During the training sessions I run on Google Analytics and improving conversion rates, I offer a quick Website critique to some of the delegates. If you have a website, the chances are that you want to a) get more traffic and b) get more business from your Website. The quick tips I give can help improve both. The trouble is that as a business owner or manager of a Website, you are too close to see what needs to be done, or you lack the skills.
Here are 5 common issues or areas for improvement that come up during our courses.
1. Make your images clickable
With fast broadband speeds becoming very common, the Web has evolved into an image rich medium. In the past, images were kept small in order to facilitate browsing by people on slow connections. These days the images that are used are much larger offer the opportunity to present a beautiful image of your business product or service. However, most of these images do nothing more than that. People instinctively click on images and so if you have a large banner picture, or scrolling images make those images click through to a relevant section of your site. You have seconds to grab the attention of a Website visitor and you may never get them back. Making images clickable will reduce the number of people who bounce off your Website and increase business
2. Improve your Title Tag
Your Title Tag is a hidden bit of code on your Website but it appears at the top of the browser window and sometimes in search engine results. It is also a vital place where search engines look to determine what the page is about. This title tag should include around 8 of the words that you want to be found for. A common example we see is “Home – ABC Limited”. All this does is optimise the title tag for the search engines for people searching for “Home” or “ABC Limited”. Have a look at your home page and see what the title tag is. Remove your business name and any irrelevant words and customise it to describe your business
3. Change your Website Font
Changing the main font on your Website can affect its appearance quite dramatically. Most Websites are built using a CSS file that tells the browser what font to use and so changing it can be a very quick task. Changing from say Times New Roman to Arial can modernise a Website in seconds.
Bored of the same old fonts? You can’t just use any font from your computer, you have to use a font that everyone will have on their computer, otherwise it wont display correctly. However, Google Web Fonts are free and enable you to have a wide range of fonts on your site. Have a browse here https://www.google.com/fonts and see if there is one that you like.
4. Make your Website mobile friendly
I know I talk about the importance of this a lot but it really is getting critical that your Website is mobile friendly. Earlier this year Google introduced a change to its ranking algorithm in that sites that were not mobile friendly would rank lower in mobile searches. With almost half of all traffic coming from mobiles, this is bound to affect most businesses. You can get a test of your Website for free here
Mobile sites should be created intelligently. Fortunately other Web developers are catching up and more sites are being made to work on mobiles. However, too many of them are done in a simplistic way without thought of what content should be displayed at the tablet size and then at the mobile size. Creating a mobile friendly site doesn’t simply mean showing everything on your page in a different size.
If your Website is not mobile friendly then you must seriously consider updating your Website it or converting it to mobile.
5. Put your important content in the shape of an F
Sounds bizarre doesn’t it? What I mean is that you need to place your most important content in the places where people look first. People glance at Websites in the shape of an F. Have a look at this image below and you will see what I mean straight away. Now, as you only have seconds to keep a customer on your site, you need to put the important content towards the top and the left of the page. Simply doing this alone can make a difference to the success of your Website.
