Your website is the only salesperson in your business working around the clock. As more business is being conducted through digital means, your website is often the first impression that people will get of your brand or organisation.
Considering that 88% of people are less likely to return to a website after a bad first experience, your web presence and performance has a direct impact on your business.
Here are 5 benefits for optimising your website
Benefits of Website Optimisation
Increased Website Visibility
By optimising your website for SEO, you can find effective keywords to rank on the SERPs. As more of your keywords start to rank on the Google results, it will increase organic traffic on those pages.
If you do it right, you can improve the site’s visibility and rank on the search engines.
More Lead Generation
Optimising your website not only brings traffic to your website but also helps convert visitors into prospects and customers. Through targeted conversion rate optimisation, you can create personalised experiences for different visitor types and help them to complete their goals on the website.
Understanding user behaviour is key to generating new leads. Doing this can increase the number of signups on your website by 300% using highly targeted branched surveys.
Improved User Experience
Whether it’s desktop or mobile devices, users expect an exceptional website experience.
Visitors may discover your website while using their desktops, create an account, add some product to the cart and leave — only to continue on the mobile website.
Since customer interaction points are scattered throughout multiple channels, creating a streamlined journey experience is imperative.
That is what website optimisation helps you to achieve by fine tuning your website across different devices. Optimisation strategies like improving page speed, fixing issues, developing responsive designs, providing one-touch checkout on mobile and single page checkout on desktop improve user experience and ultimately conversions.
Make Data-Backed Incremental Changes
What would you do if your website wasn’t performing as intended?
Where would you start to make the changes?
Doing a complete design change requires a lot of effort, time, and resources. Without any data-backed approach, how would you know if the new design would be better or worse than the original?
That is where optimisation testing comes into play. Running website optimisation tests, such as A/B tests lets you make subtle changes to the web page ⇒ test them against the original design ⇒ implement the best one. It saves resources and produces data-backed changes for improving conversions.
Even if the test fails, you would know what not to implement on the webpage.
Increased Conversions
To risk sounding like a broken record, website optimisation brings in more conversions to your website. That is what we have seen from the examples in the previous points.
Improved website ranking + more traffic + optimised webpage + customer support & feedback systems = more conversions
Website Optimisation Tools
Every business needs a reliable toolbox to build an optimised website with. But as the market for website optimisation tools gets more crowded, it is difficult to know what to look for.
Here is a quick overview of the different types of tools and how each can help you create a great web experience.
Website analytics tools
Website analytics tools help you understand your users and their behaviour, track your progress, and set and monitor KPIs.
SEO tools
A quality SEO tool will help you keep an eye on your key rankings, optimise your internal linking, find keyword opportunities, and monitor the number of external websites linking to your content. Choose an SEO tool that can help you optimise your content for SEO, including optimisation for mobile devices.
Content optimisation tools
Content marketing platforms are essential for helping you find broken links, misspellings, and duplicate content. The ideal tool will also help you maintain content freshness and readability, so you can offer your audience relevant and engaging content.
Website performance optimisation tool
Even a two second loading delay is enough to send some users away from your website. A website performance optimisation tool helps you monitor loading speed, caching, and lazy loading, so you can be sure that they do not cause delays or interference.
Data privacy management tools
As data privacy concerns grow, a trustworthy data privacy management tool is a must. Look for one that can help you monitor your GDPR and CCPA compliance, personal data inventory, and your website cookie inventory.
User experience and website accessibility tools
A user experience tool can help you check for gaps in your user journey, while a website accessibility tool can ensure you are on par with WCAG compliance. Both types of tools are key to ensuring an engaging and inclusive web experience.
Conversion rate optimisation tools
Conversion rate optimisation tools should help you track and analyse behaviour, whether you are using heat maps or A/B testing on your website. A good tool will also offer funnel visualisation, which you can further use to monitor your users’ interactions as they progress down the funnel.
How to monitor website optimisation progress
How you monitor your progress depends on which area of website optimisation you are focusing on and which business goals they support. If your goal is to increase website performance, for example, your KPIs would include site speed.
If you are looking to improve SEO, then monitoring your keyword rankings, click through rate and conversion rate are all important KPIs. Alternatively, you can use an automated website optimisation tool to measure and monitor your progress using an overall score that tracks the number of issues you have solved using the tool.
The benefit of an overall score is that it helps your team work towards a common goal even across departments.
How Merce Web Helps With Website Optimisation
In a nutshell, website optimisation begins and ends with the customer. The better you understand your target consumers, the easier it becomes to satisfy them.
Merce Web helps you do that. We offer you an advanced website audit to help you determine what needs to be optimised on your website.
