What Is Website Optimization?
The main goal of your website optimization efforts is to create a kickass user experience for your audience. The better experience you create, the more likely visitors are to further engage with your brand and convert on your site.
Website optimization consists of so many different techniques, like the following:
- Technical Website Performance: Site speed. Responsive web design. Mobile-friendliness. There are so many aspects that affect how your website performs. With the right tactics in place, you can build a fast loading, sharp-looking site that drives conversions.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This is how you get found by your audience in search. By optimizing your content, you’re focusing on the quality and value you’re delivering to your visitors by answering the right questions and providing educational resources that help them solve specific pain points.
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): The process of enabling visitors to take specific actions on your site is essential. Visitors deserve a frictionless experience when they’re interested in your company and want to follow a conversion path to become your lead. To make this easier for them, you need to design and modify webpage elements and reduce obstacles.
Why Is Website Optimization Important?
There are several tangible benefits to optimizing your site’s performance, all of which fuel sustainable business successes.
Boost Your Targeted Traffic.
By optimizing content through SEO best practices, you’re delivering valuable content and getting ranked for it. You want to optimize your content based on user intent.
When you serve answers that align with a searcher’s intent, you’re getting in front of your target audience in a meaningful way, which will then drive them to your site.
Expand Brand Awareness.
You can expand awareness through consistently positive user experiences. Humans are social by nature, so if you’re educating your buyer personas in an engaging way, they will likely share your content and sing your praises.
Maximize the ROI of Content.
Creating and promoting content calls for a lot of time and resources. Your content needs to be found. Otherwise, it has minimal impact on your business.
By optimizing your site and focusing on conversion rate optimization, those content offers you created are actually getting downloaded and serving their purpose. And you get to reap the rewards by adding to your contacts list.
Gain Insights Through Data.
You can use CRO tools to measure and analyze what your visitors are doing on your site. This, in turn, gives you more data to base optimization decisions off of.
Then, you can evolve your website optimization strategy over time to better serve your audience.
Increase Lead Generation.
Conversion is key to the success of your business. Even by boosting your conversion rates by a marginal one or two percent, you can make a huge difference in influencing revenue.
CRO is all about making small changes in the hopes of achieving big results. By testing CTA buttons or landing page designs, you can gather data on what drives more conversions, then stick to the most effective tactics.
Offer an Excellent User Experience.
The user experience (UX) truly makes or breaks the success of your digital marketing efforts. A slow site riddled with redirects and errors in your webpages is going to push people away, plain and simple.
Website design and development make a direct impact on the user experience, which is why so many companies are investing in both user experience (UX) design and user interface (UI) design.
The Difference Between UX and UI Design
Both UX and UI design work closely together, but they have many differences.
User Experience Design
This is the process of improving the usability and pleasure of how your audience and your customers interact with a product in hopes of enhancing customer loyalty and customer happiness.
The overall experience consists of how digital products (like websites or apps) feel to the end user as they use and navigate them.
User Interface Design
This is more concerned with the overall feel of a design. On the other hand, user experience design is centered on the whole spectrum of how a person experiences a certain product.
Simply put, UI design is a subset of the bigger picture – UX design.
Another big component of website optimization strategies is conversion rate optimization (CRO).
How Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Marketing Works
CRO marketing is the process of boosting how many website visitors take a desired action on your site. There are many conversions you want visitors to take.
For example, visitors can sign up for your newsletter or create an account on your site, which is often referred to as micro-conversions.
Macro-conversions are aligned with your primary goal, like getting visitors to purchase a product or subscribe to a service.
You can use CRO in several areas on your website, including the following CRO marketing strategies:
- Your homepage: Emphasize links to product information or incorporate chatbots to engage visitors.
- Your blog: Add CTAs to articles to invite readers to further educate themselves with content offers.
- Your landing pages: Include videos or add preview content from the downloadable resource to give visitors a sneak peek at the offer so they want to download it.
- Your pricing page: Show pricing intervals or add product features associated with each pricing tier.