Let’s take a look at a few things you can measure your website against to ensure that you’ve got the right foundation to start on.

1. Clear and Concise Content

First things first, always start with the content evaluation. A flaw in many businesses is worrying too much about the art and visual framework and written content gets push to the side or is focused on last. You may have heard content is king, but if you’re not working off a content strategy then you’re living in a fantasy.

Problem: Too much marketing fluff, not enough real answers

A lot of websites are publishing too much or most often too little content without evaluating the effect of the user experience. If you publish too much content, your site begins to be cluttered and you begin to ask more time of your users to invest in sifting through it all to find the right answer.

On the other hand, not enough content leaves the user feeling like their questions haven’t been answered and they tend to look elsewhere for the right answer. This can send the user off your site into a world where you don’t control the conversation. They are then subject to customer reviews, rants and raves, and competitive analysis.

Solution: Put yourself in your customer’s shoes

Find the balance between providing the right information and too much information, also, keep in mind the context of the user when they are hitting your site. How do you do this? Know your audience. Use analytics, customer interviews, UX strategies and SEO tactics to ensure that quality content is in the right place. Invest in your content!

Remember, it’s representing you and the voice of your company in your absence.

2. Overall Design

It’s important when looking at the design of your site or app that you keep things simple, accessible and usable.

Problem: Visual Clutter

Whenever the designer introduces another border, background, alignment of content, text, imagery, or any other content into the interface the visual cognitive load is increased. This is not to say you can’t bring in visual branding elements that enhance the product, experience and emotions of your visitors, but the important thing to keep in mind is the simplest conversation is usually the most effective. The visual expectations will vary depending on project and client, think cnn.com versus mashable.com.

Solution: Simplify the Conversation

Only communicate the most important content by grouping thoughts, actions and ideas together. When necessary, add visual elements that will facilitate the information architecture.

3. Easy-to-find calls to action

Should we stay above the fold? Do users scroll? What color should the add-to-cart button be? How many form fields is too many? All too often these and other questions like them can hold up projects and keep marketing directors up all night.

Problem: Making decisions based on industry myths

Many times decisions are made about the content and design based upon what you may have heard or assumed the web to be. Think for a minute about some of the “web rules” you may have encountered over time.

Solution: Usability testing

Put your customer’s journey into context. Remember, your customers have a different need and question when they reach your site than say when they visit apple.com or cnn.com. Are there best practices? Of course there are, but to really be successful in increasing your conversion rate usability testing can be a very effective way of ensuring the content and calls-to-action are in the right place.

Other methods such as A/B testing can be an effective way of serving up different content to try out what works best.

4. The homepage is not as important as you think

Search engines, social media, email marketing, video, web ads and blogging have changed the way we enter a website. The search engines have done a great job of indexing our content in way that we no longer land on the homepage the way we used to.

Problem: Wrong directions

I’ve seen it many times over, a company invests in an ad campaign either offline or online and they direct all traffic to their homepage thinking that these users will figure it out once they get there. Only to find that their bounce rate increases greatly because the expectation of that click was not met.

Solution: Map your customer’s journey

Ask yourself a simple question when creating a campaign, “Does the page I am pointing to directly relate to the context of the ad I am creating?” Sometimes your customer doesn’t care about you as a company, they just want the product and to be on their way.

Don’t disrupt the journey of your customer by adding a roadblock of content that is out of context of the action they are anticipating. If your potential customers want to find more, they will do so by their own initiative.

Put these conversion tips to work

Briefly we’ve touched upon a few tips to help you increase your conversion rate. We didn’t have time to get into great detail, but it’s a good start for you to begin asking some of these questions, whether it be for your existing site, your next campaign or website redesign.

Remember, your website should never be considered complete, it’s a living, breathing tool that you should always iterate.

The problem is most companies jump into making large changes to elements of their website, this can be risky along with a hefty price tag. They also have the mentality that their customers are still linear in the purchasing process.

In other words, most campaigns have the goal of driving a person from point A to B. In turn, they still develop campaigns that try to drive people through a carefully scripted process.

However, with the advent of social media and interactive content, the landscape has changed and as digital marketers and designers we need to look beyond the linear selling process and look to the customer buying experience.

No Longer A Golden Path

Below is an example of one of the many routes a customer can take in the e-commerce process and even this example could be altered in dozens of ways.

The point is that through out the online buying process there are many influencers, starts and stops that will affect the customer’s behavior. Of course all sales reach the same goal, but no two paths are the same. The same can be said when it comes to any engagement conversion, e.g. joining a mailing list, a follow on Twitter, etc.

We have to begin to be observers of how customers are now interacting with the content and how all the touch points can affect the sale. Is your core brand message consistent across all touch points? Is there a clear and concise call to action at each touch point? Or are your users finding dead ends in the experience?

To take a completely holistic view, the e-commerce process can even involve content outside of your own website as our example graphic shows.  A user might add an item to your shopping cart and then pop open a new browser tab to read reviews on other websites about your product or search for a promo code.

User Experience Design To Guide The Journey

For your next e-commerce project, define the business problem at hand then develop the user personas that you’re targeting. Understand at what touch point your users will be entering the conversation and map out their journey. Find the right methodology that will work for you and continue to iterate that process.

Test, Test, Test

We’ve touched upon this before, the importance of testing. With the change of technology comes the change in human behavior. What may have worked yesterday, may not work today. Even the best designers generally don’t get it right the first time, you have to learn behaviors early and quickly and make the needed adjustments so that you can continue to optimize your conversion rate.