So, you have finished the long, laborious process of a website redesign and you have the finished project in front of you, a nice shiny, new website. Can you sit back and let the website start raking in the leads now right?
Wrong.
Very wrong.
Building a new website is very much like creating a piece of art and in the words of Leonard da Vinci ‘Art is never finished, only abandoned’.
Getting a new website made and then abandoning it to ‘do its own job’ won’t do you any favours and it certainly won’t bring home the bacon. Would you invest in a new salesperson and then never look at their work, measure their productivity or offer them training opportunities? You should look at your website as if it is another salesperson because that’s what it is exactly (or should be) and there are some key things you should be doing to maintain and constantly improve your website, and its ability to sell your business.
Analysis
Regularly analysing your website is detrimental to improving the way it works, and when I say analyse, I don’t mean looking at how many sessions you have had this year compared to last. I mean, reviewing meaningful data to determine where users might be tripping up, or indeed, flying through the user journey you want them to take.
Look at things like Landing and Exit pages will allow you to understand what content is attracting users to your website and where you might be losing them on the way. This analysis should give you a really good idea on which pages and features are working and which are not so you can identify what needs improvement. You can also analyse how users move through your website and see if they are taking any unexpected turns. Are they getting distracted by the fancy navigation you have, when all you want them to do is download your latest whitepaper? If this is the case, it might be time to give your website spring clean to keep it as simple as possible.
Utilising Visitor Tracking software can also be a great way of understanding where your visitors are clicking, hovering and scrolling on your website. This can reveal and identify if Calls to Action are in the right place and if your website’s page composition is working for your audience. HotJar is a great user tracking software, and we, Intergage have recently built our very own!
Split Testing
Wouldn’t it be great if you could increase your website conversions without having to undergo a major website overhaul and all the work that comes with it? Well, dear marketers. You can!
Split testing is a great way of understanding your audience, what they like, and what makes them convert at a deeper level and can ultimately mean your website conversion continually improve by making small tweaks here and there.
For those of you that don’t know, split testing involves having two versions of a web page with one small difference between them. These variations could be the colour of your calls to action, the wording in the navigation bar or a change in image overlay. You then promote each page to 50% of a chosen audience (each) and simply see which one gets the best results. Take a look at our WHAT IS A/B TESTING AND WHY DOES YOUR BUSINESS NEED IT? blog to find out more.
The page with best results becomes permanent, or at least until the next round of split testing comes up.
There are so many small things you can split test which really will make all the difference to your audience and conversions and continuing doing this will mean continual improvement. With the right analytical skills and a flexible content management system, split testing will be a breeze, and you have nothing to lose.
Content Creation
You should also be analysing what kind of content your users are engaging with the most. If you’re finding users are more interested in ‘how to minimise downtime in production’ than ‘5 packaging machines you can’t live without’ then write more about how they can minimise downtime and the costs associated with that. There’s no point in continuing to create content your users won’t engage with; it’s a waste of your valuable time.
Start by taking a look at the content you have produced over the last 12 – 18 months and identifying the articles/posts/pages that have generated the most engagement. Could this content be recycled and turned into something else? An infographic? A banner on your website? Perhaps a video? Thinking of other ways to spoon feed your content to users will not only reduce the need for you to think of endless content ideas, but it will also allow you to give your users information you know they enjoy in different formats. It really is a win-win.
You should also be regularly reviewing the content on your website to ensure it’s still relevant. All businesses grow, develop and evolve, and it’s important that your website content can reflect that. Think about what you want users to do once they visit your website- the end goal. Book onto an event, make an enquiry, download a whitepaper- try to incorporate this into the content you produce so that everything relates back to your end goal and is driving towards a larger marketing campaign.
And remember, make sure you are also promoting the content you create. Unfortunately, your prospects won’t be sitting at home anticipating the release of your next blog post, so share it with your business network and make people aware of what you’re doing.
Continually improving your website with content, analysis and split testing Growth Driven Design approach. It allows you to drive the design of your website around proven growth. So instead of guessing which call-to-action your audience respond to and which content you ‘think’ they might like to see, you can use analysis to update how you do things in the future. Nothing is more accurate than cold hard facts. So use them!
