If you’ve got a website for your business,p you probably think that it is making you money. Your profile is being raised and clients can find you. Excellent isn’t it? Now you have listened to the ‘experts’ and got some kind of analytics installed. Now sit back and watch the money roll in
Do you ever wonder how your competitors are doing, if there site is as successful as yours? Or do you focus on how many visitors you are getting, how well ranked you are on Google and Bing? If so,then i’ve got some bad news.
While your site might be very highly ranked due to some excellent (and expensive) SEO your competitors could be getting a better ROI. A big problem with search engines is that to make a website search engine friendly, you generally have to make it pretty bad for your customers. This is an issue that Google is addressing with monthly updates to its ranking system
Speed
One simple and inexpensive way you can improve your website so you complete more sales is to make it faster. Perhaps ‘simple’ is a bit of an exaggeration. Stop slowing your users and customers down! By providing them with the fastest, friction free experience you are going to get them in a good mood, lowering those defences that normally help people to question each purchase and investment they make.
Get out of my way
When you head into the city centre, trying to board a busy tube or bus, changing terminals, going to park your car. What annoys you the most, what makes you say I’m never coming here again? Having to wait behind some inconsiderate jerk, someone who has decide now is the right moment to check their reflection or look at their shoes. WHY NOW?!? I have bad news, for many of you, you are that jerk.
Annoying website traits
- Music or videos that play automatically
- A sexy flash introduction
- Large un-optimised pictures
- 3rd party plugins loaded at the top of the page/li>
- Contact / sale action not on the home page
If your website has any of these characteristics then you are a jerk. These characteristics of sites that prevent sales with unhelpful design.
Changes you could make are
- Don’t auto play videos and music, unless this is what your clients have come for.
- Sexy flash videos unless there is an easy obvious way to skip them are a major headache for users. Also, would you rather give your customers 10 seconds to be distracted or just process the sale
- If your site is slow at loading pictures, your customer will leave
- Because of the way 3rd party plugins like google analytics are loaded they can disable your entire site if the supplier of the plugin has any form of technical difficulty. However, loading plugins last (at the end of your page) can reduce the damage done