As business owners, we all want a website that showcases what we do best and helps our target audience to take the next step in the customer journey, but when you see your website every day, it’s not easy to identify the improvements that will make the difference between website visitors taking the next step or bouncing off to a competitor’s website.
Here is a checklist of website improvements that you can make to help improve the customer journey on your website and boost your SEO traffic:
- Put your customers first
- Keep content relevant and up to date
- Keep it concise
- Optimise your site speed
- Make it mobile friendly
- Include video content
- Include contact information
- Optimise for SEO
- Monitor your website stats
- Include strong CTAs
Let’s take a closer look at what you need to do to tick each one of these off your website improvements checklist.
1. Put your customers first
When you’re working on improving your business’s website, it’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing on what actions you want your prospects to take instead of thinking about what they need and want from your website.
But if you want to improve the customer journey on your website, you need to start by putting yourself in your target customer’s shoes and thinking about their needs.
Some questions you can ask yourself to help get into the right mindset include:
- Who is my target customer?
- What are their pain points?
- What do they need from my website?
Another common mistake is prioritising SEO over your customers’ needs. Yes, SEO best practices are important, but if you’re keyword stuffing for the sake of it, your website copy’s readability will suffer, and so will your site’s conversion rate.
A good rule of thumb is to focus on writing website copy that is both SEO-friendly and user-friendly, as this will help improve both the user experience on your website and your website’s ranking in search engine results pages.
2. Keep content relevant and up-to-date
If you want your website to help your business thrive, it needs to be a valuable resource that your audience can turn to for information that will help them achieve their goals.
A big part of this is keeping your content up to date and tailored to your audience’s needs.
Keeping your content up to date is simple enough. To do so, you can:
- Write evergreen content
- Update posts that are older than three years
- Update your prices and services each time they change
- Create a content plan to help you write new content regularly
But how do you ensure your content is relevant to your customers’ specific needs?
Putting yourself into your customer’s shoes is always a good start. However, keyword research is one of the most effective ways to find out what your customers are searching for in relation to your offering.
This will help you to create a content plan that reflects the topics that your audience is interested in, which you can then use to produce website copy and blog posts that are relevant to their needs and improve your SEO.
A couple of free tools we recommend to get you started with your keyword research include AnswerThePublic and UberSuggest.
3. Keep it concise
While you want your website to be packed with valuable information, it’s important to remember that website visitors have limited attention spans. In fact, studies have shown that the average person only reads 20% of the text on a website page.
With this in mind, it’s important to keep your website copy concise and easy to skim-read.
This means:
- Breaking up text with clear headings and subheadings
- Using short, simple sentences
- Limiting each paragraph to three sentences or less
- Staying clear of unnecessary jargon
Not only will this make your website copy more digestible for website visitors, but it will also improve your website’s SEO as search engines will be able to index your content more easily.
4. Optimise your site speed
The loading speed of your website is important for two reasons. Firstly, website visitors are unlikely to wait more than three seconds for a website to load. Secondly, website speed is a crucial ranking factor for SEO.
So, if your website is slow, you are likely to see high bounce rates and struggle to rank highly on search engine results pages.
Luckily, you can use a few tools and techniques to optimise your site speed quickly.
Firstly, it’s important to understand how slow or fast your website is. You can figure this out by entering your URL into the free site speed analysis tool, GTMetrix.
This will give you an overview of how quick your site is and, more importantly, a list of things slowing down your site. Once you’ve run this analysis, you can then create a priority list to deal with the biggest problems first.
One thing that commonly appears on site speed analysis is unoptimised images. If your analysis pulls these up, try free tools like BulkResize and TinyPNG to reduce the file sizes.
Adding a speed optimisation plugin to your site is another great way to minimise load speeds.
There are loads to choose from, but here are a few of our favourites for WordPress websites:
5. Make it mobile friendly
As most website traffic now comes from mobile devices, it’s important to ensure that your website is also optimised for mobile responsiveness.
A website that isn’t mobile-friendly will be difficult to navigate on a small screen, which will lead to high bounce rates and fewer conversions.
To check whether your website is already optimised for mobile devices, you can use Google’s free Mobile-Friendly Test tool. Depending on your website builder or CMS, there may also be a mobile responsiveness preview feature that you can check as you make changes to your site.
If you don’t have a website yet and are starting from scratch, we recommend choosing a website builder that’s designed to be responsive on all devices, such as Elementor.
6. Include video content
Video is one of the most popular types of content on the internet. In fact, studies have shown that website visitors are 64% more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it.
And it’s not just website visitors that love video – search engines do too. In general, pages with videos tend to rank higher on search engine results pages than those without.
So, if you want to improve your website and make it more engaging for website visitors, we recommend including video content.
If you’re not sure where to start, why not create a short explainer video about your product or service? You could also film some customer testimonials or create a ‘behind the scenes’ style video.
Just make sure that your videos are high quality and offer real value to website visitors.
7. Include contact information
The next item in our website improvement checklist is ensuring that your website includes contact information.
If website visitors want to get in touch with you, they should be able to find your contact details easily. The best place to include this information is in a dedicated ‘Contact Us’ page or in the website footer.
8. Optimise for SEO
I’ve already briefly mentioned SEO, but getting this step right is absolutely essential if your want your audience to find your website organically through search engines like Google.
There are lots of different techniques you can use to improve your website’s SEO, but here are a few of the most important things to focus on:
- Use keyword-rich titles and descriptions
- Include alt text for images
- Optimise your meta description
- Optimise your content for rich snippets
- Include video content
- Reduce any errors on your site
- Include relevant internal and external links
And remember, SEO guidelines are there to help you provide the best experience for your site visitors, so following these tips will contribute to a more engaging website that will, in turn, boost your search rankings and your traffic.
For more SEO advice, check out our SEO tips and tricks over on our parent site.
9. Monitor your website stats
Once you’ve made all the website improvements in this checklist, it’s important to keep an eye on how your website is performing.
This way, you can identify any areas that need further improvement and make sure that your website continues to meet the needs of your target audience.
There are lots of different website stats that you can track, but some of the most important ones to focus on include:
- Bounce rate
- Pages per session
- Session duration
- New vs returning visitors
- Organic vs paid traffic
- Conversion rate
- Top pages
You can use Google Analytics to track website stats like these. Just remember to not only track website stats, but also to take action based on what they’re telling you.
For example, you can prioritise optimising your most popular pages rather than focusing on the ones that generate very little traffic.
By making small pivots in your approach to website improvements based on your results (and record them), you will see your stats improve significantly over time.
10. Include strong CTAs that guide the customer journey
Finally, your website should have a clear purpose and your website visitors should always know what you want them to do next.
The best way to make sure of this is by using strong calls-to-action (CTAs) that guide website visitors through the customer journey.
Your CTAs should be clear, concise and relevant to the page they’re on. They should also stand out from the rest of your website content and be easy to spot.
To do this, follow these top tips:
- Use button-style CTAs (45% boost in clicks)
- Use an eye-catching colour that’s reserved only for CTA buttons (see more about how colour affects conversion)
- Ensure your CTA is surrounded by negative space (increases conversion by 232%)
- Include multiple CTA placements on long layout pages (generates 220% more leads)
And finally, make sure that your CTAs link to landing pages that are optimised for conversions. This means including relevant and targeted content and a strong CTA that tells website visitors what you want them to do next.
Conclusion
We hope this checklist of website improvements has given you some ideas of how you can take your website to the next level. Just remember to take one step at a time and focus on creating a website that is engaging, informative and easy to use – your website visitors will thank you for it!
If you’re struggling to implement website improvements by yourself, get in touch, and we’ll be on hand with plenty of help and advice.
