Most people are busy these days and getting their attention isn’t easy – especially when they are being bombarded by information from just about every angle. This means even if your website has top-quality content, unless you can grab people’s attention in the first place you will may well struggle to increase site traffic and your sales-conversion rate. Read on for a few optimisation tips that may help your website earn more visitors and conversions.

Optimise your website’s usability

Making your website more visually pleasing and user-friendly might sound daunting but surprisingly enough it might only involve a few simple steps, such as de-cluttering pages, changing a page’s colour and layout, increasing text size, placing clear call-to-action buttons on each page, and building great landing pages (see more on this below).

You could start by making various changes and then using analytic tools to measure the outcome, or you could use one of the various tools on the market for optimising websites without the need for coding skills. With these types of tools you need to set your goals to start with, and then test out various scenarios to see which one performs best in helping you achieve your aims.

Some of these are:

• Visual Website Optimizer – enables you to create different versions of a web page and run various tests to see which ones work best for your business goals. Starts at around $50 USD per month.

• Optimizely – operates by integrating the program with your site and allowing you to test changes within the program rather than on your site. Prices start at $17 USD per month.

• Google Content Experiments – this one is free of charge. Unlike the other programs here it does not run A/B tests (which let you test different elements within a page) but instead allows you to compare up to five complete versions of a page for their performance against goals.

Create better landing pages

A landing page is basically the ‘entry point’ to a website. If it is hard to read and get around it could drive users away very quickly. A professional writing service can assist you with this task.

Optimisation tips include:

• Header – a landing page header needs to match with the link the user clicked on, and to be clear and unambiguous, easy-to-read and to match the brand’s image. Most people these days don’t have the time or patience to be solving cryptic puzzles on websites so make your headers clear and consistent!

• Body of page – make it very clear and easy to read. You might want to consider breaking it into sections with sub-headings and other elements such as graphics, and include testimonials so that visitors can clearly see what your customers are saying.

• Call-to-action – this could involve having a form to complete for an email sign-up, and a ‘try-now’ and / or ‘buy-now’ button. The buttons should be clear and prominent so that users don’t have to hunt around for them.

• Layout – this may depend on the type of business it is but according to this blog post at Marketing Land, in general the best landing pages for conversions have the body of the text on the left and customer forms on the right.

• Optimise for mobiles – with the rise in the use of mobile for internet, it’s vital to ensure your landing pages can be easily-accessed from smartphones and other mobile devices. Read our article here for more information on developing mobile strategies.

Analyse user behaviour

Of course numbers matter but they are not everything. You need to know why people engage with your site, how long they stay, and where on your site they are exiting from.

Tools for this include Google Analytics Audience Characteristics and Behavior feature which includes measurements for audience data reports and flow reporting.

Keep researching!

Take a look at the web pages of successful companies to see what they do to attract visitors. You might also consider running a survey to get some feedback from your users so you can work out what you need to change in order to get closer to your goals. And finally, don’t forget the importance of great content for both SEO purposes and for offering your audience useful and top quality information!