It is important to think about your customer's journey through your website. You may have a number of different kinds of customers wanting to achieve different things. Perhaps start with your ideal customer.
Think of your ideal customer. Consider what they are wanting to achieve on your website? Imagine that you are that customer. Form a picture of them in your mind. Who are they? How do they think? What appeals to them? Picture a problem that the customer has. This will be a problem that the products or services you offer have been created to solve.
Now, go to your website as that customer. Think about how your customer experiences your brand when they first arrive on your home or landing page. How easy is it for them to find the solution to their problems? When you start to empathise with your customer, you can connect more with what they need.
Here are a few important features to consider as you go through your website in this way.
Clear navigation
It’s vital that your visitor can easily find what they want on your website. If your menu is difficult to use, they’re not going to stick around for long. If it takes too many clicks to find your products or services, that’s going to turn them away. Even if the navigation is complex, you can group the navigation items to make finding what you need more easily. For example, for the Auckland Catholic Website (see our non-profit portfolio), we were able to create a menu that is grouped by categories for sub-menu items to enable easy navigation in a large and complex website.)
Can your visitor easily navigate through your website?
Walkthrough your own website as a potential customer and count how many clicks it takes for them to get to the solution they want. It should be 3 clicks or less.
Engaging content.
People skim read when they first read content online. Try to read the way a first-time visitor would, looking at headings and any highlighted text. Does the content immediately address the problem they have? Then went you look at the specific paragraphs that address their problem. Is it written in plain, easy to read language?
Call To Action
Every page on your website should have a clear call to action, also known as a CTA. This is the action that you want your visitor to take when they’re on the page.
Looking at your homepage or the landing page you are exploring, is there one clear action that you’re asking the visitor to take? This could be to go to a Services page, a Product page, or perhaps you want them to request a quote. For example, on the homepage of this website, there is a clear call to action: request a discovery call and for those not ready to take that step, an invitation to look at our case studies.
If you don’t have a clear call to action, then it’s time to decide what you want your visitor to do. Each page on your website should have a purpose and a call to action.
Are you ready to walk in your customers’ shoes? Let me know what you find.
If you’d like to talk more about how you could optimize a customer’s journey on your website, you can book a call with us to discuss how we can help.
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