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Conversion optimization has distinguished itself as the main driving force behind investment in all digital marketing channels – it all starts and ends with the bottom line. However, as business owners have come to realize, reliance on a single element or detail or SEO such as site design or content creation can limit the kind of results gotten from the entire strategy.
As a result, many SEO experts are shifting their focus towards every aspect that optimizing user experience through every brand interaction session, online as well as offline. The result is the relatively new concept of user experience optimization, a field that utilizes statistics, hypothesis tests and other empirical data validation tools to come up with working formulas.
Conversion and experience optimization are without doubt the future of search engine optimization: even now, Google has strongly elevated ranking factors that directly contribute to good user experience when ranking results. While it isn’t a proven science, there are some best practices which can help you start down the right path. Read on for some of these practices, which are applicable to businesses of any size and in any field of practice
Touch point optimization
Consider every avenue through which existing and potential clients interact with your brand: your official website, social media profiles, phone conversations, emails and trade fairs and conferences, just to mention but a few. Is the customers experience with the brand consistent throughout these channels? Are there any promises you’re making and failing to deliver on?
Begin your user experience optimization strategy by outlining all touchpoints through which a potential client may interact with your brand. Next, perform a thorough audit of your business’s actions through every interaction. Once this process is complete, you will have a good starting point to inform your actions towards experience optimization.
The personalization strategy
It’s more than just having your client’s first names in your email messages to them – this technique has become so commonplace that your clients will not be impressed by your using it. However, you can leverage the advancements made in our ability to collect, analyze and store huge volumes of consumer data to improve your understanding of the customer. With cheaper analytics tools available, any business can now leverage this data to give customers more personalized interactions with the brand.
The first step is to invest in data collection so that you know as much as possible about the client. Then, use this information to deliver valuable insights in the context within which the consumer would like to consume it.
Consistency in messaging
Bear in mind that your customers demand consistency from every interaction with your brand. This is one area in which most brands get caught, particularly when using paid advertising channels: they use one message on the ad, but have a completely different offer on the landing page. For optimized experience, the ad message should only be used to pique the audience’s interest and followed up on the landing page to deliver on whatever was originally promised.
Data-driven testing
Conversion optimization cannot work outside of data, large volumes of data. You will continuously have to collect, analyze and interpret data and use it to inform your marketing decisions. For your data to have any meaningful impact, however, you must know how to apply it for good effect.
A/B testing
A/B testing is itself an art, which correctly applied, can lead to greater success in your optimization efforts. It’s important to determine what you will test for, how long, validation methods and criteria for discounting test data prior to beginning any test procedure. You can use the many resources online including ignitur.com to gain knowledge on how best to run A/B tests.
Multiple landing pages
Landing pages are critical to the personalization element as relates to offers for service to different audience/customer categories. With multiple landing pages, you can offer bespoke products and/or services as well as tailor the message/language to suit your specific audience’s requirements. In addition, multiple pages allow you the opportunity to target search terms that you couldn’t naturally fit into your homepage.
Hubspot research has demonstrated that there is an exponential increase in conversions rates for every extra landing page used on a website. When building landing pages begin by segmenting your audience into functional groups based on some pre-determined criteria which affects their purchasing decisions. Data collected from surveys, consumer conversations and other sources will be useful in determining these criteria.
Next, create landing page templates using information provided by the customers – answer questions asked and needs brought to your attention use language/tone that is familiar with each customer segment. In order to work, your landing pages must include fully original copy, or else you could be in danger of deindexing/penalties following duplicate content.
Easy forms
Any business running online will at one point or another have to use web forms; whether to collect audience information or run surveys among other reasons. However, web forms must be approached with due caution since they have potential to decrease your site’s conversion rates.
The general guideline is to keep your web forms as short as possible: the exact number of fields will of course depend on the goal driving each form’s existence. For instance, if you’re simply collecting email addresses for subscription to your correspondence, you need nothing more than a single field for the email address and maybe another for a preferred name.
Go progressive
Another idea is to progressively collect information about your site visitors, especially if they are repeat visitors. Begin by requesting the least amount of information at signup, and you can engineer the site to ask for additional information during subsequent visits.
Conclusion
These ideas simply scratch the surface of what is needed for conversion and experience optimization. However, the main ideas should guide you in implementing any other useful digital marketing and SEO techniques.
Where rubber meets the road, invest in learning as much as you can about the audience as well as in keeping this information up to date. In addition, never stop testing what works for your audience: online marketing is always changing, as are consumer tastes, incomes, interests and other factors which will affect their purchasing decisions and hence your conversion rates.