It’s the website you always dreamed of — a stunning display of dazzling graphic elements and snappy headlines that turn leads into paying customers. The only problem is the price tag.
You might not have a million-dollar advertising budget to build a website to compete with billion-dollar corporations. But you can improve your existing site by prioritizing the user experience. In this blog, we share three ways to polish your site, improve SEO, and boost conversion rates.
User Experience and the Customer Journey
Visitors come to your website for a reason. Even if they’re just poking around, they’re on your site because something piqued their interest. Their attention is yours to lose. So it’s important when building your site that you prioritize the user experience.
Your website wasn’t built to satisfy your ego and one-up your competitors like Wall Street executives trade business cards.
Your website was built to make customers’ lives easier, educate them about your product, and help solve their problems (or at the very least entertain them).
Continue reading for actionable tips to improve your website’s user experience. They are by no means exhaustive but are a good starting point if you want to improve UI — which in turn will boost search engine results. (Keywords are useful, but load rates, as well as KPIs like dwell time, click-throughs, and bounce rates, are also essential to improving SEO.)
Readability
Good website copy communicates important information clearly and concisely while following brand guidelines. Great website copy tells a compelling story that captures readers’ interest while also educating them on your brand promise. And with over 1.1 billion other websites on the Internet competing for your reader’s attention, you can’t afford to be anything less than great!
Copywriting Dos
- Use facts and statistics to illustrate your points
- Maintain a conversational tone
- Use headlines, taglines, and salient bullet points to highlight key info
- Differentiate yourself by developing a signature brand voice
- Keep your writing focused and concise (your readers’ time is valuable)
- Use empathy when addressing customer pain points
- Make use of style guides, customer personas, and brand guidelines
- Write with a point of view (don’t just try to sound bland and neutral)
Copywriting Don’ts
- Treat copywriting like writing a college essay
- Use SAT words, overly complex sentences, and too much of technical jargon
- Use filler words and unnecessary sentences (“don’t talk just to hear yourself speak”)
- Come off as corporate and stuffy (even conservative brands can use stylistic writing)
- Use ChatGPT to write your website for you (only you truly understand your brand)
Good copy needs to communicate information clearly and in a way that grabs your readers’ attention. One idea needs to move seamlessly to the next without making your readers stop to figure out what you’re saying. Every word, sentence, and paragraph needs to work together to tell a story. If any bit of copy distracts, confuses, or just sits there being limp and useless, CUT IT!
In the creative fields, there’s a saying that might just be the best piece of storytelling advice you have ever heard.
“You have to kill your darlings.”
This seemingly sinister quote has been attributed to both the poet Allen Ginsberg and Nobel Prize laureate William Faulkner. Simply put, it means that while you may feel a certain attachment to your work (especially after you spend hours writing and rewriting the same paragraph over and over) if any piece of writing fails to help tell your story, CUT IT!
Bonus tip: Using specific questions as headlines and answering them with brief sentences and bulleted or numbered lists will help improve SEO rankings. They’re also a lot easier to read 🙂
Visual Content
Websites use mixed media to tell a story. Copy, layout, typography, colors, videos, and images all work together to communicate your brand. While not every element needs to be perfect to create a good website, completely missing the mark on one can seriously disrupt your user experience.
The best copy in the world is powerless if your site looks like a 90s Word doc, and all the dev work money can buy won’t mean squat if you can’t articulate your brand promise and provide a clear call-to-action.
Building a quality website from scratch is itself an art form that would take twelve 1,000-page manuals, three-weekend seminars, and twenty credits worth of college coursework to explain. But it doesn’t take a genius to understand that using a clean layout with high-quality graphics and videos to support your copy will help turn leads into paying customers (or at the very least stay on your site longer, thereby improving your search rankings).
Bonus tip: Inserting embedded videos into the source code on your site is a great way to reuse some of your best social content on your website. It will also help drive engagements on your social channels. This is especially useful for TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram 🙂
Internal Linking
Buried across your site is loads of useful information that’s relevant to some visitors but not others. At least that’s how it should be (please don’t try to pack all the relevant info on your site on the homepage). Visitors will feel most satisfied — and will be most likely to take the action you want them to take — when they find the info that is most relevant to them. So it’s your job as the site architect to empower them to find that info as easily as possible. Don’t make your site a confusing horror movie-esque hedge maze filled with dead ends that visitors have to struggle to navigate through!
Internal links not only improve search engine results, they also improve the user experience by helping visitors easily navigate from page to page in search of the information they need.
Just think of Wikipedia. Their linking strategy allows you to easily find the information you’re looking for, even if it’s not the info you thought you wanted (we’re also not sure how you made your way from an article about shin splints to the origin of the word yeti).
Because Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia with millions of web pages, your linking strategy obviously won’t look quite like there is, but it gives you an idea of what a seamless link-building strategy feels like from a visitor’s point of view. So instead of a million links per web page, try two to ten relevant ones.
Conversely, irrelevant and unnecessary links detract from the user experience and make your site even harder to navigate. This could seriously hurt dwell time, click-throughs, and bounce rates.
Conclusion
In today’s digital world, your website is as good as gold (especially for D2C companies). It’s the heart of your brand and is likely your most valuable asset, no matter how much you actually spend on it. These tips on user experience are just scratching the surface of what goes into a great website. And if it all feels a bit overwhelming, that’s ok. You don’t need to go back to school and get a second degree just to have a great website. You could partner with a great marketing agency instead.
Fractional marketing offers a scalable solution for sustainable growth. Unlike big ad agencies or in-house teams, fractional marketing helps you amplify your message without worrying about the price tag associated with a big marketing campaign or the headache of building an in-house team.
Meet Pulse
Pulse is a fractional marketing agency that gives you access to an entire team of graphic designers, writers, content creators, and digital marketing experts. We’ll help you tell your story in a way that captures the hearts of your audience to grow your following and your budget. Ready to get started?