The website redesign is not what it was. ‘Radical’ website redesign – where you carry out a ‘big-bang’ overhaul of your site – is becoming less common these days. It’s now been replaced by what’s known as Evolutionary Site Redesign, or ESR for short.

This is a good thing, and there are a number of reasons why.

Firstly, it is just less risky to iterate on an existing website than to start from scratch.

It’s also generally cheaper, faster, and more measurable. With ESR, companies are able to make educated, incremental changes to their existing websites that can be validated.

Perhaps most importantly, the ESR approach tends to be rooted in data insight. Radical website redesigns traditionally aren’t.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I have worked with companies who have launched slick-looking brand new websites, only for their sales conversion rates to plummet at launch.

Not to mention what happens to search engine rankings and traffic volumes.

However, this doesn’t mean that radical website redesigns don’t still happen.

Sometimes there isn’t the option to do ESR, as the decision has already been made by senior executives, or the CEO.

Radical website redesigns are often the result of:

– ‘digital transformation’ or re-platforming

– an existing website not being mobile-friendly, or

– an outdated look and feel.

All is not lost if you find yourself in this situation, though. There are things you can do to minimise the potential impact on performance that a radical site migration might have.

Devise a conversion rate optimisation strategy in the website planning process

You can think of ESR as conversion optimisation on a large scale. But even a radical design approach can incorporate CRO.

By adopting conversion rate optimisation methodologies you can plan how to iterate on your new designs as soon as you launch – and not lose control over the performance of your new site.

Just as you need to consider SEO during the scoping and planning phases, you should also lay the foundations for CRO at the same time.

And there’s a great opportunity to use insights from an existing live site to feed the experiments that you can run as soon as the new site goes live.

Too many times I’ve seen companies addressing conversion after the website has gone live. This is too late, and generally results in the need for unwieldy design changes further down the track that could easily have been avoided. It’s not recommended practice.

A 10-step process

You shouldn’t underestimate the importance of planning and prioritisation in the overall CRO process.

In our methodology at Acquitain Digital, steps 1-8 are all about planning and prioritising: gathering data insights, user surveys, user testing results, site drop-off reports etc. The actual testing and analysis of results constitute only the last two steps.

Scrimp on the data gathering at your peril.

In my experience, the data gathering phase for CRO can sit nicely alongside keyword research for SEO and content in the pre-site build timeline.

In fact, many of the insights that this research yields are important for the site scoping process – for instance:

This is all invaluable information that can feed straight into the wireframing/prototyping phase of the website redesign project.

How this approach fits into the overall redesign process

You can see our recommended process in the two diagrams below. The first shows the various steps within the scoping phase of the project, broken down by discipline (e.g. Search, CRO, content, UX).

The second outlines the development phase of the website redesign project, with the CRO disciplines included throughout the timeline. This shows how experiment ideation and prioritisation, tool set-up, QA and implementation can happen at the same time as the development sprints.

Agree and prioritise your areas of focus

But with so many options open to you, you have to decide which areas you’re going to focus on, and then prioritise them.

Considerations, and questions you should ask yourself, are:

– What’s the primary objective of this website redesign?

– What are the pages on the site with the most traffic?

– What are the highest value pages on the site? (these are often checkout pages and product details pages)

– What are the areas we already know that visitors have difficulties with?

Once you’ve identified the answers to these questions, you’ll be in a much better position to plan your attack.

De-risking a re-design launch

I have worked on website redesign projects where we essentially ran an A/B test between the old site and new, rather than releasing a beta version.

This is an effective way of de-risking the site launch, since you can serve the site to a small proportion of the total audience, and rapidly identify and fix issues.

An example of this approach was with the UK general insurance company Direct Line.

If the issues on the new site are major, there is always the option of ‘throttling back’ the new site to 0% (effectively switching it off).

Most enterprise-level A/B testing tools (we used Adobe Target) give you the ability to scale up the size of the audience that you want to expose the new site to. So you can start with, say, 5% and throttle up on a weekly basis as you fix outstanding bugs.

The biggest challenge is establishing which success metrics you want to track – and not having too many.

Direct Line saw a 0.4% increase in car insurance quotes and a 0.1% increase in home and pet insurance quotes.

While this doesn’t sound like a resounding success, it was actually a great result.

Remember that this exercise has two purposes. The first is to check that the site is functionally sound.

The second is to guard against any significant drop in your primary metrics (such as sales conversion). Be aware that overall sales conversion may well drop at first, as customers get used to the new design and layout.

Your A/B testing tool and/or analytics tool should also be able to show you how the site is performing by segment. So if you wanted to view the performance metrics for all mobile visitors, for example, you can.

What are the success criteria?

There should be an underlying measurement framework that underpins the objectives of your website, whether the existing one or the new one. This framework is made up of the KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, that give you a clear idea of how well you are doing.

When you are testing the success of the old site against the new, it’s important that you don’t have too many.

I learnt the hard way.

A few years ago I worked on a website redesign project where we were asked to report on all metrics within our measurement framework. The idea was to provide as detailed a report as possible of how we were tracking.

It quickly became an impossible exercise, though, as subtle differences in site design meant that in a number of instances we weren’t able to compare like with like. And the results were meaningless.

Focus on the primary metrics you usually report on. For an ecommerce business these might be:

• Sales conversion rate

• Newsletter subscription rate

• Average order value

Pre-launch experiments

Once you are comfortable that the new website is performing at an acceptable level, it’s worth already having some initial experiments up your sleeve to test against the new control. This effectively means you will be running A/B/C tests, with:

– A being the old site

– B being the new site

– C being the new site including a slight variation (thoroughly researched, ideated, hypothesised & prioritised).

Isolate areas that are known to be high impact and high importance, and focus on them first. These are usually the pages that have the most traffic, such as product pages or the homepage.

Again, focus solely on one or two primary metrics, since differences in page design and the user journey will make it hard to compare more granular KPIs.

By this stage you should have a new website that is:

– Bug free and lightning quick to load.

– Performing at least as well as the old site from a primary metric perspective.

– Already enhanced by some quick and easy improvements.

You’ll then be in a position to switch off the old website and focus solely on the new. The sooner you can do this the better, as it removes the need for two separate sites and/or content management systems to be maintained.

Post-launch experiments

It’s a good idea to have a shortlist of A/B test candidates at the ready for launch.

These should be tests that you feel will make the biggest difference in terms of conversion uplift.

Most companies will have far more experiment ideas than time to run the experiments themselves – so it pays to be choosy, and to prioritise.

You should have a fairly good idea of initial test candidates already. Score them by ease of implementation and potential revenue uplift. (Or, if you want to be more thorough, use ConversionXL’s PXL prioritisation methodology).

Generally, the further down the sales funnel, the more valuable the test will be in terms of revenue.

So an experiment run on a product details page on an ecommerce website, for example, will usually be prioritised ahead of one on the homepage.

And one testing the checkout process will be of higher value than, and therefore prioritised above, one anywhere else on the site.

Often an effective way to estimate the potential value of an experiment is to take into account the data you already have relating to the profitability of your sales funnel.

If you know the value of each part of the purchase funnel in terms of average sales revenue, and are able to estimate the number of visitors who would be bucketed into the experiment based on analytics data, you could get a decent estimate of the possible uplift.

A good question to ask is: If we were to see a nominal conversion uplift of 1% from this experiment, what would that equate to in terms of additional revenue?

Baby steps

You may find it useful to follow these ‘rules of thumb’ when you launch your first experiments:

–          Consider just running one test at a time to start off with. You don’t want to have too many variables, and you want to clearly see which changes are having an impact.

–          You might want to ring-fence a small proportion of traffic for this experiment too (e.g. 10%). This helps keep risk to a minimum, although you need to be sure to send enough traffic to the variant to make the experiment worthwhile.

–          Think very carefully about which changes are going to result in the biggest upswing in conversions, and focus on them. You want to minimize wastage as much as you can – of time, cost and effort – so it’s critical that your approach is as lean as it can be.

–          Be very clear about how long you run your initial experiments for. If your website doesn’t get large volumes of traffic then you’ll need to make sure you run it for long enough to get a statistically significant, valid result.

Track and monitor success as you go

I mentioned above that you need to be selective with the metrics you use to track the success of your redesign project when you first launch your new website. You also need to do this on an ongoing basis, as you launch your initial A/B tests and incrementally improve the content and functionality.

However, depending on the type of tests you run, there will be different success metrics that you will need to measure.

It’s important to trace the objectives of your experiments back to the core business objectives of your website – and of your organization. If ancillary product penetration is a primary KPI for your company (as it was for us at Direct Line Group), then you need to make sure your experiments focus on this outcome.

It sounds obvious, but you would be amazed how often this gets missed.

My recommendation would be to use a test results document to log the results of each of the experiments you run.

This can be a simple spreadsheet that lays out, in chronological order, all the experiments you carry out in your testing program, with their results. It’s generally a good idea to include comments about the experiment, as well as agreed next steps.

It’s amazing how easy it is to forget these details down the track if they aren’t documented somewhere.

We would recommend that you include at least the following fields in the spreadsheet:

• Test ID

• Test description

• Success criteria (& maybe hypothesis)

• Experiment start and end dates

• Winning variant

• Comments, including uplift/downturn %

• Agreed next steps

This has served us as a great way to present results to stakeholders and the senior management team. However you might also want to consider some data visualization to support it, as the spreadsheet format can come across a little dry on its own.

Cultural benefits

As well as the clear performance benefits that a structured approach provides, there are clear cultural benefits too. Organisations that have adopted a test and learn culture have generally been more successful than those that haven’t, and including CRO strategies in your radical redesign can be a good way to introduce a culture of continuous improvement and experimentation.

Embedding a test and learn culture takes time, and needs to come from the top. You can build interest among senior managers by regularly reporting progress against benchmarks, and communicating the winners from your testing programme.

The C-suite respond to figures, so be sure to share tangible results.

Conclusion

Wherever possible we would advocate taking an existing website design and improving it iteratively. Push back on the urge to start from scratch, as performance will suffer as a result.

If you are left with no other option than a radical website redesign, though, do your best to devise a conversion plan that can be adopted as part of the overall project schedule. This will help you to align your redesign to business goals, giving you the best chance of success.

Have you redesigned your website recently? Let me know in the comments below how it went.

The post How to build CRO into your website redesign appeared first on Acquitain.

In this post I explain what they are, and why they are so important.

We constantly hear marketers talking about website conversions and conversion rates. But what are they?

It’s actually pretty simple.

Formula for conversion rate

A conversion happens when a visitor to your website does something that you (or your web designer) wanted them to do.

Ideally this would be them buying something from you, or maybe signing up for a subscription or even downloading an eBook in return for their email address.

The conversion rate is the proportion of total visitors to your website who do that thing that you want them to do.

So if 500 people visit your site and 15 of them buy your product, your sales conversion rate would be:

(15/500) x 100 = 3%

To express this as a formula, it would be:

Why is your conversion rate so important?

Your website conversion rate is arguably the most important thing for you to measure, as it’s an ideal barometer of your company’s profitability.

It’s scary the number of business owners who don’t know what their sales conversion rate is. That is, what proportion of their overall website visitors go on and actually buy from them.

Having knowledge of this simple metric can help you maintain control of your business’s health.

Analysing your conversion rates is a great way to identify where your business is having problems.

It could be that your content isn’t resonating with your visitors.

Or it could be that the user journey through your sales funnel is confusing.

Be careful not to look at your conversion rates in isolation, though. You’ll need to bear in mind other metrics like bounce rate, exit rate, average session duration and page views per session too.

Lots of marketers focus on driving more and more traffic to their site to increase sales revenue and profits. However they neglect the activities required to convert that traffic into leads and paying customers.

What is a good conversion rate?

A question I get asked probably more than any other is ‘what is a good conversion rate?’.

There’s no real straight answer to this, but it generally depends on context.

If you only sold 1 product last year and this year your conversion rate increases by 100%, you’re still only selling 2 products.

However, if you sold 5,000 products last year and your conversion rate goes up by 3%, this year you will have sold an additional 150 products.

Some digital marketing experts say that as long as your conversion rate keeps going up, then that’s all that matters.

You also need to take into account any external factors when you are tracking conversion rates – such as changes in price, advertising campaigns or seasonality, as these can all have an impact.

Macro and micro conversions

Conversions are often split into macro conversions and micro conversions.

Macro conversions are ones that have the biggest impact on revenue, and tend to be at the end of the funnel.

Micro conversions are smaller conversions that tend to happen nearer the top of the funnel and contribute towards the final macro conversion.

An example of a macro conversion might be a customer buying your product, or a visitor to your website becoming a lead.

A micro conversion might be a visitor clicking on a call to action button on your homepage, and landing on your product details page.

How to measure your conversion rate

There are a number of reports you can refer to in your analytics program that will let you track your website’s conversion rate.

If you use Google Analytics, and you already have goals set up, you can go to your goal report:

1. Log in to Google Analytics
2. In the left menu, go to Conversions > Goals > Overview
3. This will give you a top level view of the average conversion rate of all your goals. If you have more than one goal, you can also view the rate for each specific goal.
4. There is also other important information in this section that can help you analyse your traffic and conversions:
   
   • Goal URL: This is the URL of the page where your visitors actually converted.
   • Reverse Goal paths: This report shows how visitors are arriving at your goals. It’s really handy for seeing which of the pages on your site are the most successful at converting.

If you have an ecommerce website, and you have Ecommerce tracking set up in Google Analytics, you can go to the Overview in the Ecommerce report within Conversions.

Here you’ll be able to see your Ecommerce conversion rate.

This is the percentage of sessions that resulted in an ecommerce transaction – or in other words, a sale.

There are a number of other really useful reports in Google Analytics that will let you dig into the weeds, and will reveal the effect that different factors have on your conversions.

These include:

1. By browser

In Google Analytics, go to Audience > Technology > Browser & OS.

2. By device

For this report, go to Audience > Mobile > Overview.

3. By high bounce/low converting landing pages

In GA, go to: Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. From the second dropdown select Ecommerce Conversion Rate.

4. By screen resolution

To access this report, go to: Audience > Technology > Browser & OS, and then click on Screen Resolution as the Primary Dimension.

5. By traffic source

You can find this report at: Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.

Conclusion

Knowing how well your website traffic is converting into paying customers is critical. Without this knowledge you could well be scrambling around in the dark.

By using website analytics reports like the ones I’ve outlined above you can keep on top of how your website’s conversion rates are doing – and if there are any big fluctuations you’ll be able to look into what might be causing them.

What marketing activities have you carried out that have resulted in an increased conversion rate?

The post What’s a conversion? And why’s it so important? appeared first on Acquitain.

With the global economy in the shape it’s currently in, and with more and more companies being forced to move online in order to survive, it’s never been more important to have a website that is fully optimised to sell your products and services.

I hope you’ve found the content in these posts useful. If you have, then you’ll be interested in an exciting announcement that you’ll find at the end of this post…

But first I’m going to recap on the main points from the series.

Competitor analysis

First of all I showed you how to benchmark your digital marketing activities by carrying out a regular competitor website analysis.

This is a review of the websites of other similar companies in your field (direct competitors) as well as some in an unrelated industry (indirect competitors).

Doing this is important, as it allows you to put a stake in the ground and see well your site is performing in relation to others.

Researching other companies’ products, sales funnels and marketing strategies can be a real eye-opener. It can reveal insider secrets on how you can steal a march on them.

SEO audit

In the next post I focused on the visitors you attract to your website.

Specifically I showed how you can run an SEO audit to give yourself the best chance of bringing in a good stream of targeted, high-quality traffic.

By using tools like Ubersuggest, Woorank and Google Search Console, you can pinpoint the areas where your SEO efforts are falling short.

This then serves as your own tailored checklist of fixes to improve your SEO metrics – including:

• the volume of organic monthly traffic
• the number of keywords the domain ranks for
• your domain score

I also showed you how to run a page speed analysis of your website.

Slow page load is something that Google takes very seriously. It can have a seriously negative impact on user experience.

Using Google’s Page Speed Insights tool, you can test the load speed of every page on your site. You’ll then get a clear step-by-step guide outlining exactly what you need to do to fix the issues that are identified.

Finally, I ran through how you can run a backlink audit.

Backlinks are links from other websites to yours, and play a crucial role in SEO. Google sees them as votes of confidence in your website, and so getting links in from high quality websites can do wonders for your search rankings.

They can also bring a fresh source of visitors to your site. 

Ubersuggest will give you a top-level backlinks report, but you can also use a tool like SEMRush to give you a much more detailed backlink audit.

Optimising visitor conversions

In the final post I shifted my attention from traffic acquisition to on-site conversion.

The importance of converting your visitors to paying customers can’t be overestimated.

For a start it generally costs money to acquire new visitors to your website. Whereas converting them into customers doesn’t have to cost anything.

Increasing your conversion rate can increase your profitability exponentially, because your cost of acquisition stays the same.

Next I pointed out some Google Analytics reports as a great starting point for identifying conversion ‘stumbling blocks’ on your site.

And I then took you through a few of the principal areas you should focus on within your website – namely:

• your homepage
• your blog
• landing pages
• the checkout funnel (for ecommerce websites in particular)

If you’ve done the hard work of attracting streams of great traffic to your website, the last thing you want is for them to leave without doing anything.

Not everyone is going to buy from you on their initial visit.

So you want to be able to get some benefit from their visit. Try to capture at least their email address, so you can hook them in at a later date.

Conclusion

By following and implementing the steps in this series of blog posts, I’m confident that, in time, you will start to see your website getting more visitors and more conversions.

If you’re really committed to driving up your sales volumes, and you want to take your website to the next level, I’ve got exciting news for you.

I have recently launched my online course A Step by Step Guide to Conversion Rate Optimisation.

The course gives a complete grounding in conversion rate optimisation, while giving you all the tools you need to skyrocket the profitability of your website and, as a result, your business.

By taking the course you not only benefit from 90 video lessons, but you also get tons of bonus supporting materials including:

• worksheets
• assignments
• quizzes
• cheat sheets
• process templates that I’ve used with great success for a number of clients

as well as a certificate of completion.

You can find out more about the course here.

Thank you for subscribing to this blog series. I hope you found it helpful.

The post How to give your website a health check – series wrap-up appeared first on Acquitain.

In the first post I showed you how running a robust competitor analysis of websites in and outside your industry can help you benchmark how well your site is doing against others in its field. 

Then in the second post I showed you how to run an SEO audit on your website, so you can make sure it’s doing the best job of attracting high quality visitors.

In this third post I’m going to be showing you the third element to investigate – how good your site is at converting your visitors to sales.

Get the free guide:
9 common website conversion killers – and how to fix them
Download it here.

Why you need to focus on conversions

It’s all very well having lots of highly targeted visitors coming to your website, but if they don’t know what to do when they’re there, you’re more than likely going to lose them before converting them into customers.

Companies have historically focused most of their attention on the acquisition side of things – that is, attracting visitors to their website – and have tended to treat the on-site activities as an afterthought.

A simple truth is that acquiring new visitors generally costs you money, while converting them into customers doesn’t have to cost you anything.

It’s possible to increase your website’s conversion rates, and by extension your revenue, without incurring any costs.

And more revenue at the same costs means greater profitability.

In fact, a relatively modest conversion rate increase of 50% can result in an increase in profitability of around ten times that amount – because cost of sale isn’t affected.

This is why it’s so crucial that you pay attention to your visitors’ on-site experience, and try to make their conversion journey as seamless as possible.

In this blog post I’m going to be looking at the different areas of a website (homepage; blog; landing page; checkout process) and how you can make sure each one is optimised for conversions on your website.

Start with your analytics!

It’s a good idea to go to your analytics programme before you do anything else. This will show you any areas on your website that are posing problems for your visitors.

I’m a firm believer in basing all design decisions on data insights – otherwise you’re just acting on a hunch rather than scientific evidence. So it’s crucial that you get quantitative insights.

I will show you a Google Analytics report for each section of the website that I run through with you. If you have a different analytics program on your site there will almost certainly be equivalent reports that you can analyse.

Area 1 – the homepage

The homepage is the page that gets the most visits on average. It’s the shop window to your brand, and it’s usually the first point of contact for a visitor to your site.

For this reason I’m going to start with this page.

To get an initial overview of how your homepage is performing, go to Google Analytics and navigate to:

Behavior > Site Content > All Pages

This is the pages report, and it’s useful for getting a top-level view of how each of your pages is performing.

By default it is ordered by volume of page views, so your homepage should appear somewhere near the top:

You can then look at metrics like average time on page, bounce rate and exit rate.

This should highlight any major issues that you can then address.

You can also look at how the page fares for these metrics in comparison with the other pages on your site.

Click on the Comparison button, and then select the metric you want to view from the dropdown:

The green and red bars show whether the page is performing better than (green) or worse than (red) the site average. In this instance the homepage bounce rate is 47% better than the overall website average.

Areas to focus on

Not all homepages are the same – but there are elements that most homepages share, like

• The headline
• An email capture form
• Links to key sections of the website
• Social proof/testimonials

You need to make sure that you have all of these things on your homepage, and that they are doing as good a job for you as they possibly can.

Let’s look at each of them in turn.

The headline

Your homepage headline is one of the most important elements on your website. This is because it provides a golden opportunity to show visitors what it is that you do, and how you can help them.

If it piques their interest and hooks them in, it can make the difference between whether they stay on your site or click off to a competitor.

So it needs to be both succinct and compelling.

This one by Funnelytics is great, as it states very clearly what the tool is that they’re selling, and what’s in it for you if you create an account with them.

This one… less so.

It doesn’t tell you anything about who they are, or why you should use them.

They are missing an opportunity to tell you how they are different from the competition.

Try split testing different headlines on your homepage to gauge which ones are the most compelling.

An email capture form

If you aren’t using a form on your site – or at very least just on your homepage – to capture visitors’ email addresses, then you should start doing so straight away.

As I mentioned in the first post in this series, some of the most successful business owners in the world say that their email list is their most valuable asset.

There’s a simple reason for this.

Email consistently outperforms other channels in terms of conversions.

And, as opposed to your audiences on Facebook or Twitter, you own the list. It can also drive consistent volumes of traffic to your website.

If you don’t already have an email capture form, the good news is that you can use free tools like Hello Bar or Sendpulse.

Hello Bar sits at the top of your page, so it is always visible but isn’t too distracting.

You also want to make sure you’re providing something valuable in exchange for someone’s email address.

We get too much email these days. So you’ll need to have something that allows you to cut through the noise and entices them to sign up.

A free eBook or guide can work really well for this.

Links to key sections

One of the jobs of the homepage is to guide visitors through to other areas of interest on the website. So you need to check that there is very clear ‘signposting’.

The page navigation should be clear, simple and logical. If the site uses mega-nav menus, make sure they’re not too long or take up too much space.

Steer away from this type of thing:

Aviva links off to deeper content in a very structured way. It’s really clear where you’re being taken to, and it is in line with the site’s content and product hierarchy:

Check that your homepage lets visitors easily find where they need to go, and try to keep it as simple as you can. If your site navigation is overloaded, try stripping out irrelevant or duplicated links.

Get the free guide:
9 common website conversion killers – and how to fix them
Download it here.

Area 2 – the blog

The next area to spend some time looking at is your blog.

A blog is a vehicle for attracting a rich source of targeted traffic to your site.

But it can also be a good way of converting visitors to customers – as long as you follow a tried and tested formula.

1. Link out to other websites

Including links within your blog posts to other websites is a good idea for a number of reasons.

As Rand Fishkin of Moz testifies, it can elicit inbound links from the site you’re linking to, as well as validating the credibility of your content. 

Whilst it may seem counterproductive from a conversion perspective to send visitors away from your site, the benefits generally outweigh this risk.

2. Link out to your other blog posts

By providing links to your other blog posts from a specific post, you are:

• giving your visitors more of an opportunity to spend more time on your site
• making it easier for search engines to crawl your website
• and (hopefully!) enriching the user experience by giving the reader access to more detailed, related information

It can also be a good way of nurturing prospective leads through a sales funnel.

The more they get to know you, the more they will trust what you have to say and look upon you as an expert.

3. Have a compelling headline

Like your homepage, each blog post you write should have a compelling headline that lures the reader in.

Using phrases like ‘How to’ and ‘Discover’ tells the reader what sort of article it is, and gives an idea of what they are going to learn by reading it.

Try testing different headlines in the same blog post, and see which ones result in the best engagement.

4. Use lead flows

Lead flows can be a really effective way of driving conversion from within a blog post. They are essentially pop-up forms, but they can also take the format of slide-ins or exit intent forms, and they are used for converting blog visitors into subscribers or leads.

Love them or hate them, they work – and the statistics speak for themselves. In a study carried out by Sumo, the top 10% of pop-up forms convert at 9.3%.

5. Include contextual, text-based calls to action

Perhaps the most important element to include in a blog post is a text-based call to action.

Text-based CTAs consistently outperform buttons in blog posts, most likely because they are more contextual in nature, and less transactional.

Buttons tend to work well on eCommerce sites where clarity is paramount, and space is limited. However within a blog post they can appear cold and even pushy.

Try including text links that drive visitors to your email sign-up form, and other supporting articles and downloads.

Area 3 – the landing page

If you use campaign landing pages you can take this opportunity to review how effective they are at bringing you leads.

The objective of most landing pages is to drive visitors to perform a single action, like a sign-up, so it’s important that they are focused and ‘single-minded’.

Firstly, go to Google Analytics and navigate to
Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages.

This is the landing pages report, and it will give you a high-level view of how these pages are performing against your target KPIs.

As with the All Pages report, you can track metrics like bounce rate, pages per session and average session duration.

However it also shows you conversion data if you have goal tracking set up.

Again, this report will give you a good overview of areas that need closer investigation.

And it’s a good starting point before you go ahead and check your landing pages against the criteria in the following checklist:

• Have a compelling headline that matches the messaging on any ads that are sending traffic to it
• Make sure you include crystal clear call to action buttons, but don’t have too many of them. You want to keep the page focused
• Use bullet points to outline the benefits of your offer as well as the features
• Keep the page as uncluttered as you can by removing unnecessary navigation, and try to minimise distractions. If you only want your prospect to do one thing, you need to make sure the page design accomplishes this
• Include a short, simple email capture form. Consider whether you need their name as well as their email address?
• Having customer testimonials and/or reviews on the page can do a fantastic job of adding credibility to your offering. Make sure they are authentic, and include full name, occupation, and photo if you can
• Run A/B tests on different headlines, calls to action, images, and testimonials to see what drives the highest conversion rates.

Area 4: The checkout process

If you have an ecommerce website, then your most valuable pages are going to be the ones that make up your checkout funnel, also known as a conversion funnel.

So you want to be sure that your potential customers complete their purchase, and don’t abandon your site before they do.

This is easier said than done though.

According to Conversion Sciences

“The average shopping cart abandonment rate currently stands at nearly 70%. That means 7 out of 10 highly qualified leads – people who like your product enough to click “Add to cart” – are being lost during the checkout process for one reason or another.”

So what can you do to give yourself the best chance of clinching the sale?
Back to Google Analytics.

The Funnel Visualisation Report gives a visual representation of how visitors behave in your conversion funnel.

To access it, navigate to Conversions > Goals > Funnel Visualisation.

The report shows you how many visitors proceeded through each step of the funnel, as well as the abandonment rate.

This will show you where there are any glaring issues that you can investigate further.

Once you’ve done this, it’s a good idea to check that you’re also following these best practice tips in your checkout funnel.

1. Provide a guest checkout

Forcing your visitors to register with you when they start the checkout process is a sure-fire way to kill your conversion rates.

Allow them to check out as a guest, and you’ll see fewer drop-offs and more sales.

2. Keep the process as short as possible

It almost goes without saying that the longer the checkout process, the less likely it is that potential customers will complete it.

But you’d be amazed how unnecessarily long and complex some checkout funnels are.

Make sure you’re only asking for critical information in your forms. You can always go back and get more data after you’ve secured the sale.

3. Show total order cost up front

Does this sound familiar? You’re on a website and you’re about to pay for the product that’s in your shopping cart. You’re happy with the price, but then when you click through to the payment page, the price has gone up!

This is because additional costs (usually shipping) weren’t included up front.

Don’t annoy your customers by not showing the total order cost on the product page. It’s a small thing, but it can make a big difference.

4. Include trust factors like payment company logos and padlocks

Humans are suspicious creatures, and with the levels of online fraud activity these days, we are probably right to be.

Include trust signals on your payment pages like the logos of the payment companies (Visa, Mastercard) you use to process your payments, and security icons (padlocks, company logos).

These can reduce your visitors’ fears and increase trust in your brand.

5. Have a water-tight returns policy

You should always have a returns policy as it can very effectively remove any barriers to your visitors buying from you.

Just make sure it’s clearly visible on your checkout page(s). 

A returns policy can speak volumes to potential customers about the perceived quality of your product, and about how fairly you treat customers once they have bought from you.

Conclusion

You’ve done the hard work of getting a visitor to your website. Now you want them to buy your product or service.

So you need to be sure you are making it as easy as possible for them to do it.

There are too many companies whose websites do a poor job of converting their visitors into customers.

After all, only 30% of website visitors who add a product to their shopping cart actually go on and buy it.

Make sure yours isn’t one of them.

By following these proven conversion rate optimisation tips and techniques, you stand a great chance of slashing your cart abandonment rates, boosting your site’s conversion rates and turbo-charging your sales.

Have you tried any tactics that have helped you boost your website’s conversion rates? Let me know in the comments below!

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The post How to check your website is converting visitors appeared first on Acquitain.

In this post I show you the steps you can take to make sure your website is doing the best job of attracting quality visitors with an SEO audit.

There are a couple of free tools available that will allow you to do this, and I’m going to show you exactly what to do to get the most out of them. 

Get the free guide:
9 common website conversion killers – and how to fix them
Download it here.

1. Woorank.com

Woorank is a ‘freemium’ tool that will let you run an initial free site audit as part of its free 12 week introductory offer. 

Type your site domain into the box at the top of the page, and wait for it to run a scan of your website homepage. 

What comes back is a detailed checklist of positives and negatives that you should pay attention to. 

At the top of the page is a summary score out of 100. Below this is a Marketing Checklist, which gives a few top priority recommendations as to what you should address first. 

These recommendations are split between on-page and off-page factors. 

On page SEO factors

• Issues with content 
  • Meta tags
  • Page headings
  • In-page links
  • Language declaration
• Indexing issues
  • Whether all versions of the site point to one domain
  • Whether you have a robots.txt file and an xml site map 
  • Broken links
  • Poor quality URLs
  • How many pages of your site search engines have found and crawled 
• Mobile
  • How mobile-friendly the site is
  • How the site renders (appears) on a mobile phone
  • Whether the text is legible, and how well spaced apart the elements are
• Structured data
  • Whether there is site schema on the page
  • Whether there are open graph and Twitter tags on the site, and microformats
• Security
  • Whether you have plain-text email addresses on the site
  • Having SSL on the site
  • Having ‘mixed’ content (some SSL, some not)
• Performance 
  • How optimized the assets (images, CSS files etc.) are on the site 
• Technologies
  • Server uptime (need a free trial for this)
  • Server IP address
  • Technologies used on the site
  • Which analytics tools you’re using on the site
  • Doctype and encoding 
• Branding
  • Your URL
  • Whether you have a favicon
  • Whether you have a custom 404 page 
• Domain
  • Domain registration info
  • Availability of similar domains

Off-page SEO factors

• Backlinks
  • Your backlinks score
  • Referring domains
  • Backlink quality (requires a free trial)
• Traffic 
  • Estimated volumes 
  • Visits on mobile
• Social profiles
  • Social media engagement
  • Whether you have linked Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts defined in your site’s structured data

Where the tool has deemed your site to have errors or areas for improvement, these are marked with a red cross (error) or an amber exclamation mark (not errors as such, but need improvement).

You can then read a detailed explanation as to how to fix the issue by tapping/clicking on the panel.

Or on the accompanying query icon on the right hand side. 

Another really useful feature is the Impact/Ease of resolution signal under the headings.

The cross-hair icon shows how serious the issue is (scored out of 3), and the cog icon shows how easy it would be for a marketer (rather than a developer) to resolve it (also out of 3). 

I suggest you look through each of the errors and areas for improvement and read the detailed explanations of how best to resolve them. You can then pull together an action plan based on the results. 

If you do this exercise on a regular basis you can track your site’s SEO improvement, and use the score as a benchmark that should keep going higher as you make the fixes. 

2. Ubersuggest.com

The next tool I would recommend you use for your SEO audit is called Ubersuggest.

There is a free version you can use, although it will only provide a subset of results/data. It should still give you enough information to be useful though, and if you wanted to opt for the paid version it isn’t overly expensive. 

Go to Ubersuggest.com and type your site’s domain name into the orange box at the top.  

Select your country from the drop-down below it. 

The tool will then crawl your website (this takes roughly 10 minutes) and bring back a set of scores, including:

• Your on-page SEO score
• The number of monthly visits the domain gets from organic search 
• The number of organic keywords the site ranks for
• Domain score (out of 100)
• The volume of backlinks from other websites

Let’s look at each of these in turn. 

Your on-page SEO score is out of 100, and according to the site ‘represents a combination of the ratio of issues found to the number of checks performed by the audit tools’. You should use this as a benchmark figure to track your SEO success.

Organic monthly traffic is the total amount of traffic the domain gets from organic search. This is another really important metric, as it shows you whether the keywords you’re targeting in your content are bringing a decent volume of traffic to your site. You should track this on a regular basis, as this will help to highlight any impact that algorithm updates have on your site’s rankings.

The organic keywords report shows the number of keywords the domain ranks for in organic search. The tool also allows you to drill down so you can see the full list of these keywords, with their individual search volumes, average position in the search engine results pages, number of estimated monthly visits that each keyword generates, and SEO Difficulty – that is, how easy it is to rank highly for the keyword.

You can access this report by clicking on the Keywords tab under the Traffic Analyzer heading on the left hand side of the page:

Take a look at the SEO Keywords Ranking report, as this will give you a good indication of which positions your keywords are ranking in in Google.

You can find this on the Overview page below the Traffic chart.

In this example, the volume of keywords that the domain is ranking for is good. However, very few of these are ranking on page 1 of Google (positions 1-10), which is where they need to get to.

This report can serve as a good benchmark for keyword performance.

Get the free guide:
9 common website conversion killers – and how to fix them
Download it here.

The backlinks report

The backlinks report shows the volume of links coming in to your website from other domains. Google sees links from other domains as a vote of confidence for your site, and it’s an important element in how they rank a website.

The report doesn’t just show you the volume of backlinks, though – it also shows the number of unique referring domains that those backlinks are coming from. It’s a good idea to develop a strategy that aims to increase the volume, and – more importantly – the quality, of both backlinks and the domains that refer them.

You can then track these on a regular basis.

Last but not least is the domain score. This represents the overall strength of a website, and is based on a variety of factors. It is out of 100 – the higher the number the more authoritative a site is, and generally the higher it ranks on Google.

There are a number of ways that you can increase your domain score – write quality, in-depth content; improve your on-page and off-page SEO; disavow bad links to your site; and build high-quality backlinks.

The SEO health check report

On the site audit page in Ubersuggest is the health check report.

It highlights the pages on your website that are healthy, as well as any that are broken or have issues. It also shows all errors that the tool considers ‘critical’.

These are the ones you should look to fix as a priority.

• Click on the View All link at the bottom of the Critical Errors panel
• This will bring up a list of the critical errors by category

For this website, the 20 critical errors are split between low word count, duplicate meta descriptions and duplicate title tags.

The columns on the right show that each of the errors has a high SEO impact, and have a difficulty rating of ‘moderate’ to fix.

• Now click on the 6 pages link for ‘have a low word count’

The word count for each of the pages is listed on the right hand side of the report.

You can find out more information about each of the errors, and how you can fix them, by clicking the ‘What is this and how do I fix it?’ link at the top of each page.

Just bear in mind that they are guidelines, so may not be relevant in every case. Low word count is more of an issue on a product page, or a blog post, than on a shopping cart page, for example, as you wouldn’t necessarily want a shopping cart page to rank in the search engines.

You should then repeat the process for the other critical errors in the list, following the advice in the corresponding ‘What is this…’ link. 

Depending on the number of errors found this exercise can take a long time, but it’s worth getting all these issues fixed. Or at least assess each one and decide whether it’s worth fixing it.

I would recommend carrying out this process once a quarter to make sure you are staying on top of any major problems.

Page speed

A web page’s load speed is something that Google takes extremely seriously when assessing its ranking potential.

But it’s not just search engines that you need to take into account.

What do you do when you click on a link and the page takes ages to load?

Well, generally you would give up and go to a competitor’s site instead.

Suffice to say that slow page load speeds are a huge conversion killer, so it’s something you should address as a matter of urgency if this is the case with your site.

Fortunately there are a number of tools available that let you test and fix up slow loading web pages.

Ubersuggest has a useful summary report that you can see on the Overview screen. It’s positioned about halfway down the page under the healthcheck report:

It has a good graphical representation of how quickly your site loads on desktop and mobile, and shows performance against top-level metrics.

However, you’ll want to dig a bit deeper than this by using the Google Page Speed Insights tool.

This tool is free, and it lets you test every web page on your site. The best thing about it, though, is that it lays out very clearly the steps you (or your developer) need to take to reduce the page load speeds.

These are what they call Opportunities.

These opportunities are prioritised by the estimated time savings they will make. So the top one – in the example below ‘serving images in next-gen formats’ – would result in the biggest reduction in page load speed (5.1 seconds) if implemented.
Another free tool that does a similar job is GT Metrix.

The recommendations are laid out in a similar way to how Google does it, but with GT Metrix the performance scores are graded in alphabetical bands, and they also show additional information like the length of time for the page to fully load, total page size and what it calls the ‘YSlow Score’.

YSlow Score compares a site against a list of Yahoo’s rules for high-performance websites

3. Google Search Console

The last tool I would recommend using is Google Search Console.

Google defines Search Console as “a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.”

Search Console is a multi-purpose tool with a number of different useful reports.

However, for the purposes of this post I’m going to focus on one specific report, which will help you to drive more traffic to your website.

This is the Queries report on the Performance page.

• Click the Performance button in the left hand navigation bar

You’ll see this screen:

• Make sure all 4 checkboxes are checked – total clicks, total impressions, average CTR and average position
• Then, scroll down the page until you get to the Queries report:

This report will show you the search terms that get a high number of impressions but a low volume of clicks and a low click-through rate.

What this means is, your pages relating to that search term are appearing in the search results, but people aren’t clicking on them to get to your website.

To find these keywords, simply click on the Impressions heading so that the list gets sorted in descending order (largest at the top). Now you know which keywords these are, you’re in a great position to address the problem.

Now, for each of the search terms in your list, do a Google Search and look at the results that rank highest.

Then, find your search result and compare it. What are the differences? Do you feel more compelled to click through on some and not others?

The next exercise you should carry out is to tweak your title tags and meta descriptions so they are more compelling.

Moz has a great guide to creating strong title and meta description tags, and I strongly advise you to follow their recommendations. They also have more detailed articles on title tags and meta descriptions.

Conclusion

Traffic is your website’s lifeblood, and you need to have a flow of good quality traffic coming to your site regularly to be successful.

With Google rolling out almost one thousand algorithm updates a year, it’s never been more critical to monitor how friendly your site is to the search engines, and to your site visitors.

A distressing number of companies have seen their website traffic all but disappear as a result of an algorithm change, so you want to make sure this doesn’t happen to you.

By running a regular SEO audit you’ll give your website the best chance of thriving in a tough marketplace.

In the next post in this series, I show you how to optimise your website for conversions.

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Get the free guide:
9 common website conversion killers – and how to fix them
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The post How to run an SEO audit on your website appeared first on Acquitain.

What is a digital competitor analysis?

A digital competitor analysis is a study of your direct and indirect competitors’ websites and other digital channels. 

HubSpot defines it as:

“A strategy where you identify major competitors and research their products, sales, and marketing strategies.”

Why should you do it?

Carrying out a competitor analysis is a great way to benchmark how your website is performing against others in its field.

It’s also a good way of checking if there are areas you are missing out on in your digital marketing efforts.

It forces you to familiarise yourself with what your rivals in business are doing, and to carry out research on their products, their sales and their marketing strategies.

Analysing your competition in this way gives you a clear view of what they are doing well, and what not so well.

By identifying these areas of weakness, and then capitalising on them on your own site, you can get a step up on them.

When should you do it? 

It’s a good idea to carry out a competitor analysis at least a couple of times a year.

The landscape is constantly in flux, and companies are always diversifying their product offering, so it pays to keep alert to developments in your market. You want to be aware of any changes your competitors are making so you can stay ahead of the game.

You should always run one just before you carry out any major redesign or large-scale addition to your site. 

Who should do it?

You could get someone to do the job for you – you can hire digital marketers or UX consultants on sites like Upwork and Fiverr even if you’ve not got a huge budget. 

But if you know what you’re looking for (and I’m going to show you exactly that here) then you should be able to do the job yourself. 

Get the free guide:
9 common website conversion killers – and how to fix them
Download it here.

What should you do?

Step 1: Select the most relevant companies to include in your competitor analysis

These should be ones that are currently your direct competitors, although it’s also worth considering indirect competitors too. These might be companies that sell slightly different types of products, but target the same group of customers as you. 

It’s worth articulating up front what the list of competitors you’re including in the competitor analysis have in common. Slick, premium sites, for example; or high-quality modern photography. 

Step 2: Decide how you’re going to measure success

You need to determine which areas you’re going to focus on in your competitor analysis. These tend to vary by industry, but for an ecommerce business you might choose:

• Homepage effectiveness
• Product quality and positioning (including pricing, distribution)
• How easy it is to use the shopping basket/checkout
• How well they capture email data

while for a car insurance company, for instance, you may want to look at:

• Clarity of information (e.g. what the policy actually covers you for)
• How easy the application form is to complete
• Cross-sell and upsell effectiveness
• Claims information

There are also some rather more standard ones that are relevant across the board, like quality of images, effectiveness of social media and mobile-friendliness (that is, how good the site looks and functions on a phone).

Step 3: Run a SWOT analysis to understand your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. 

You can use a simple matrix like this one from Creately:

Or you may find it easier to design one like this, where you can list the findings by company, one below the other:

This can be a really effective way of documenting your findings.

It focuses your attention on where the competitor is doing well, where they are not doing so well, where there are opportunities for you to steal a march on them, and finally areas where they pose a threat to you.

All you need to do is apply each of the 4 criteria in the SWOT analysis to the areas you decided to measure in Step 2, and there you have it – your framework for analysing your competitors!

Let’s apply it to the example I mentioned above – the ecommerce website.

In this instance I’m going to pretend I’m an online jeweler, and I’ve run a competitor analysis on some competing companies’ websites. 

The competitor analysis in action

I started off by selecting the companies I was going to include in my competitor analysis. 

One way of doing this is by following these two steps:

1. Choose companies whose websites compete for the same or similar product or category search terms in the search engines.
2. Review other high ranking sites in the luxury jewellery market.

This then gives me a good range of direct and indirect competitor websites that I can be confident offer similar products.

So I ended up with a list like this:

The list on the left is direct competitors who are similar companies to mine (generally small online jewellery brands) with the average number of monthly visitors to their sites from SEO beside them. 

The list on the right is indirect competitors – they are sites that rank highly for similar keywords in organic search, but tend to be larger high street retailers, or ones that sell jewellery as only one of their offerings.

I then tend to hone these down to a short list of about 5 or 6.

Element 1: Homepage effectiveness

The first thing I did was a review of the selected companies’ homepages, based on a set of predefined criteria. This took the form of a usability, or heuristic, review. 

These criteria were:

• Clarity and ease of navigation
• Brand experience
• Quality of photography
• Clarity of design and content
• Mobile experience

This homepage scored well for clarity of navigation and quality of photography, but not quite so well for design clarity…

…while this one scored well for mobile experience – stylish product shot above the fold, but also important information clearly laid out, without being cluttered.

If you wanted to get really forensic you could use a scoring matrix for each of the criteria, and give scores of 0-5 for each company.

Element 2: Product quality and positioning

Next I wanted to explore:

• The quality of the products and services that my competitors are offering compared to mine
• How they are positioning themselves in the market (high-end/premium, price-led)
• Whether they have different pricing strategies for offline and online; and
• What their distribution strategy is (do they offer free shipping, for example)

Monica Vinader’s understated yet simple design and beautiful product shots are perfect for a high-end brand selling premium products. 

While a High Street brand like H Samuel has more of a price-led approach, which is reflected in its design and layout…

It’s also a good idea to look at the different channels your competitors are using to sell their products. Are they selling on partner sites, for instance, like Amazon?

This competitor has a Facebook shop. When visitors click on a product they are sent straight to the buying page on the website. It can be a great way to increase the reach of your product offering.

Element 3: How easy it is to use the shopping basket/checkout

It’s worth also looking at the sales process for each of the competitor websites. That is, the route a visitor would take from selecting a product all the way through to buying it on the site.

So usually this would be:
Product details page > Shopping Cart > Delivery and billing details > Payment & confirmation.

Naturally it’s going to be tricky going through this whole process as you won’t want to buy a product each time.

However you can get a good idea of everything up until the payment page without having to put your card details in.

Good questions to ask are:

• How easy is it to add products to the shopping cart?
• Is it clear what you need to do when you’re in the cart?
• How easy it is to find out whether the product is in stock?
• Are the checkout instructions clear?
• Are you forced to register/log in before buying?

Edge of Ember has a really clear Add to Cart call to action button on its product details page, as well as neatly ordered size, stock and shipping information. They even give a summary of product features and benefits as a reminder.

Daisy London uses a simple uncluttered layout for its cart (or ‘bag’ as they call it), but manages to include plenty of salient information like size and product shot, as well as clear instructions for adding a gift message.

They also have a clear, full-width Go to Checkout button at the bottom of the panel, to make it crystal clear what you need to do next.

What’s good about Molly Brown London is that they allow you to create your account after you’ve checked out, rather than forcing you to register before buying. 

Not having a guest checkout can be a big conversion killer.

As far as the checkout itself is concerned, I’d recommend looking at things like:

• How many different payment options are available
• Whether there are trust signals visible on the page
• How simple the payment process is
• Whether the page is free of distractions

Kit Heath does it pretty well on the whole. They clearly lay out the steps in the payment process, from billing information through to reviewing your order.

And they also show the SagePay logo with padlock in a prominent place on the top right of the screen.

There is no other navigation on the page, which means it’s less likely visitors will be distracted and leave the site at this point.

They also offer PayPal as an alternative payment option:

Daisy London gives you the option of paying by express checkout if you don’t want to pay by card – although it isn’t totally obvious what happens after you’ve completed your shipping address details on the form.

The card payment and billing details form has a nice, simple layout. It looks very professional, while the card logos and padlock icon are good trust signals.

Get the free guide:
9 common website conversion killers – and how to fix them
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Element 4: How well they capture email data

When a group of successful business owners was asked what their most valuable asset is, they all said that it’s their email list.

That’s because subscribers on an email list have already pre-qualified themselves as being interested in what the company has to offer. And as a result they are more likely to buy the company’s products and services.

For this reason it’s critically important to attract quality leads with an email opt-in offer – and that’s why I tend to include it in my competitor analysis.

There are four things I look out for when I review a website’s email data capture:

1. How visible is the opt-in form?
2. Do they incentivise the sign-up with a value-led offer?
3. How quick and easy is it to sign up?
4. To what extent are data privacy, cookies, considered? 

A number of the sites position the sign-up form at the bottom of the page, telling visitors what they are going to get in their communication.

The fact that it’s so far down the page means it’s easy to miss. Kit Heath and Molly Brown are cases in point:

Kit Heath does also have a pop-up that appears after a timed delay. While some people find this obtrusive, it can work well in increasing subscription rates. 

They don’t offer a specific incentive, but you do get the feeling that you’re going to benefit from special offers by signing up. And the call to action is very clear. 

To build trust they have included a link to their privacy policy, and it’s very easy to sign up. All you have to do is enter your email address.

A few of the sites offer 10% off your first order.

Having a very specific offer like this can be a good hook. But not differentiating can be risky as it means your offer doesn’t stand out from the crowd.

This creates a good opportunity for me to offer something a bit different on my website – a free gift, for instance.

Other considerations

There are also some more standard areas you should focus on as part of your competitor analysis. These include: 

• Quality of photography
• Mobile-friendliness
• Effectiveness of social media

Quality of photography

The nature of the product here means that high quality design and imagery on the websites is pretty much a given. 

These ring images on Monica Vinader, for instance, are beautifully shot – evoking a real sense of quality and luxury.

While the lifestyle shot on the Soru homepage is reminiscent of a high-end fashion magazine.

Mobile-friendliness

According to Statista, more than 50% of website visits are now made on a mobile phone. So it’s critical that a visitor’s experience of a brand is just as good on mobile as it is on a desktop or laptop.

In terms of how the sites perform on mobile phones, I tend to look out for the following:

• Firstly, whether the site is optimised for mobile
• Whether it’s easy to see what the website offers without having to scroll
• How easy it is to buy on the site
• How fast the site loads

The sites I’ve included in my analysis are all optimised for mobile, and it’s generally clear at first glance what it is they sell. 

They tend to all lead with a mixture of bold product shots and lifestyle modeling shots, with very little copy.

Some of the calls to action are more prominent on some sites (Silver, Edge of Ember). This results in a slightly more direct buying journey on these two sites than on the others.

Another crucial criterion – particularly in Google’s eyes – is how fast the sites load on a mobile phone. 

I ran the sites through the Google Page Speed Insights tool to check page load speeds. All of the sites performed poorly on mobile, mainly because of the large images that hadn’t been optimised. In fact, none of the sites scored higher than 27 out of 100, which is really quite poor. 

This gives me another great opportunity to gain an advantage on these competitors by optimising the images for mobile on my website.

The page speed insights tool shows you exactly what to do to minimise page load speeds, and all you would need to do is hand them over to your developer to fix.

Social media effectiveness

The final area I investigated was social media – specifically how well the competitors are using social media to engage with their audience and sell their product.

One or two of the sites are using social media very effectively. 

Silver by Mail is the number one site in Google for silver jewellery.

Their position is greatly helped by their social media. On Facebook they have:

• 37,861 followers
• An average of 9,993 shares per month

and they post once a week with good photos.

They also have a Facebook shop to better display their products. This links off to their site at point of purchase:

Edge of Ember use carousel ads on Facebook to good effect:

as well as using professional video content. This video was created using a sequence of stills:

Daisy London and Monica Vinader both use Instagram story highlights to show off different areas of the business.

Conclusion

If you want to keep ahead of your competition, you need to keep on top of what they are doing. But with so many marketing channels available now, it’s nigh on impossible to do.

That’s why it’s so important to run a competitor analysis at least twice a year.

By following the steps in this post, you can get an in-depth insight into your competition’s digital marketing activities, identify where there are gaps you can exploit, and then put your plan into action.

Have you tried running your own digital competitor analysis? Did it give you useful insights? Let me know in the comments below the post.

In the next post in this series I show you the steps you can take to make sure your website is doing the best job of attracting quality visitors. 

Get the free guide:
9 common website conversion killers – and how to fix them
Download it here.

The post Why you should run a regular competitor analysis appeared first on Acquitain.

Businesses are closing at an unprecedented rate. And in light of repeated lockdowns and a shift towards remote working, the ones that remain are being forced to adapt to a digital approach in order to survive in these turbulent times.

According to Mastercard, in May of this year alone ecommerce spending increased by 93% in the US year on year.

With the digital landscape becoming so much more competitive, it goes without saying that you need your website to be performing well.

In this series of blog posts you will learn how you can give your website a health check.

Get the free guide:
9 common website conversion killers – and how to fix them
Download it here.

You’ll discover the steps you need to take to make sure your site is as profitable as it can be. And what you need to do to remedy it if it isn’t. 

You’ll also learn about the different tools you can use (many of them free) and the strategies you can adopt to achieve this.

Health check post 2: The importance of a competitor analysis 

In the next post you’ll learn how to run a competitor analysis, and why it’s so critical that you do it.

An analysis of your direct and indirect competitors’ websites is crucial. It can serve as a benchmark for how well your site is performing against others.

Buffer outline a number of quantitative and qualitative benefits from running a competitor analysis. These include:

• Help in developing and validating your Unique Value Proposition
• Improving your product by capitalising on competitors’ weaknesses
• Providing benchmarks to measure your growth against
• Uncovering market segments that aren’t fully served by competitors

To carry out a competitor analysis you need to know who your competitors are.

You also need to find out what keywords they are targeting, and what metrics you should include in it so you can track success.

By following the steps in the post, you’ll understand how regularly you should be running one, and who should do it.

Then, you’ll find out about a framework you can use to give yourself the best chance of success, before I run you step by step through a real-life competitor analysis.

Health check post 3: Running an SEO audit

In the third post you’ll learn how to get your website to attract a rich stream of high quality visitors.

To start off you’ll get to see a number of industry-leading tools you can use for free to run an SEO audit of your website.

I then run through in detail exactly how you can use them to identify issues on your website.

And then, when you have a full snagging list of things you need to fix, how you should go about fixing them.

Armed with this knowledge you’ll be in a great position to boost your domain authority, your keyword visibility and your backlink profile. This in turn will help your website to rank higher in the search engines for the right keywords.

Health check post 4: Checking how well your website converts visitors 

Getting lots of visitors to your website is crucial for survival, no question.

But it’s no good if those visitors leave your site as soon as they arrive.

That’s why in the fourth post of the series I cover how to review how good your website is at converting its visitors into valuable customers.

Each page on your website plays a subtly different role in nurturing visitors towards a conversion point. In the post I focus on these different areas

• homepage
• blog post
• landing page
• checkout process

and show you how you can optimise each one for conversions on your website.

For each of these pages you’ll see a simple analytics report that highlights any general problems. This is a great way to find any areas where your visitors are struggling.

It’s a good idea to revisit the metrics, or KPIs, that you want to measure the success of your site against.

What’s more, you’ll discover some of the most important and valuable ones, and how you can benchmark your site’s performance from month to month.

I then focus on common elements on each of these pages, and show you other websites that are following best practice in these areas.

By implementing some (or all) of these strategies I’m confident that you’ll start to see your own conversion rates increase over time. 

Conclusion 

With the global economy in its current precarious position, there’s never been a more pressing time to give your website a health check.

Companies are closing down at an alarming rate. Those that survive are going to be the ones that can adapt to changing consumer behaviour. More and more people are buying online now, and the opportunity for servicing them digitally is clearly growing.

However, competition is fierce. So you need to be on your A-game if you want to be able to thrive in this environment.

Look out for the next post where you’ll learn how to carry out a digital competitor analysis to get ahead off the pack.

Subscribe to this blog post series and get valuable hints and tips about how you can fine-tune your website to be more profitable for you and your business.

By signing up you’ll get notified when the next posts are published.

Get the free guide:
9 common website conversion killers – and how to fix them
Download it here.

The post How to give your website a boost with a health check appeared first on Acquitain.

In this post I outline seven steps that you should take to get senior management engaged and involved in digital optimisation.

1. Get an optimisation sponsor. Without doubt the first and most important thing you should do is appoint a sponsor who can own the program and take overall responsibility for it. This should be someone with enough knowledge to understand its importance to the company, but senior enough to be able to sell it in at board level, and have enough weight to negotiate and influence decisions. A role like Digital Director or CMO is usually ideal for this.

2. Sell the benefits of optimisation. You will find that embedding CRO in your organisation is as much a PR and sales exercise as anything else. For it to be a success you need to sell the benefits to all stakeholders who are going to have any involvement – not just senior management. Often this is a Catch-22 problem, as the benefits only become clear after you’ve run some successful tests, but rest assured that the selling job gets a lot easier after you’ve had a few successes, and some tangible results.

3. Get senior management involved. With busy diaries this is often easier said than done, but it’s critical that senior managers understand what you’re trying to do. You may struggle to get them involved in the more granular tasks of idea generation and result prediction, but make sure at very least that they are on a quarterly email distribution list of test results – and, if possible, pull together a high level ‘board pack’ that can be shared by the optimisation sponsor at board meetings.

4. Keep regular communication. If you and your optimisation team don’t shout about your efforts and results, you can bet that no-one else will. That’s why sending out regular updates to stakeholders is so important. Don’t be shy and keep it to your own team or immediate stakeholders, though. It’s a great opportunity to share test results, new test ideas and other news from within the Optimisation Team to senior management as well. Keeping people engaged and showing them why conversion rate optimisation matters will give your testing program the impetus to continue, and will keep you and your team motivated.

5. Show the size of the prize. Nothing tells a story better than statistics, so if you have had some good success from experiments, make sure you include metrics figures such as increases in sales and quote conversion rate, revenue increase and click-throughs. With the right volumes of traffic even small incremental lifts in conversion rate can yield huge increases in revenue and profitability, so make sure you shout about them. After all, which senior manager wouldn’t want to hear about those?

6. Show that your optimisation efforts are underpinned by a strategy. Nothing turns people in an organisation off more than a ‘fad’ that is introduced as the new big thing, and then dies out when it loses traction after a few weeks. Make sure this isn’t the case with your optimisation program. The best way to ensure that this isn’t the case is to devise a strategic plan that ties in with your organisation’s overarching business objectives. You can guarantee that this will give your senior management team (and your sponsor) much more confidence in what you’re doing, not to mention more likelihood of the program being a success.

7. Be an evangelist. This one ties in with a number of the previous points, but it is so important to believe in what you’re doing and to keep spreading the word. Just getting out ‘on the road’ and telling new stakeholders what you are doing and why can make the difference between a program that succeeds and one that fails – so make sure you are constantly talking about how optimisation can help them. At one of my former companies we created a video about ‘the value of optimisation’ and sent it out to the senior leadership team to get their buy-in.

I hope you try these tactics yourself – I’d be really interested to hear how you get on. 

The post How to get senior management support for your optimisation program appeared first on Acquitain.

Einstein said “we cannot solve the problem with the same thinking we used when we created them”.

These days if you fail to innovate you will almost certainly fail. Companies need to be flexible and adapt in unpredictable markets, and adopt approaches that allow them to do this.

The ability to test and learn is critical for businesses, as it allows them to:

• Limit financial risk
• Limit exposure to new markets
• Try new ideas and ‘fail fast’

So how do you get your company to embrace a test and learn culture? Here are seven ways you can try:

1. Get senior management/board backing. Instilling a test and learn culture needs to come from the top down. If the CEO and executive team aren’t tuned in then it won’t happen. There needs to be an appetite for a change in culture, and they need to communicate that. It’s wise to have a sponsor who owns the initiative, and who will fight your corner in the face of any push-back. I talk about this in another blog post.

2. Set yourself up to succeed. You can’t decide overnight that you are going to be a test and learn organisation. You need to have the right structures and processes in place first if it’s going to work for you. A good number of large companies these days use the Agile or Scrum methodology, and this tends to work well for experimentation. If you don’t, then you can definitely still be successful with experimentation, as long as you plan and prioritise effectively.

3. Test everything. In order to make sure you practise what you preach, you shouldn’t push anything live across websites or apps without subjecting it to at least an A/B test. This should be the case with non-digital initiatives too. Get into a habit of launching a minimum viable product (MVP) and then improving it in increments – also known as ‘shipping and iterating’ – rather than getting bogged down by internal committees and sign-off loops. You can even split test new site launches against existing websites. Just make sure you’re clear on your success criteria.

4. Agree that there’s no such thing as failure. A fear of failure stifles creativity and growth. So try to get into the mindset that it’s OK to test options that might not work. The most important thing is to learn from experimentation – it’s called test and learn after all. Often it’s a good idea to change the vocabulary you use in your company. Rather than saying ‘that A/B test failed’, for example, say instead ‘the existing version beat the challenger’. It’s a subtle difference, but it can help prevent negativity from creeping in, while reminding people that experimentation is the fastest way to learn what your customers want.

5. Eliminate ‘gut feel’. A hypothesis-based approach to all your web projects (not just A/B tests) will help shift your colleagues over to a more ‘scientific’ mindset. You may have heard about HiPPos, or the highest paid person’s opinion. The classic scenario of a CEO dictating a major design change on the back of a hunch can become a thing of the past with the introduction of steadfast experimentation. This eliminates design-led opinion using scientific methods.

6. Nurture interest through gamification. A highly effective way to create a buzz around an initiative is to turn it into a game. People are competitive by nature, so getting them to predict the outcome of an experiment is a great way to get them interested in what you’re doing. Be sure to involve as many people and teams as possible, and before long your test and learn efforts could well be going viral.

7. Get the right tools in place. I’m not just talking about your A/B testing software here. You need to have a suite of different tools at your disposal if you want to succeed, such as a good, simple analytics dashboard, reporting templates, a data visualisation package, heatmapping, and survey software, to name a few. Project management tools like Jira, Trello or Basecamp can also be invaluable.

The post 7 ways to embed a test and learn culture in your organisation appeared first on Acquitain.

The days of launching a product and leaving it to chance are gone. Profitability is everything, so it’s critical that organisations make sure that there is minimal wastage in their everyday operations – every pound invested has to work as hard as it can to make a return.

And there’s really no excuse. Analytics are so widely available now that pretty much anything can be measured, from the volume of website visitors to in-store purchases.

This can be both a blessing and a curse. According to the Norwegian research association SINTEF, more data was created in the past two years than in the entire previous history of the human race. The challenge for organisations is that they need to be able to interpret these vast quantities of data, and use the learnings to inform their business strategy.

So how do they do that?

The secret is being able to derive meaningful insights from the data that can be easily translated into real-life test scenarios, or experiments. More and more companies are starting to do this, under the banner of digital optimisation – a term that encompasses activities like split testing and personalised messaging.

Split testing is not a new phenomenon. Direct marketing giants like Claude Hopkins were doing it in the 1920s, sending subtly different direct mail messages to two separate groups of customers, and gauging the result. It provides an effective feedback mechanism for rapid decision making, and resists intuition.

The reasons for engaging in test and learn activities are numerous, but the main ones are:

• Without testing you will never know whether the changes you make to your products and services are working.
• You can get a steer on whether you are wasting budgets and resources.
• Without it you will only ever have anecdotal feedback from your customers about what they think about you. When you test, you can see the reality of how they interact with your brand

Who’s been successful with test and learn?

Toyota are generally held up as the classic example of a continuous improvement or ‘kaizen’ company. They are considered to be the pioneers of test and learn in the manufacturing environment, with the Toyota Production System.

Etsy, a peer-to-peer ecommerce company that sells handmade and vintage items, is another more recent company that has continuous experimentation as part of its DNA. Lacy Rhoades, iOS Software Engineer at Etsy, says “Experimentation at Etsy comes from a desire to make informed decisions, and ensure that when we launch features for our millions of members, they work.”

It seems to be working for them, as the company reported 21.3% growth in merchandise sales year on year for 2015, and projects double digit growth for the next three years.

Failing fast and continually learning is key to the success of entrepreneurial small business. The Lean Startup model, developed by Eric Ries, was born out of a need to de-risk starting a business, but its tenets can also be applied to larger, more established corporates. It’s turning the traditional model of

business case > funding > waterfall rollout > complete product launch

on its head. No wonder 75% of start-ups fail, according to the Harvard Business Review.

These days it is far more common for a company to launch a minimum viable product (MVP) that can then be developed and enhanced based on customer feedback, and aided by split testing experimentation.

Digital test and learn is still very young as a concept, and we are yet to see its full impact. But be sure that it is here to stay – and that the future will be very exciting as a result.

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