Ever fill out a form, hit submit, and say what the heck? Did the form fail to process the data correctly? Did the database fail? Did you type the captcha letters wrong? It was none of the above. It was the design, or should I say usability.
Your secret to building a successful form for your website? Watch a few NEW users fill it out for the first time.
Not all things are intuitive, especially to new visitor. Look at this example below. Continue reading »
Sometimes you just have to bite your tongue, or in the case of blogging, sit on your hands.
If your blog is about improving websites, like this one, ranting about politics could be the worse thing you or I could do. This morning, the urge for me to get off topic ranting about politics was at an all time high.
Knowing that I often unfollow people who express political opinions that oppose me, I decided to turn it into a reminder for others to keep it keep on topic. Continue reading »
What are better visitors? Well, that all depends. What do you want your visitors to do? This month I have been working on increasing the average page views per visitor. So for me, right now, a better visitor would be one that generates more page views. I feel that this is currently a weak spot on my site, so I am doing whatever it takes to improve it. Continue reading »
Here is what I am thinking. I’m thinking that I have a general idea what kind of people visit my site. I have a target audience, I have a pretty specialized niche, and I am thinking I still don’t know who the heck visits my site. I have analytics, I have reader feedback, I can see your comments, but still, I don’t know what you really want. Nor will I really ever. So what am I going to do? Continue reading »
This is the third of a three post article on a parallel design comparison. The first and second part of this article can be found here: Parallel Design Comparison, and Parallel Design Comparison Part II.
So here we have three sites, all three are about credit cards, all three are trying to drive referral clicks, but only one is really getting the job done. Looking at the comments from the previous posts, we have one vote for the first site, three for the second site (the second one was my first impression), and another vote for the third site. The second site wins?
A simple breakdown of the sites are as follows:
The site performing the best is http://www.nowcreditcards.co.uk/. Why? Well apparently in this case, content is truly king. The site drives the best search engine traffic. The search engine traffic could also be influenced because of it’s double menu, making the site very keyword rich. I wouldn’t suggest having a double menu like this for usability reasons, but it doesn’t seem to be hurting the sites performance at the moment. Visitors are finding the site, and they are clicking on the referral links.
The second site, Credit Cards Comparison is ranking well for it’s main keyword, but it’s not making the conversion. This is due to the fact that though visitors are finding the site using secondary keywords, they are not landing on the home page, and not making the conversion. They are simply landing on the content pages, and then taking off. The only conversions the site is getting is when a visitor lands on the home page for the main keyword, and this is unfortunate because those visitors convert more often than the first site.
The third site, Compare Credit Cards, is way behind. Search engine traffic has not developed, and the referral links are simply not visible enough. I hate to say this, but they need more ads if they want to make this site work.
The lesson comes from seeing the parts that fail, and being able to compare.
What should the owner do? Here is the beauty of parallel design. If he had only designed one site there is no way of knowing what is failing, and what is doing well. All the owner could do is try to make the one site better one step at a time, and hope it works. Comparisons take a long time that way. Because he has three sites doing the same thing though, he knows what could use improvement, and what is doing well. In this case content is clearly important, add placement should be highly visible, and ads should found on every page.
He doesn’t have to make all of the changes at once either. Why mess with the best site? He could work with the second site, adding the ads to all of the pages, similar to the first site, and this time he could put them all on top. Then he would have two similar sites, #1 and #2, with only one real difference, ad location. Yet another opportunity to see what does better with parallel design. Do you see that advantage of parallel design?
How many directories do you think your site is listed in? Can you say fifty? How about 150? Just building a website is simply not good enough. It has to be found, and you actually have to tell someone about it. Marketing stinks, but it’s the facts off life. Using a directory submission, like Submit2Please can make life a lot easier when it comes to improving your sites visibility.
Imagine setting some free time for yourself, say one whole week, just submitting to directories, blogs, and bookmarks. How many could you do? One every five minutes? What’s that after forty hours? Using my calculator that comes to 480 places. For just $49.95 you could use Submit2Please services, and submit your site to 1,000 directories. Total time, five minutes. What’s your time worth? What would $50 worth of regular advertising on Google Adwords get you? Maybe 100 visitors? If you were on a 1,000 directories, and you only recieved 50 visitors a month from them, your talking just two months till you are out performing paid ads.
By outsourcing link building, you can save time, money, and quickly create a higher visibility of your site. When using Submit2Please you get a detailed report, a monthly progress report, and the ability to track your services online. They additionally have a great knowledge base of information about getting links, and marketing in general.
There used to be a time when I would say I hate this kind of stuff, but it’s what the web is turning into. Sites with real actors delivering the sites primary message. Walking and talking actors are coming alive on websites everywhere these days, and their impact can be substantial if viewed by the target audience. Low download speeds are also becoming a thing of the past so something like a video shouldn’t be as big of a deal anymore.
Silver Cross is one of those sites with a video actor. When loading the site they have a very unobtrusive video pop up in the left sidebar talking about their main product, stair lifts. She quickly introduces the product, reviews benefits, and covers some principal customer concerns before making a purchase.
The advantage of having the video is that it gives a defined message, and it will be delivered regardless of what the visitor reads on the site, assuming they actually listen. The actor also very quickly mentions some of the companies history, giving the visitor and even greater sense that they are on the right site, and that it can be trusted. In this case, a twenty second video has given a visitor five minutes worth of digging around a site the conventional way. Another big plus? She is still heard when I visit another tab in my browser. Talk about keeping a visitors attention.
The pitfalls is that it can scare some visitors away, but I believe that most of those bouncing visitors are most likely not the target audience to begin with. You need to be careful, and make sure that it is easy for a visitor to turn off, or make silent in a second. In this case, both are easy to do. Another thing I would avoid with this is making it site wide. I would stick it only on a landing page, or home page. Finding this video on the sites wheelchair lifts page might not seem as relative since she is mostly speaking about stair lifts.
Adding video to your site? I say go for it, just make sure you take the time to do it right. The Silver Cross video offers an excellent example of a well thought out message.
I monitor all of my sites with Google Analytics, and here is another reason why. It’s the new beta Advanced Segment option. One of the things I like to analyze is my Top Content. By knowing what your top content is, you can see what is driving traffic to your site, and what is at least capturing your visitors interest. What if the page is simply keyword rich though? Are you just getting a bunch of search engine traffic that you are not really trying to capture? Basically, did you create a high quality page that all of your visitors like, or did you just get lucky with some keyword?
So with the new beta Advanced Segments that Google has you can see not just what your top content is, but what your top content is for your regulars. By selecting Direct Traffic or Returning Traffic, you can get a good idea what your regular visitors are doing. You can find what they like, and what makes them bounce out. What’s even better about this, is that you can select several sources, and it will graph them individually so you can see any similarity or differences. Don’t be surprised when you find the spikes are not the same.
After selecting your source, look at that bounce column to find out what your stinkers are. Compare them to the low bounce rate pages, and find out what the difference is. It could be anything, picture vs. no picture, less links vs. more links, layout, whatever. Depending on your site it could simply be the quality or subject matter of that page. There is most likely something though, so really look hard if it is not obvious.
Using the same method as above, but selecting Direct, Return, and Search, find out what pages are the real winners. After applying the filter to your Top Content scroll down to see the break down of bounces for each category. Make sure you check out the Exit percentage as well. You will probably find that your returning visitors have the lowest bounce rate, and that is to be expected. What you are looking for here though, is for the low bounce rate for all categories. These are your real winners because they are what the random search traffic visitor wants, and it’s what your regulars want. As before, compare these winners to the losers so you know what to do next time. There are a lot of different ways you can mix this, but it’s all thanks to the new beta Advanced Segments.
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