Optimization– What is it and Why is it so Important?

When it comes to how webpages look, it’s more important than ever to make the end user’s experience as seamless as possible. Whether your marketing niche is email, SEO, or PPC, there are a few tried-and-true ways to optimize your website (including mobile sites) to drive more customers to your site and keep them.

Perhaps the most important part of a page when it comes to grabbing the user’s attention is the CTA (call to action). All too often, this is sandwiched into the end paragraph at the bottom of the landing page, but if a user has already decided to email or call you for more information, they may not want to scroll through a page of SEO marketing to get your phone number. Even if it’s redundant, have several CTAs throughout the page, and make sure (click-through) contact info is displayed prominently in your header and footer.

Capturing the lead is also quite important, and you want to make sure your forms are easy to read, use, and navigate. Make sure your form works easily with autofill settings with browsers – users don’t like to type or tap their names and emails constantly into forms. Check colors of your forms, making sure they’re easy to read, and ask for the most important information, namely phone, email, and business type.

Take a good look at images and layouts. Is the website easy to read and navigate? Can users seamlessly go through pages without much trouble? Are pictures aesthetically pleasing and eye-grabbing? If you need a little bit of help figuring things out in this arena, Optimizely is a great site for offering another paTir of eyes when it comes to optimizing your site.

When it comes to marketing, you want to try different things, such as upselling, pop-ups, and offering free services or products, such as eBooks. It’s a good rule of thumb to only try one new thing at a time, closely evaluating traffic and sales as you do so.

Mobile sites are increasing in popularity and, more and more consumers are making purchases and shopping through their smartphone or tablet than ever before. As such, your mobile site is actually more important than your desktop site, and it needs your focus and attention.

When it comes to the aforementioned CTA, make sure it fits on the user’s screen. No one wants to scroll through a smartphone or tablet looking for the phone number or email address. The user should be able to navigate to your site and click to call without even touching or tapping another button.

Make sure your designers have each type of webpage to scale. For instance, a 10-inch iPad offers more room than a 5-inch smartphone. A savvy designer has CSS built in so that the webpage is universal across every platform. This includes no pinching in to zoom to read the content on your page. Your mobile site should be already optimized to fit, so that the end user doesn’t have to pinch and waste time.

Navigation should also be easy and seamless. Make menu buttons apparent, label links, and most of all, make contacting you easy and intuitive. It’s estimated that users will only wait a matter of seconds before clicking away to visit another site, so if you have slow page loading speeds, content that’s wrongly sized, or no way to contact the site, you’re losing clients by the minute.

In conclusion, one of the best ways you can optimize your site is to pretend that you are the end user. Beyond design, SEO, Adwords, and marketing, how would you feel if you were a shopper or were looking for a service? Would you find your site attractive and persuasive? When you put yourself in the shoes of the potential client, it makes SEO and optimization a whole lot easier to manage.