Optimizing your web content for conversions

I’ve been focusing a lot on optimization lately.

If you think about it, there are 2 ways that you can increase business results on your website. You can pay more to throw more traffic and more eyeballs at it. Or you can optimize its content so that visitors are more likely to become customers.

One of the key benefits of web content optimization is that it has long-term results. When you pay for an advertising campaign, that only lasts for so long. Optimization efforts produce results long after you’re done.

Here are a few tips in getting started in optimizing your website.

Getting started with optimization

To start, you need to ask these 2 questions about each individual page on your site:

1. What is the 1 piece of information on this page that’s most important? What is everyone looking for when they come here? Take that piece of information at put it at the top. Make it very prominent.
2. What action do I want the visitor to take next? Make this very prominent. Call it out several times if you need to. Try a button or a big link (which I affectionately call a “blink”).

Tools for the job

Doing it yourself is a great way to start, especially if you don’t have a lot of budget. Unfortunately, your efforts were only guesses. You have 2 tools at your disposal to get the real answer: usability testing and web analytics.

1. Web analytic tools allow you to use data to analyze whether or not your website is producing results. It fairly cheap, but usually the data doesn’t answer why your website isn’t producing results. Google’s free Website Optimizer is a great tool for analyzing an individual page’s performance.
2. Usability testing involves testing your website in front of actual representative users. You ask a single test subject at a time to perform important tasks and observe whether or not they are successful. Although expensive and time-consuming, usability testing gives you a lot of qualitative data that answers why a design doesn’t work.

Ideally, every project should start with usability testing. Getting your ideas out in front of actual people will give you endless insights on how your designs should flow. And the earlier you can get these insights, the less likely you’ll need to correct your course in the future.