The best-performing business websites provide a positive user experience through deliberate layout design, content placement, linking, and technical optimization. This article provides tips and ideas to create a website with high conversion rates via user experience best practices.
User experience, also known as UX, represents an integral part of digital marketing today. Experienced web design teams work with UX experts to develop a strategic plan and implementation techniques. Add to this, real-world website analytic data plus tracking metrics and you can leverage all you need to have a top-performing website.
By focusing on UX, digital marketers do the right thing. Your company’s digital presence is essential. In other words, not ignoring how your potential users might see your firm is an absolute necessity. In the article you’re about to read, we’ll show you why digital marketers should focus on user experience (UX).
What is User Experience Design?
Before delving deeper into our main subject, let’s consider the syntagm we’ll be using quite a lot in the rest of this text. So, what exactly is user experience or UX? Generally speaking, UX is a set of strategies, tools, and methods implemented to make a particular product, service, or brand mainly focused on the user, not just the firm. UX website design also applies to considering how website visitors will interact with your site and how you can make that experience better to increase conversions.
UX expert Andrew Kucheriavy, in a blog article on the intechnic website, describes UX in this way, "Think of the website as a yellow brick road: move users seamlessly from one section to the next by understanding user personas’ goals and needs. Users are more likely to notice items near the top of the page, in order of their importance. Consistent and easy-to-use web interfaces help users concentrate on the content and move through it. Avoid creating dead end pages on websites. They cause confusion and create additional work for users. Use common website patterns and interfaces; don’t make users learn something new"1.
Best Practices for User Experience
Not to get ahead of ourselves in this article, but we want to introduce 10 key ways to improve website user experience. From effective ways to present information and make exploration easy, to improving relevancy and conversions, there are specific things you can do for better results. Per an article by Darling Jiminez, published on Hobspot, "Your website is the core anchor for your digital marketing efforts. Designing a great website user experience requires understanding the problems different visitors have to solve."2. The article further cites these 10 areas to improve user experience:
- Use white space
- Optimize your page speed
- Use attractive calls to action
- Use hyperlink differentiation
- Segment key information with bullet points
- Use images (wisely)
- Include well-designed and written headlines
- Keep your website pages consistent
- Catch your 404s
- Be responsive and mobile-friendly
Why Website Designers Need to Focus on User Experience
Now that we’ve defined UX, it’s time to see why digital marketing agencies need to utilize it. In other words, we’ll show you how your company can benefit from the strategic use of proven UX methods.
Positive UX Drives Conversions
To generate conversions, your company needs a solid marketing strategy. That strategy will have to assist your customers in finding all the necessary info about a certain kind of product or service your company offers to its potential users. Anyway, the right kind of UX will help guide them on the journey to becoming your loyal customers. With a solid team of UX/UI designers, we’re sure you can make something that appeals greatly to your potential customers and avoid some of the most common digital marketing mistakes. You’ll notice some changes pretty soon.
In a brillaint article published on the WordStream webite (blog), UX specialist Marc Schenker offers the following, "Websites live and die by their conversion rates. Good conversion rates mean more sales and revenue while poor conversion rates mean that you’ll struggle to keep your business afloat…Look at it from the perspective of your leads. If you land on a page—even if you’re interested in the offer you come across from a Google Ads (AdWords) ad or organic search result—yet the offer is so unintelligible that you can’t understand much of it, then your experience as a user is very poor. You’ll be frustrated, and your patience for staying on the page to figure things out will drastically decrease. You’ll likely exit the page very quickly. You’re not going to convert. That’s why, when you ensure the UX on a site is excellent thanks to clarity and well-defined page goals, you can be sure that higher conversions will follow."3.
Good UX Boosts SEO
Best UX practices are important because it is one way to improve website SEO (Search Engine Optimization). For instance, with a good UX strategy, your content will be seen in more search queries, and many potential consumers will appear. Additionally, a positive UX that a single visitor might experience on your website will inspire them to browse your material further, resulting in a lower bounce rate. As you may or may not know, Google is paying good attention to your website’s UX. The lower your bounce rate, the better Google will notice and understand that your site possesses valuable information and effectively matches the browsing user’s intent.
Optimizing for Mobile Search
First things first, here are some statistics:
- A whopping 67% of mobile users note that they’re more likely to buy a product or hire services from a website optimized for mobile phones.
- 48% of users feel irritated when they notice some websites aren’t optimized for mobile phones.
- 40% of users immediately leave the website if it’s not mobile-friendly.
- 65% of all traffic comes from mobile phones, making PCs second.
- 1 Andrew Kucheriavy, "Top 100 UX Design Tips from a User Experience Master", March 17, 2017, Available from intechnic blog
- 2 Darling Jimenez, "10 Tips That Can Drastically Improve Your Website’s User Experience", April 01, 2022, Available from Hubspot
- 3 Marc Schenker, "6 Powerful Ways UX Can Affect Your Conversion Rates", November 24, 2021, Available from WordStream
- 4 Douglas Karr, "Time Spent on User Experience Results in Higher Sales", August 20, 2013, Available from Social Media Today
- Photo Credit, "Alvaro Reyes", available at Unsplash.com
- Photo Credit, " Rob Hampson", available at Unsplash.com
- Photo Credit, "Pawel Czerwinski", available at Unsplash.com
- Photo Credit, "Charles Deluvio", available at Unsplash.com
You’ll have to consider these numbers. Optimizing your website for mobile users is one of the crucial points of a good UX strategy. Unless, of course, your goal is to lose conversants and harm your brand’s reputation. Also, a mobile-friendly website is a big part of how to boost your SEO ranking. And that’s something you need to keep in mind when coming up with an effective UX strategy.
Analyzing UX Improves Results
Over the past couple of years, digital marketing has become increasingly challenging to be effective and purposeful. Most contemporary companies invest a lot of funds and valuable time into digital marketing, knowing that the whole thing’s highly uncertain regarding its long-term effectiveness. You’ll have to research to see what your audience thinks about you. As always, website visitor and customer feedback can be very helpful for ongoing improvements. Improving your business website design (and your overall digital marketing strategy) with customer feedback is a smart move. Tracking changes in your audience’s engagement will help you to maintain and improve market dominance.
Per an article on the Social Media Today website, "Typically, someone who spends more time on your site will tend to be engaged deeper, an indicator that they are a good lead that can be converted (your metrics may differ!). What are you doing to engage visitors deeper? Do you have video? Whitepapers? Case Studies? A blog? Providing a variety of information that drives engagement is key." 4
A Great User Experience Keeps Customers On Your Website
Your relationship with your customers is probably your number one concern when developing an effective digital marketing campaign. That’s why UX has to be an integral part, the backbone of that relationship.
Various studies have shown that a great UX strategy boosts your customers’ overall satisfaction with your business website. It motivates visitors to share their positive experiences with their friends and family. Happy website visitors can effect increasing website traffic. In highly competitive markets, an optimal user experience can give your business a competitive advantage.
Another detail for a great user experience is eradicating comment spam. Use your WordPress “Discussion” settings to block IP addresses, specific words, and pesky URL’s.
Very good article with helpful tips. Thanks!
Good stuff!
Useful ideas indeed!
UX is a critical part of achieving higher conversion rates. Nice article!