When trying to evaluate your website, there are several metrics that should never be underestimated.
When trying to evaluate your website, there are several metrics that should never be underestimated. Still, if you were to single out just one of them, it’s definitely – user satisfaction. At the end of the day, it is a goal of your website to help you establish a relationship with your audience, increase sales and establish yourself as a niche authority. All of this is built through user satisfaction. So, how do you boost this user satisfaction? Well, through improved user-friendliness, of course. Here are six tips to help you get there in no time.
- Improve responsiveness
One of the simplest ways to make your website more user-friendly is to make it responsive. Why? Well, because waiting for too long to respond will make some of your visitors so uncomfortable that they may develop a negative relationship with your website. According to one survey, about 25 percent of all visitors will leave if your pages fail to load within four seconds. Moreover, even if they do stay, they may be dissuaded from browsing further since they will expect the website to take forever to load on every page.
- Intuitive navigation
One more thing worth taking into consideration is the navigation. This is the most important thing in increasing the number of pages visited and the duration of the visit (per page). It’s also the most effective tool that you have on disposal in order to fight the bounce rate. The most common reason for disappointment is an unrealistic expectation. In other words, if your visitors have no idea what to expect after clicking on a certain link, chances are that they’ll be disappointed when it comes to where they end up. This also means that they will slam the “back” button as soon as the page fully loads (or even before that). By simply making your navigation more intuitive, you can easily avoid this.
- Optimize for search engines
The next thing you need to understand is that your website actually has two types of users. You have traditional, human, users and Google-bots, which are in charge of indexing your pages and awarding you an SEO rank based on it. On-site optimization is definitely something that you need a specialist for, which is why you should do it while establishing your off-site presence. When working to establish your website’s presence in Asia, for instance, you can consult Hong Kong SEO specialists and resolve both of these issues at the same time. This is probably the most holistic way of approaching this issue.
- Work on readability
Cramming too much information onto your homepage is never a good idea. Why? Well, first of all, because it reduces the ability of your users to focus on what really matters. Second, because it can reduce the ability of your visitors to skim through your posts. Sure, you want them to read every word, but this is, most likely, not the way things are going to go down. Finally, too much text, huge slabs of uninterrupted text can cause actual psychological discomfort in some of your readers. Fortunately, the readability can be improved by implementing a bit of minimalism, as well as with the cunning use of whitespace in your page layout planning process.
- Responsive on all devices
The next thing you need to take into consideration is the responsiveness on all devices. Remember, people are browsing your website on large monitors, TV screens connected to a desktop computer, smartphones, tablets, etc. Making various versions of your website (one for each type of user) is inefficient, expensive and quite bad for your SEO. Investing a bit in responsiveness is always the most flexible solution. Still, when you take into consideration the average demographic of your audience, going mobile-first might not be a bad idea, either.
- Add a survey
Sometimes, instead of trying to guess or deduce what your audience wants, you could try asking them instead. How do you do this? Well, with a survey on your website. Try to avoid popup surveys, seeing as how hiding content behind these popup windows tends to diminish user experience. Instead, go for a chatbot version of the survey or even offer some sort of compensation for successfully completing this inquiry. It will definitely pay off.
Conclusion
Superior user experience leads to a superior SEO position, more visitors and an overall better brand image. The simplest way to work towards improving this user experience is to put yourself in the position of an average user and try to figure out which aspects of your website need some improvement. This question is not such an easy one to answer, but it’s
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