Posts Tagged ‘navigation’

Performing a complete website review is rarely easy. I’ve found that you can start a site analysis intending to spend just a few minutes looking over it only to find that it quickly spirals into a multi-hour marathon of research. Complete website reviews can be time consuming and often produce many more hours of work beyond that.

One of the problems is that people tend want to skip right to search engine optimization forgetting that users matter. Many people want to rush into the marketing without realizing that the website itself is part of the marketing process. This is a shame.

Investing in SEO and PPC marketing, without having performed a thorough analysis of your website is largely an exercise in vain (and yes, even new websites often need a usability analysis!) You don’t have to have a perfectly usable site in order to rank well in search engines, but it is increasingly difficult to rank a site without a strong usability focus, unless you’re in a very niche industry. And even if you do rank well, without good usability you’re losing more customers than you need or want to be losing.

Click here to keep learning

Forget about the details of setting up an AdWords, Search Marketing or adCenter campaign. — You aren’t going to find those instructions here. At least not today anyway. If you’re looking for that kind of information, each vendor has a pretty extensive step-by-step process they’ll walk you through. (Although tips on those instructions are always good – that is another post.)

What you will find here is a basic question that you need to ask yourself. Before even considering how to compose your ad text or create the keyword list, what is the FIRST question that needs asked? Is it about the budget? No. How about the CPC bids? No, that’s not the first either.

So if ad text isn’t first, keywords aren’t first, budget isn’t and CPC certainly isn’t, then what is the question needing answered? If you’re job is like mine, and you manage other people’s PPC accounts, you’ve got to understand what your client sells, and how their site is organized. So you the first question you have to ask is:

Click here to keep learning

Audio feed[audio:http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/emp/blog-audio/usability-guidelines.mp3]

Sites that are designed to sell products and/or services must go the extra mile to enhance the visitor’s engagement with the website. Shopping cart abandonment (shoppers abandoning their carts before deciding to pay for the “items” they’ve added to their cart) can result in a significant loss in potential sales. But much of that can be reduced when the shopping process is streamlined and geared for shopper satisfaction.

The selling process–from initial interest to the very last checkout page–must be able to grab shopper’s attention and proceed to drive them through to the finalization of the sale. But even after the sell, you must deal with customer service issues in order to keep the sale finalized. Good customer service will bring your purchasers back for another and another and another. Here are fourteen general usability guidelines that will enhance your shoppers overall experience on your site.

Click here to keep learning

[audio:http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/emp/blog-audio/shoppers-cart.mp3]
Since the “purchase” is the ultimate conversion, it is imperative that you remove as many obstacles from the customer’s research-to-buy cycle as possible. Providing your visitors the key ingredients in their shopping experience creates a smooth and worry-free transaction process. The easier it is to shop and buy the more customers will overcome the natural hesitations that many feel before they commit by hitting the final “complete order” button.

Search functionality
If possible, create an extremely robust and accurate search function for the website. A good search function should be able to provide visitors the information they are seeking even if products are misspelled in the search box or search products are not offered at all. Be careful, as anything less than a perfect search function only serves to frustrate rather than help visitors.

Click here to keep learning

Audio feed[audio:http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/emp/blog-audio/dissatisfy-visitors.mp3]

Since creating a website that is “user friendly” is often difficult and time consuming, I thought it would be fun to explore a few ways to create a dissatisfying user experience on your website. Unlike the dozens upon dozens of things that go into creating a website that provides a positive visitor experience, one that creates an atmosphere of trust and is likely to improve conversion rates, creating a dissatisfying experience can be done fairly easily in just a few steps.

In fact, while I’m sure there are just as many things that can derail a visitor on a website, there is no need to implement more than a few. We have found that any one of the four things listed below will do the trick!

Click here to keep learning

A friend of mine sent me an email last week, asking about optimization for his personal website. My reply was long winded (which is typical coming from me) and I after I sent the email I thought it was decent fodder for a blog post about very basic SEO.

Here’s our exchange, or at least most of it …

What is the name of the files you work on? I started my web-site and wanted to start getting people to check it out. I know that is what you do. I wanted to research how to do it. If you wanted I could pay you to help.

Having no clue what he was asking me I relied with: Click here to keep learning

Audio feed[audio:http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/emp/blog-audio/engage-audience.mp3]

How engaged a customer is with your website will determine whether they can be persuaded to buy, comment, download or submit their information for you to follow up on. Customer engagement goes beyond just getting the customer’s attention, you must keep their attention. This can be done by providing your visitors near immediate gratification.

To do that you have to first know who your audience is, know what they seek and then also know their purpose for being on your site. Knowing all this then lets you work toward meeting the needs of your target audience. But it also means taking things a step further and building a relationship with them. The ability to build a relationship with your visitors can be crucial to driving them through the persuasion process. Relationship building starts the moment the visitor hits the website.

Click here to keep learning

Not every site needs a site map, they they can certainly be a good idea. Site maps provide a dual purpose: They provide search engine spiders easy access to all of your site pages and they provide site visitors easy access to all of your site pages. The difference is that search engines and visitors access your site map differently and therefore there are different methods that need to be applied to creating site map(s) that are friendly for both engines and search spiders.

Small sites typically don’t need a site map so long as all pages are linked in the main navigation. Once you get into main and sub-navigation menu’s then site maps are helpful in allowing search engines and visitors to quickly find anything they are looking for within just a couple of clicks. A single site map can be used for both purposes or multiple site maps can be created. Here we’ll address creating site maps for spiders and humans separately.

Click here to keep learning

Forms are one of your primary points of contacts with your visitors. While many visitors still use email or even the telephone to contact you or to place an order, the vast majority will contact you first via your web forms. Forms that are broken or improperly implemented cause frustration and can greatly reduce your conversion rate for leads and sales.

It is up to your design and development team to test your site’s web forms as thoroughly as possible in order to eliminate any errors. While no site can ever be 100% error-free, finding and fixing errors sooner, rather than later, is important to maintaining a usable website. When user and usability errors do occur –and they will– it is important to employ the right safeguards in order to ensure visitor satisfaction and reduce exit rates.

Click here to keep learning

Customers who, by all means, appear to be ready to make a purchase are often found abandoning their shopping carts before they complete their online transaction. In many cases this is part of the normal online shopping experience as the shopping cart is just used as a place to collect items of interest but which the user has no real intent to purchase. But all too often it is a failure of the shopping cart page itself that leads visitors to abandon their items which they do, in fact, wish to have.

While shopping car abandonment cannot be completely eliminated, it can be dramatically reduced. There are a number of key indicators that need to be present on your web site’s shopping cart page. These indicators continue the process of instilling trust, reliability and provide shoppers the cues they need to continue forward in the purchase process.

Click here to keep learning