focus on marketing & sales. It goes well beyond just aesthetic appearance.
devEdge Internet Marketing has been working with business websites for years. We’ve come up with some general best practices. These are some of the things we find work most of the time and for most businesses out there. Many of these tweaks can be implemented by you. None of them take a lot of technical expertise. So give some of these ideas a try and see what happens!
The 10 Website Optimization Tweaks
1) Focus your copy on the reader. Use “you.” Also known as the 2nd person perspective. It takes a little to get used to writing like that because we were mainly taught 1st and 3rd person writing techniques in school. It’s worth it though. You’ll end up focusing more on the benefits and readers perspective.
2) Use a call to action. Don’t be afraid to ask your readers to do something once you’ve established the value and benefit of your product or service. Make the instructions easy to follow and clear. With a good call to action, you can move your passive readers into customers, clients, or at least interested prospects.
3) Clearly display your phone number, contact form, and address on all pages. Don’t make people click the “Contact Us” menu link on your website. Put your contact info everywhere so that it is there as soon as they want to see it. Make it easy for people to contact you in the way they feel comfortable.
4) Establish credibility with testimonials, notable clients, associations, memberships, and accreditations. If you require a special qualification to do your job, make sure you mention it. Using logo’s of your accreditation, memberships, clients, etc… seems to work better. If you’re proud of a type of product you use – let people know you use it (and possibly why if it isn’t self-explanatory).
5) Blog. Just bite the bullet and start writing articles.
6) Use images and video. Nothing turns people away quite like seeing a large block of text. Use images (and video if you can swing it) to break it up. Our tests have shown that using an image in the top-left of your content works really well to draw people into reading.
7) Headlines. Use them to break up the text and draw people into reading more.
8) Simplify contact forms or shopping cart. Who would want to fill out a long web form that asks for way too much information? Keep it simple by asking for as little information as you possibly can while still maintaining a high-quality lead. If you have an eCommerce website then try simplifying your shopping cart steps.
9) Improve site navigation and structure. Put yourself in the shoes of someone researching your business. What information are they going to want to know first? Second? Etc… Then organize your website navigation in that order (from left to right, or top to bottom – depending on how your menu is laid out). Usually this means that your services/products should appear before your about page.
10) Use a text and background colour that is high contrast. There seems to be a trend right now to use low-contrasting text. This means that the text is a similar shade to the background color. Such as a dark grey on an off-white background. It’s silly. Make your website readable… And people might actually read it! Black text on a white background has been proven repeatedly to be the most readable.
Did You See Something that You Could Try?
I hope that this list of 10 website optimization tweaks helps you. Maybe you saw something on there that could be improved on your website? You should try it out as soon as possible! I tried to keep the list to things most business owners could do themselves.
There are many other tweaks and things you could do on your website. This is not an exhaustive list. However, it covers some of the most common problems we come across. Which means that if you can implement everything on this list you’ll probably be ahead of your competitors.
If you’re interested in really seeing how your website stacks up to website optimization best practices, then contact devEdge Internet Marketing. You’ll get a free website audit.
Maybe you’ve got your own tweak to share? What have you found that works best? What do you think of the list? Let me know in the comments below.
