How to Quality Check Your New Website

Doug Williams @ 5:35 am

This blog entry was posted on November 22, 2011.

You have just received your new website from your web developer. How should you check it over to make sure they did a good job? Here are a series of visual checks and free web tools to do your own quality check.

Visual Checks and Tests

Verify your design is professional and presents your organization as credible and trustworthy. Compare against your competition, does it make you look like a leader?
Manually test every function. Buy something from your store, sign-up for your newsletter. Do you receive all the proper email notifications?
The logo should be at the top left of each page and link back to the home page.
Navigation labels must be text based and be clearly understandable. More on navigation
Website footers should include copyright info and links to primary pages More on footers
Your phone number and physical address should be on every page, not just on the contact page.
Content should be keyword driven and written with a clear message. Cut and paste page text into a Word document and check spelling and grammar.
Does each page have a clear and visible call to action? You have to ask your visitors to do something.

WooRank Report: This is a convenient tool that measures many page attributes. The WooRank report checks a lot of factors all in one step. Some important items to look at are (in order as you scan the report):

Are your keywords being used in both the Title tag and H1 tag on the home page? This is important for SEO.
Under inside analysis, are there different titles and descriptions on each page?
www resolve should show a redirect to either the www or non-www version of your site.
XML Sitemaps should show a sitemap present.
Google Analytics should be present to measure visitor traffic and visitor behavior.
Load time should show your site speed at less than 1 second.

HTML code validation: Verify your pages were built within coding standards. Validate all HTML code with W3C Validation. This helps with cross browser compatibility.

Browser test: Test each page on each of the major browsers. Each browser displays a website differently. Browsershots.org allows you to view pages of your site without having to actually load the different browsers onto your computer.

Broken Link Check: Check all internal links for broken links using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

These tests cover the basics. There are an almost overwhelming number of tools and tests that could be run. The key is to quickly uncover the major issues before you take possession of your new site.

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Website Footer Best Practices

Doug Williams @ 4:45 am

This blog entry was posted on November 18, 2011.

Footer navigation should be placed at the bottom of each web page. These are usually identical on all pages in your site. Website footers act as a macro sitemap to the key pages on your site. Footer links make it easier for visitors to navigate your site without having to scroll back to the top of the page. Including an address in the footer helps visitors and helps establish the location of your company, especially for local search.

Footer links help search engines index your website, particularly if the primary navigation is formed in Flash or JavaScript. It can act as a condensed version of your site map.

Local Search: If yours is a local business seeking local customers, then having your address including city and state in the footer identifies your location for both search engines and visitors. You can even include the communities that you serve.

Usability: Footers should be designed first with usability and visitor experience in mind rather than just the search engines. As a general rule, if it’s good for your visitors it will help your search rankings. If you are forming your footers only around a SEO strategy, you should think long and hard about it.

Pages: Which pages should be included in your footer links? This should include about-us, contact, privacy policy, terms of use, sitemap and links to key services or products. Include your copyright information as well.

Number of links: How many links should be in the footer navigation? Typically up to a dozen. Large scale footers are rarely good for visitors or for SEO. Organizing links into natural categories makes it easier to visually locate an individual page.

Google suggests that any page not exceed 100 links. Having too many footer links may put every page in the site over this suggested limit.

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The 5Cs of Website Navigation

Doug Williams @ 6:23 pm

This blog entry was posted on August 9, 2011.

Navigation provides the clearly marked path that guides visitors toward the information they are seeking. It should be easily understood by the even an inexperienced web user. The navigation system should allow search engine spiders to fully crawl a site to index content.

Clear: (Not confusing.) The menu names should clearly describe what lies beyond. Stay away from obscure or general phrases. Excellent navigation is clear, precise, predictable, instinctive, familiar and even boring. Make your menus simple enough for a third grader to read. Clear navigation helps build trust with your visitor when they can intuitively move around your site.
Consistent: Navigation should appear in the same place on every page. Use the same phrases, in the same order to make navigation usable and predictable. Menus should be in the same color scheme and fonts. This helps visitors interact and move through your website intuitively. You should still add sub-menus for specific sections of your site.
Categorized: Experts on information architecture suggest a maximum of seven main site categories. Navigation becomes a problem when there are too many options. More choices often mean less action or even site abandonment. Group related topics together into categories and apply a clear category name. This works for drop down menus or in organizing a page of links (sitemap).
Conspicuous: Place your navigation menus in a prominent easy to find location that is above the fold. This is usually in a horizontal navigation bar near the top of the page or in a menu on the left hand side. People using the web are impatient and expect to quickly find your site’s navigation. This gives them clues to what your website is about.
Crawlable: Provide a crawlable site architecture using HTML link navigation. This provides anchor text for links to all internal pages. Use sitewide links to guide the search engines to high level pages within your site. Image links may still connect the search engines to all your site pages, but they lack the valuable context of anchor text.

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10 Ways to Turn Your Website Visitors into Paying Customers

Doug Williams @ 5:27 am

This blog entry was posted on June 3, 2011.

Answer their question: People come to your site searching for answers. Your home page should address and answer those questions. This means you need to understand your customers and the problems they need to solve.
Sell benefits, not features: People first want to know how what you are selling will help them, how they will profit. This gets their attention so they will become interested in the features.
Grab their attention with headlines: Studies show that people read the headlines first. Get their interest so they will read the rest of your message.
Show your credibility: Tell your story on your About-us page. They want to know to know your story. They want to know how long you have been in business. What are your credentials?
Build trust: People arrive to your site suspicious and thinking “Can I trust these people?” Show your phone number and address. Show social reviews and testimonials.
Post a guarantee: People won’t do something that puts them at risk. Risk reversal is part of building trust. Have a no-risk returns policy.
Call to Action: Drive your visitors toward a desired action. Make it clear and highly visible. This could be to sign-up, join, call or buy now. Place your primary call to action where it can be easily seen.
Build value then give the price: Show how your product is different and better than the competition. Emphasize what they will receive both initially and through the life of the product.
Relationship: Build a relationship with your visitor. Educate them on what they are buying. Give them free helpful information. Offer a free eCourse. These are things that build long-term trust.
Payment plans: Offer multiple payment options to make your products available to a wider audience. Offer third party financing on high priced items.

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How to Write an About-Us Page For Your Business

Doug Williams @ 5:25 am

This blog entry was posted on May 20, 2011.

This is the website page that humanizes your business. Your About-Us page is there to build trust and credibility. Visitors want to know the business or the person behind the website. They want to know to know your story. They want to know how long you have been in business. They want to know if they should trust you.

This is the job of your About-Us page.

Importance: How often do visitors read the about-us page? Based on analytics data of our clients, 2-35% of visitors will go to this page. It really depends on your type business. If you have a strong brand and your business is well known, fewer people will view it. Ecommerce sites tend to have a lower number of visitors reading the about-us. Attorney websites, physician websites and weight loss websites have the highest viewing rate at 25-35%.

What to include: These pages should help people learn more about who you are, what you do, and why they can trust you. The about-us area for a website can be a single page or a section of pages, depending on your website.

Describe how you are different and better than your competition. Introduce your key staff members with a “meet the staff” page. Share your company philosophies, awards and certifications. If you have important affiliations, this is the page to include them.

Tell when your company was founded and how long you have been serving your industry. People enjoy reading the story on how a company got started and what led the founder to launch the business.

The About us page should be concise and easy to read. Its main purpose is to build trust with your visitor. People want to feel safe and secure before they buy from you or even provide you their email address.

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Layout Affects Your Conversion Rate

Doug Williams @ 6:26 am

This blog entry was posted on April 29, 2011.

How you layout your home page will affects the conversion rate of your website. You need to grab their attention, get them interested and then build desire for your offering and then get people to take action. Answer the three questions: why you, why now, and what’s in it for me?

People search for answers. Your home page should address and answer those questions. This means you need to understand your customers and the problems they need to solve.

Initial Hook: Grab their attention with a compelling headline that includes the phrase they were searching for. Your objective is to grab their attention and pique a potential customer’s interest. Your opening paragraph should address the question they came to get an answer for.

Start with Benefits: Visitors arrive wanting to know what’s in it for them. How will you make your customer’s life better? Spell your benefits out clearly on your home page. State the advantages of your services over your competition. Save your product features for later steps in your selling sequence.

Call to Action: Drive your visitors toward a desired action. Make it clear and highly visible. This could be to sign-up, join, call or buy now. Place your primary call to action where it can be easily seen and above the fold. It needs to be highly visible to arriving visitors. Examples of calls to action include- “Buy Now”, “Order Now”, “Join Today”, and “Sign Up For A Free Report”.

Placement: The upper right quadrant of your web page gets the best response. Place your phone number in upper right with email sign-up forms just below.

Information Overload: Avoid overloading your visitor with too much information. Keep paragraphs short and give “bite size” nuggets of information. This makes it easier for people to scan your content and find what they are looking for. Include a link with “Learn more” that will lead them to more in depth information.

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Conversion Tip: Your Website Must Anticipate Your Visitor’s Needs

Doug Williams @ 5:28 am

This blog entry was posted on April 22, 2011.

The difference between a good website and an excellent website is how much in tune you are with your “best buyer” visitors. A visitor comes to your website to solve a problem or a need. If you clearly understand their needs and you can anticipate their questions, your website will be a welcome answer to what they are seeking.

Start by answering the question, “Why are they coming?” What problem are they trying to solve? As an example, if you were a fertilizer company… People do not come to learn about your fertilizer. They come to learn how to make their grass greener. What you have is the answer to their problem.

Think about your website from their point of view. Once you understand their questions then you need to answer and address their needs. Just provide the answers they are searching for.

Make your graphics, your message and your navigation clear and intuitive. The message on your website needs to be clear. This means having an offer that is relevant, understandable and visual. This offer is your call to action.

Make your website interactive. Deliver more than they are expecting. Your site could have free reports, instant quotes, price and feature comparisons, or even free samples. Try and deliver a concierge level of service.

Help them improve their knowledge and skills. Deliver education through a blog, videos or an eCourse. Education in your website helps build trust and rapport. If you strategically build trust, people will be more open to your offer.

The most important thing is to anticipate what your visitor might be looking for and deliver that information… and more. Work to exceed their expectations.

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What’s More Important, SEO or Conversion Rate?

Doug Williams @ 5:20 am

This blog entry was posted on January 24, 2011.

Should you focus on conversions or on search engine optimization? Is it better to have more traffic that may not convert as well or do you need to add big red buttons and have a website that can look spammy?

Seriously, this is the internal struggle that many website owners go through. The correct answer is that you absolutely need to do both. You don’t need to create a “spammy” looking site to get good conversions; you just need to design in a clear and visible action for your visitor to take.

You don’t need to choose between conversions and traffic. You are much better off with an SEO campaign that draws in interested visitors AND having a website that is designed for conversion. My goal when working with any site is to improve traffic flow and conversion rates.

Having a top ranked site (SEO) may insure that a visitor will see your site, but without conversion rate optimization (CRO), you won’t make any money. A productive website has balance and focuses on search engines and users.

SEO is a long term, methodical process that gets your site ranked for your targeted keywords. The keywords you choose will bring in searchers with different sets of expectations. Some will have a stronger bias to take action and convert. This is just one example of CRO and SEO overlapping.

A holistic approach doesn’t put SEO against CRO, it puts them in alignment focusing on a common goal. The goal is to increase visitor actions (sales, leads, sign-ups) over both the short term and the long term.

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Web Forms: Keep Them Short, Simple and Relevant

Doug Williams @ 5:03 am

This blog entry was posted on January 14, 2011.

Filling out a web form is the most common way to interact with a website. Have you tuned your form to make it easy to complete? Web forms are often one of the most neglected after thoughts on a typical website.

If you ask for too much information or if it is not easy to fill out, people will abandon the form and just leave your website. Filling out forms is something most people dislike doing.

Location: Placement of the form can greatly affect how many people complete it. Frequently the upper right corner of the web page is the most visible. Sometimes placing the form on an interior page will improve conversion rates. You need to test this.
Form Title: Have a clear and understandable form heading. The title or headline needs to communicate the benefits of completing the form.
Form length: This depends on what is being signed up for. People will enter more information when purchasing airline tickets than signing up for your newsletter. Keep your form as short as possible and only require information that is really needed.
Instructions: Eyetracking studies show forms are scanned with a left to right eye movement. This means instructions placed on the far right will be ignored. Try placing form labels to the left hand side with 1-2 word instructions between the field name and the entry field.
Easy to read: Use a sans-serif screen font such as Verdana. Design the form colors to be visually pleasing yet having a high contrast between text and backgrounds. Having a good color and layout design encourages trust from visitors.
Wording: Use plain English and avoid the use of acronyms. If you use acronyms, use their full meaning next to it. Be polite in asking for form information and extra polite with error checking messages.

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People Judge Your Business by Your Website

Doug Williams @ 5:01 am

This blog entry was posted on January 12, 2011.

“75% of web users admit making judgments about the credibility of an organization based on the design of its web site” – BJ Fogg, Stanford Web Credibility Project

The Stanford University Web Credibility Project developed the 10 guidelines of web credibility based on three years of research that included over 4500 people. You should use these guidelines to improve the trustworthiness of your website.

Summary of the 10 Guidelines of Web Credibility

Make it easy to verify information: By providing third party citations or links to the source data you make the information you present more believable.
Show your organization is real: Provide evidence that you have a real business by posting a physical address, photos of your offices or listing your membership with the chamber of commerce.
Highlight your expertise: If you have experts on your team, show their credentials. If you are affiliated with respected organizations, show and link to these. Links and associations with organizations that are not credible will damage your credibility.
Real people behind the site: Show that there are honest and trustworthy people that stand behind the website through the use of photos, bios and listing their responsibilities.
Make it easy to contact you: Clearly post your phone number, physical address and email address.
Professional (appropriate) website design: People quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone. This includes layout, typography, images and consistency. The visual design should be consistent with the site’s purpose.
Useful and easy to use: Website should be both easy to use and useful. It is not about dazzling the visitor with graphics and technology.
Update content often: Websites that were recently updated or at least reviewed are trusted more.
Minimize promotional content: Minimize offers and ads. Content should be written in a clear, direct and sincere style. Avoid the use of hype.
Avoid errors of all types: Typographical errors, broken links or your website being down hurt a site’s credibility.

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