Every good question usually comes with an annoying answer: Yes and No. On one hand, it is so much harder to drive organic traffic to a website than it is to change a font color or image – and doing those small things can often improve a sites usability and conversion. BUT – on the other hand, we dont have a magic crystal ball that can tell us what changes to make. So while making changes to a site is easier than driving traffic, at least we know what we need to do to drive traffic…
We all wrestle with this dilemma daily. Here is my advice and what I do with seevolution.com
1. Relax : ). You can’t really go wrong with either effort, but having a fresh, stress free mind often prevents us from making really bad decisions (like complete re-designs for no reason or thousands of dollars spent in ad words)
2. Pick one page – not the whole site, and run some basic heatmaps on that page. See what people are clicking on, where the fold lies, and what people are paying attention to. Here is an example. We recently launched a page displaying our click maps and upon running a scroll overlay on that page I noticed that only 50% of that pages visitors actually saw the sign up button on that page. Adding an additional call to action, via a button or link in the text will take me 5 minutes to deploy. That is time worth spending.
Example:
3. Now that I’ve made one improvement to that page, I will probably spend a little money driving traffic to that page and see if my click through rates on that that page improved at all. I do this with click heatmaps and with some metrics that I pull from Google Analytics.
4. Pick another page and do the same as above. Making small tweaks using intelligent tools is relatively easy and affordable. You don’t need to think of entire site re-designs to drastically improve conversion and usability.
Here are some real-world tweaks that our clients have made using heatmap analytics:
- A lot of sites have a large banner on the homepage, but then use that same template for the rest of their site. Using scroll heatmaps, we’ve uncovered that most times, this design negatively affects the internal web pages conversion rate. Removing the banner or making it more narrow can allow more products and calls to action to sit above the fold.
- Adding links to text early in the copy. What does this mean? Let’s say I sell beef jerky on my website and my intro paragraph on my product page says, “our Turkey Jerky is low in fat…” Having the word Turkey Jerky be a link to that product’s page can make a huge difference. Use click maps to determine how users click on those links.
- Change verbiage and tag lines to be less subjective and more objective. An example: Our products are fun and great – try them  VS Our Products are BPA free and weigh less than 5 oz.
In short, optimizing a web page can be easy is you follow the following principles:
1. Use intelligent analytics tools
2. Optimize one page at a time
3. Start with small easy to change tweaks like the ones listed above
Good luck!
Edo
