Don’t Bring Good Prospects to a Bad Site

Unlike baseball, “if you build it, they will come” doesn’t really apply online. So you’ve probably put a fair amount of money into making sure you’re ranking well organically and driving traffic through paid advertising. Your clickthrough rate has skyrocketed… but your number of new customer acquisitions has not risen accordingly. What’s going on?

You might be suffering from poor user experience on your site. This could stem from any number of things, including:

• Content that doesn’t address your potential customers’ needs and pains, doesn’t speak in their language, or doesn’t show how your offering can benefit them
• Information architecture (a fancy name for the way your content is organized) that makes it tough for a potential customer to find what they’re looking for
• Design & layout that makes it hard to find, read, or share the information on the site
• Calls to action that are missing, confusing, or inappropriate
• Forms that are too long or error-prone
• Landing pages that are not optimized for conversion

How do I fix my bad site?

If you suspect that your site might be suffering from one or more of the issues above, there are a few things you can do. I’m going to focus on a couple here: landing page optimization, and website usability testing.

Landing page optimization

Landing pages are the bridge between a search result or a paid ad and your site. It is important that the page that a potential customer lands on after clicking matches the messaging and design they have seen before clicking, whether that relates to a download or free trial you’re providing, the benefits of your product, or some other offer the customer can’t resist.

It is also important that the landing page is directed and free from other distracting elements. It should flow logically and quickly from headline to content to call to action.

Landing page optimization is the process of making changes to your landing page in order to eke out the most conversions possible. Typically, optimization includes running A/B testing (or multivariate testing) using a testing platform like Google Website Optimizer, LiveBall, Marketo, or Unbounce. These platforms let you create multiple versions of your landing page that are served up randomly to visitors. As the tests run, you get to see which versions of your landing page result in more conversions – it could be the one with the red button instead of green, the headline that mentions your product’s price, or the content that uses a bulleted list instead of a paragraph.

It’s important not to get mired down in minutiae – not everyone has the resources to test 41 different shades of blue. One of my favourite pieces of landing page advice comes from the folks at ion interactive: with landing page optimization, you have to “innovate and iterate”. Innovate by making some drastic changes, like a completely different template. Then iterate by progressively testing different elements on that page, like the call to action, headline, content, images, and so on.

By strengthening the connection between the search result/ad and your site, you can help to coax those conversions you’re not getting right now.

Website usability testing

So you’re driving good traffic and you’ve optimized your landing pages, now you’ve got to make sure that your website is also performing optimally. There are lots of ways to do that, including A/B and multivariate testing like you did on landing pages, online satisfaction surveys, and digging through your analytics. But to get good results quickly, you can also do some website usability testing: getting real users to perform real tasks on your site, monitoring their performance and feedback, and making changes accordingly.

Website usability testing typically involves one-on-one interaction between a moderator and a user. The user is asked to perform representative tasks and provide feedback about the interface, problems they encounter, and so on. Metrics that can be measured include:

• Time on task
• Task completion rate
• Errors made
• Number of times help was provided
• User satisfaction

The verbal and/or written feedback that is provided by the user during and after the testing can be quite valuable for getting deeper insight into the thought processes, behaviors, and emotions of the users of your site.

New tools are also allowing website usability testing to be carried out remotely. There are a number of benefits to remote usability testing, the most important of which is that the user can participate from their “natural environment” with all of the regular distractions, the hardware they’re used to, and the annoyance of finding a parking spot at a testing facility. It also reduces travel time and expenses for the moderator (and client), eliminates geographical separation issues, and leaves the testing schedule much more flexible.

I think I’ve got a bad site… what should I do now?

Test. Then test some more. Whether it’s landing page testing and optimization, website usability testing, or something else, there is no substitute for trying out different things and seeing how your potential customers react. To rework the famous quote:

If you build it, test it, and optimize it, they will convert.