If there’s one asset that affects a company’s entire digital marketing strategy, it’s the website. However, many companies don’t use them wisely. Believe it or not, 1 in 4 businesses still don’t have a website, meaning they aren’t even competing for online traffic.
If you have a website, that’s great news for your business, but there is still plenty of competition. Luckily, with the right tools, you can bring your website to the top. Let’s talk about what increasing website usability can do for your business.
What Is Website Usability?
To understand website usability, we first have to break it down. The usability of your website is largely determined by the user interface (UI) and the user experience (UX) of your website.
UI refers to the aesthetics of your web design and how people interact with it, while UX is more generalized to the overall experience they have on the platform? Essentially, UI is the visual effects and UX is the journey through your site.
Essentially, websites with low usability are more difficult to interact with. While many factors will harm a website’s UI/UX, there are many common culprits, including:
- Difficult navigation system
- Unappealing web design
- Broken links
- Errors and redirects
- Slow loading time
- Poor mobile optimization
And the list goes on, including anything that will affect a user’s journey through your site. Understanding how to improve usability is critical to success, but more importantly, you need to understand why UI/UX is so important to your business.
Why Is Website Usability so Important?
First and foremost, your brand is on full display on your website. There is no better indicator of a brand’s identity than on its website, where the company has full control over the UI/UX. Because of this, whatever content is on your website and whatever the overall user experience is, it will reflect onto your brand.
However, that’s not the only reason to focus on website usability. Here are some other important examples.
SEO Value
Two of the most important factors in search engine optimization (SEO) are website quality and your content marketing strategy. However, a perfect content marketing strategy is useless without a strong website as the foundation.
Google and other search engines have a job to do, and that’s to match users with relevant, high-quality content. If search engines were constantly matching users with websites with poor usability, it would reflect negatively on their search engine. On the other hand, with a quality website, Google will be more likely to recommend you in relevant searches.
Believe it or not, Google uses over 200 ranking factors specifically involving the quality of your website. These factors include:
- Mobile-friendliness
- Page load time
- Page structure
- Link structure
- Navigation
- Keyword usage
If you can optimize these elements, and then add in a strong content marketing strategy, you’ll be well on your way to earning higher search rankings and more relevant traffic to your site.
You can supercharge these rankings and traffic by adding relevant, high-quality backlinks, which happen when other sites link to pages on your site. Producing good content is central to building these links, but you also need an attractive, easily navigable website that others can find and want to refer their readers to.
Remember, SEO isn’t like other forms of marketing. Once you start ranking highly on certain search results, you could get free traffic for years to come without the need for ongoing expenses.
User Retention
Whether you bring in traffic from organic search results, email, social media, or paid advertisements, you want to keep your users for as long as possible. Well, UX is critical for retaining users, considering that most users won’t stay long on low-quality sites.
Think about where the average user spends most of their online time. Usually, it’s on sites like Facebook, YouTube, and other giants in the industry that have enormous resources and state-of-the-art features.
Like it or not, that’s the standard of the age. Because users spend so much time on these sites, they’ve grown accustomed to certain standards, like fast-loading pages. Various studies indicate that the average user will exit a page if it doesn’t load in less than 3 seconds.
Consequently, websites that live up to high-quality standards and expectations will ultimately retain more customers. This customer retention will help improve your SEO value and affect key metrics, including conversion rates.
Increased Conversion Rates
What is your company’s bottom line? Making money.
Generating revenue is challenging in such a competitive time, especially when people are becoming desensitized to advertisements. Did you know the average person sees up to 5,000 ads every day? We’re inundated, and standing out from all the noise has become more and more difficult.
Because of this, many businesses are struggling to reach a good return on their digital ad investments, particular pay-per-click (PPC) ads. With these types of ad campaigns, you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. If that person clicks the ad only to see a slow-loading, poorly designed, hard-to-navigate website, then they’re much more likely to bounce, and you’ve lost that lead (and the money spent to get them to the site).
With an optimized landing page, clean navigation, and good usability, your website’s conversion rates could increase significantly–not just related to ads, but for organic search traffic, social traffic, and other digital marketing endeavors.
How to Improve Your Website’s Usability
Whether you are receiving professional services or attempting a DIY fix, improving your UI/UX should play a major role in website maintenance. Here’s how to start.
Website Usability Testing
It’s impossible to fix something if you don’t know why it’s broken. To diagnose your website’s issues, first conduct a website usability audit along with some SEO testing. There are multiple free testing services, and you can also invest in things like heat maps, which show website user clicks and allow you to observe the behavior of users as they interact with your website.
Using Google Analytics (and a variety of 3rd-party analytics platforms), you can track key metrics such as bounce rate, conversion rates, time on page, and more. With this information, you can determine where along the journey you lose users, and then make the necessary adjustments.
Clean up Your Site
After you’ve addressed UI/UX, your primary focus should move to reducing load times, fixing page errors (such as broken links), and making sure your site is responsive (automatically adjusts to device screen size).
Continuously look at your site through the lens of potential customers. Navigate through your site, click on links, open new tabs, and look for anything that needs fixing.
Web Development Services
Being able to make some basic DIY changes is a great way to save money and get things done quickly. However, there’s no DIY substitute for professional web design services. Users are becoming increasingly accustomed to high-quality websites, and the sooner you get ahead of the competition, the better.
Also, getting a leg up on organic search results can yield escalating benefits and help keep you ahead of your competition. Good SEO works hand-in-hand with website UI/UX work, so look for companies that offer both services, or those that can offer a cohesive strategy that ties together multiple optimization elements. You might want to check out a company’s case studies to see how well they have performed with previous clients. This is a great way to gain valuable insight and understand what to expect from their web development, UI/UX, or SEO services.
Boost Your Site Today
Now that you know what improving your website usability can do for you, there’s no time like the present to get started. The sooner you make the necessary adjustments, the sooner you will see results!
Follow our blog for more helpful website tips, and feel free to contact us with any questions.