There are few constants in the ever-evolving landscape of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Algorithms change, user behaviors shift, and best practices evolve. However, the centrality of user experience in SEO strategies is one theme that remains consistent. As we move through 2023, one of the most talked-about topics in the SEO community is Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV) initiative.
Understanding Core Web Vitals
Launched in 2020, Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics designed by Google to gauge the user experience on a webpage. These metrics measure real-world, user-centered outcomes and give business owners and web developers tangible targets for performance optimization. The three main components of CWV are:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance. Ideally, a page should have an LCP of 2.5 seconds or faster.
First Input Delay (FID): Assesses interactivity. Pages should strive for an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Evaluates visual stability. The ideal score is less than 0.1.
Why has there been such emphasis on these metrics? It’s simple: Google believes that if users have a superior experience on a website, they’re more likely to stay engaged, consume content, and return in the future.
The 2023 Landscape of Core Web Vitals
Fast forward to 2023, and Core Web Vitals have evolved from being just another set of metrics to being integral to SEO strategies. With Google confirming CWV as a ranking factor, businesses have been propelled into action, re-assessing and re-engineering their websites to meet these benchmarks.
Moreover, with the rise of mobile browsing and 5G technology, users now expect faster and smoother online experiences than ever before. Websites that fail to adapt to these evolving expectations risk falling behind in search rankings, user trust, and brand reputation.
Integrating CWV into SEO Strategies
SEO professionals have always understood the importance of speed and user experience. However, with CWV, there’s a newfound focus on ensuring that optimization efforts cater to these specific metrics. Here’s how businesses are integrating CWV into their SEO approach:
Prioritized Content Loading: Websites are now designed to load primary content first, ensuring users see the most relevant information immediately.
Enhanced Mobile Experience: Most web searches are now conducted on mobile devices, and optimizing for mobile has never been more critical. Techniques such as responsive design, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), and optimizing media files have become standard.
Stability Over Flashiness: While interactive designs and animations can make a site attractive, they can also lead to layout shifts. Web designers now balance aesthetics with stability, ensuring visual elements don’t impede user experience.
Challenges and Opportunities
However, while there is a clear roadmap for businesses to enhance their CWV scores, the journey isn’t devoid of challenges. Many legacy systems and larger websites with vast content find it hard to adapt swiftly. On the other hand, newer or recently updated websites might find it easier to tweak their designs and backend infrastructure to meet CWV requirements.
This disparity presents an opportunity for SEO professionals and web designers. As businesses vie for top search rankings, there’s a burgeoning demand for experts to help redesign and optimize websites to meet CWV standards.
The Shift Toward User Experience
The focus on Core Web Vitals in 2023 underscores a broader shift in SEO’s world: the shift towards genuine user experience. Instead of optimizing solely for machines or algorithms, businesses now recognize the value of optimizing for the end-user.
While challenges persist, the emphasis on CWV has, in many ways, leveled the playing field. No longer can large companies rely solely on solid backlink profiles or high domain authority. Instead, the metric of success has become how well a website serves its users. In this new paradigm, small businesses and new entrants have as much a chance to succeed as established players as long as they prioritize user experience above all else.
Research shows 94% of first impressions relate to your site’s web design.
You may have a great product, but the first element of interaction with your potential customer is your website. If you don’t make a good first impression with your web design because your site is outdated or unappealing, chances are potential customers will bounce off your website and find your competitor. To positively impact your site visitors, invest in a fresh redesign that catches your audience’s attention and gets them to engage on your page.
2. Are You Mobile-Friendly?
According to Statista, by 2024, there will be more than 185 million mobile buyers.
That is a lot of traffic and a lot of sales you will miss out on if your site isn’t mobile-friendly. Who doesn’t have a smartphone nowadays? Providing a mobile-friendly website reduces bounce rates by making it easy for visitors to navigate your site using their cell phones.
3. In Website Traffic, Speed Is a Good Thing.
According to a study by Google, the fastest websites can load within five seconds and retain 95% of their visitors.
The longer it takes your site to load once someone clicks on it, the more you’ll lose out on some potential customers who give up due to your slow site speed. Make sure your website is optimized for speed to keep traffic moving on your site and not your competitors.
4. Is Everything Neat and in Order?
53% of all trackable website traffic comes from organic search. (BrightEdge)
Optimizing your content for search engines is very important. On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing web page content for search engines. If you show up on page 1 of the SERP, you’re more likely to get more traffic to your website. On-page SEO practices include:
Optimizing title and meta tags.
Developing keyword-rich content.
Creating internal links.
Assigning SEO-friendly URLs to your web pages.
5. What’s Going on Behind the Scenes?
68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. (Intergrowth)
A little schema goes a long way. Schema is a type of microdata that makes it easier for search engines to interpret the information on your web pages more effectively to serve relevant results to users based on search queries. While Google claims that schema does not affect search ranking factors, it does improve your site’s rich snippets. Rich snippets help people find what they want, and that is what Google loves. If you are more visible in the search engines on page 1, you will get more website traffic.
6. Do You Know How To Tell a Good Story?
B2B marketers use an average of 13 content marketing tactics. (TopRankBlog)
You can’t just rely on one type of content for your website. Don’t be afraid to vary the length and format you use, interspersing short news-based blog posts with longer pieces such as video, infographics, or data-driven articles. Creating quality copy without sounding robotic can be challenging but is extremely valuable in bringing quality traffic to your website. Don’t forget an excellent, compelling headline either because, without a powerful, attention-grabbing headline, even the best-written articles may go unread.
7. Are You Short Tail or Long Tail?
Long-tail keyword searches have a click-through rate of 3% to 5% higher than generic searches. (Smart Insights)
Long-tailed keywords are good if you’re in a competitive market. For example, the keyword “lawyers” produces over 201,000 searches per month. A long-tail keyword for lawyers could be “divorce lawyers near me,” which produces 110,000 per month. “Divorce attorney near me” creates 40,500 searches per month. Long-tail keywords can have a higher conversion value, as they are more specific. The traffic growth may be more gradual, but it opens you up to new visitors who are more motivated to buy.
8. If a Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words, How Much Is a Video Worth?
Video is 50x more likely to get organic ranking than plain text results. (Forrester)
When it comes to attracting new customers, video content combines visual imagery and sound to tell your story better than static images or text. Studies show that information retention is significantly higher for visual material than it is for text. So, if you want to boost traffic to your website, add video content. According to Elite Content Marketer, 66% of people said they’d prefer to watch a short video to learn about a product or service. 18% would rather read a text-based article, website, or post.
9. Are You Social?
53.6% of the world’s population uses social media. The average daily usage is 2 hours and 25 minutes. (Global Webindex)
Maintaining an active presence on popular social channels such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or Instagram can help you increase traffic to your website by leveraging the power of people sharing and liking your posted content – this builds awareness for any business’ products while simultaneously boosting traffic from sources like Google search results. Be sure to post regularly and offer relevant content that your ideal customers will find helpful, including images, videos, infographics, how-to guides, and more.
Make sure your social media profile is optimized. Fill in all the details on your profile and include relevant keywords. Also, add your website links in your social media profile and add your social media links on your website as well.
10. Thought Leaders Get More Traffic.
More than half (55%) of business decision-makers said they had increased their business with an organization based on their thought leadership. (LinkedIn)
Becoming an industry thought leader certainly is not easy. It requires maintaining an active role in providing fresh content and participating in industry events. Creating a blog with valuable, insightful information can help give you industry thought leader status, setting you apart from your competition and bringing potential customers to your website to read your content and procure your products and services.
11. Link-Up
91% of all pages never get any organic traffic from Google, mostly due to the fact they don’t have backlinks. (Ahrefs)
A backlink is a link from one website to another. Backlinks help websites increase their search traffic and rankings on search engines. But only high-quality backlinks will actually increase your website traffic. Backlinks are significant ranking factors. Google considers incoming links as a “vote of confidence” from one site to another. So, the more backlinks a page has, the more search traffic it gets from Google.
Referral traffic refers to visits to your site from links that appear on a different site. To make referral traffic worth your while, it has to be from a site that is reputable with ongoing traffic itself; otherwise, you could get penalized by Google. The best links that bring in quality referral traffic include directory/resource links, review links, and news aggregator links.
12. Does It Pay To Advertise?
Global digital ad spend will reach $445 billion in 2021. (eMarketer)
Paid search, social media advertising, and display ads help drive relevant traffic back to a business’ website.
Paid search involves placing ads on Google and other major search engines, which can lead you down the path towards success in no time! With paid search ads, businesses bid on ad placement to appear as a sponsored link on the search engine results page. When search engine users search for relevant keywords related to the company, the PPC ad will appear at the top of the page in their search query. The ad usually includes a link back to the sponsor’s website, which brings in the traffic that turns prospects into customers. Google estimates that businesses generally make an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on AdWords.
Social media advertising involves placing ads on social networking sites with a link back to your site to bring in more traffic, create brand awareness, and sell products. Promoted ads on Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin are an effective way to target the right audience and get even better results than organic. In addition, everything is tracked, and you can use the data to improve your advertising campaigns further.
Display ads appear on Internet websites, apps, or social media through banners made of text, images, flash, video, and audio and can include a link back to your website to drive more traffic. According to Zenith forecast: Total display ad spend is expected to hit $177.6 billion globally. You can use retargeting tactics on your website to serve visitors display ads once they leave your site and visit other sites.
13. Get Gold Stars
Studies show that 94% of consumers report that positive reviews make them more likely to use a business.
Online reviews allow customers to rate their experience with a company and potential customers to decide whether they trust that company. As a result, online reviews have a significant impact on increasing a website’s traffic. If your customers have a positive experience with your company, encourage them to offer a review on sites like Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Google.
14. Can You Teach Them Something They Don’t Know?
Webinars hosted on a company domain generate 3x more audience participation. 91% of professionals who watch webinars say their next step is to visit a website for more info. (BrightTALK)
Webinars and live events are a great way to share your wisdom with eager audiences and bring in qualified traffic interested in learning about trending topics, case studies, and demonstrations around your products and services. Send out an email ahead of time so that you can increase attendance and promote through social media. Make sure your webinars are informative and not salesy if you want to hold your audience’s attention.
15. If You Email, They Will Come.
49% of consumers said that they would like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands on a weekly basis. (Statista)
Email marketing is a powerful tool to help send traffic to your website. In fact, you’re 6x more likely to get traffic from emails than from tweets. Email newsletters can drive subscribers to your website to read an article or take advantage of an offer. Promotional emails can focus on specific sales or events, such as a product demonstration or featured artist in your store.
Remember to include CTAs with linkbacks to your website. Use Google Analytics to see how much traffic is coming through to the site when you send emails by adding UTMs (Urchin Tracking Module) to your links.
The top four ranking factors are direct website visits, time on site, pages per session, and bounce rate. (SEMrush)
Google Analytics is your best friend on just about every conceivable aspect of your site, from your most popular pages to visitor demographics. Review what pages and posts are the most popular. Inspect visitor data to see how, when, and where your site traffic is coming from. Analyze the data and use this information to inform your marketing and content strategies.
Getting To Where You Want To Go
Driving traffic to your website is challenging, but with effort will be rewarding. Following the 16 tactics above will help get you more traffic, more conversions, and ultimately increased ROI.
SEO is an important and powerful tool for B2B marketers. But many businesses do not know where to start when it comes to SEO. It’s time to get on the ground floor with SEO in order to make sure that you’re maximizing all avenues for B2B lead generation. If you’re a B2B marketer, it is key to boost traffic and conversions from organic sources like online searches.
Today, many consumers and business professionals prefer to research about products and services on their own before contacting a company or making a purchase decision. The good news: relevant and compelling content marketing helps brands rank higher in search engine results pages which means more traffic and leads – 67% better than those who don’t blog at all. That’s why it’s import to start your company’s B2B SEO today.
In the B2B realm, many of your competitors are still hesitant to use SEO
While it is true that the competition and marketing success of consumer brands are at an all-time high online, many business-to-business (B2B) keyword terms are still underutilized by B2B companies. The hesitation from businesses stems largely from misconceptions about what they think will work or how much time it takes to see results. However, once these fears are overcome there can be tremendous gains made through optimizing content for search engines. Not only does optimization create brand awareness it also helps generate leads!
Keywords and Content
How can you check if your website is currently ranking for keywords in your industry? The first thing you should do to find search result rankings is make sure that the playing field on Google is level. Start by examining a depersonalized view of the keyword, which strips any pre-existing bias you might have in your personal history with it. This creates an unbiased search where you can analyze how people are interacting with that content online.
After you have completed a depersonalized search, begin to research where your website shows up on relevant search queries in comparison to your competitors. The ability to answer your prospects’ and customers’ common questions online is a huge opportunity for any brand. By doing so, you can make yourself authoritative on the subject of whatever question they have asked. It doesn’t matter if it’s about what product has certain features or why their favorite type of sports team stinks–if you are an expert in that area then people will turn to you before anyone else when looking up answers.
SEO is a valuable tool to help increase the reach of your B2B content
Content is your best chance to build trust and confidence with buyers. Content for B2B specifically gives them the assurance that you are knowledgeable, competent, and trustworthy in their eyes.
It is easy to get lost in the crowd without combining content creation with SEO. Combining these two aspects of marketing can take your business from average to something special, as it will ensure that every asset you create has a larger reach and more value than before.
Creating the right content: You need to know who your audience is before you can create the right content for them. For instance, a CIO will be more interested in the tech specs of a product while a CIO may want more information about pricing and product update costs.
Determining Keywords: The decision of what keywords to input when searching is dependent upon the level at which users are looking. Initial searches may require very broad terms, such as “paper companies in Pennsylvania” while other searchers will know precisely what they want and search accordingly with more specific words like “paper companies in Pennsylvania who make 80lb linen white stock.”
Search Intent:Google’s algorithms are now so advanced that keywords alone will not do the trick. Content creators need to consider who their audience is and what they want from a search engine before crafting content, because different audiences require very specific information presented in unique ways.
Keep in mind that there are as many different types of decision makers out there and each one has their own interests.
Always Consider Mobile When Creating B2B Content
The way we market our products has changed dramatically over the years. More and more, consumers are reaching for their phones to complete almost every task: from reading emails at work, ordering groceries online when they’re hungry on a Friday night, or even looking up directions while driving down unfamiliar streets.
While many business professionals work on a desktop at work, they still use smartphones and tablets — especially after work. Without optimizing your website’s design and content layout for different screen sizes, you may miss out on potential purchasers who research products off-hours.
It’s Never To Late to Start Using SEO
The best time to start focusing on B2B SEO is now. In this era of content marketing, you need a complete strategy if you want to make sure you are getting your market share and capturing and converting leads online. Search engine optimization will help you achieve those goals. If you need help with your SEO program, please take a look at our SEO Packages.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important marketing strategy many businesses use to drive traffic to their website. Why? In today’s digital world, the web is the place to go to gain leads for your sales department and grow your business through online sales. Funny that one of the most asked questions about SEO is…is SEO dead?
SEO is definitely not dead. U.S. companies are investing more into SEO than ever, spending over $80 billion annually. While social media, PPC, display advertising, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, search engines, especially Google, drive the most online traffic. In fact, 53% of all trackable website traffic comes from organic search, according to BrightEdge. When set up properly, SEO is one of the only online marketing channels that can continue to pay dividends over time, where advertising needs ongoing funding to send traffic to your site. SEO is not going to stop working anytime soon.
Seven Reasons Why Your Business Should Go SEO:
SEO Works!
SEO is effective and generates results. According to a recent study by BrightEdge, 40% of revenue is captured by organic traffic. SEO is trackable so you can see what’s working and what’s not working. And with comprehensive analytics, you have the ability to drill down at a granular level and see demographic information and other engagement metrics for individuals who have interacted with your website. You can also set attribute values to your lead conversions, making it easier to see the return you’re getting from your SEO investment.
SEO Boosts Your Credibility and Authority
When you combine your SEO efforts with content marketing and create informative, valuable content, you have the opportunity to build trust and credibility with prospects on their buying journey, from the research phase through purchase to becoming a loyal customer.
SEO is Affordable
Inbound marketing strategies like SEO are much more cost-effective than outbound marketing strategies like cold-calling. SEO targets users who are actively searching online for products and services like yours, so the traffic generated to your site is more qualified. And leads generated by an inbound strategy like SEO cost 61% less than leads generated from an outbound strategy. SEO drives results that other marketing channels just can’t match.
SEO Drives Mobile Device Traffic
According to TechJury, the mobile market share worldwide is 52.1% compared to the desktop market share of 44.2%, and 40% of people search only on a smartphone, especially when searching for local products and services. What does this mean? Local search optimization is important, and optimizing for mobile is critical to ensure your ability to gain more opportunities to reach people.
SEO Gives You Access to the Online Market
Organic SEO is more important than ever. Consumers spent $861.12 billion online with U.S. merchants in 2020, up an remarkable 44.0% year over year, according to Digital Commerce 360 estimates. That’s an incredible amount of business you will miss out on without SEO tactics in place to get you to page one of the search engines.
SEO Puts Your Name Out There
Your business needs to be on the web and not just on your website. Not having a good content profile will translate into lost business. Having a solid content profile means that your business has valuable content on its site and participates with other sites, including social media, forums, video sites, directories, etc. Search engines use updates to search algorithms to see where you are on the web, so having a content profile in place will ensure the search engines properly evaluate your site and presence on the web and deem it important.
Your Competition Is Using SEO
When your competition is aggressively using SEO, and you are not, someone will lose out, and it won’t be your competition. SEO is ongoing and needs to be actively managed. If you’re not on top of your SEO, another company will be, and they’ll pull ahead of you. Do not let your competition reign unchecked online. Get your business up to speed and start creating value (and clicks and customers).
Putting the work needed into developing organic SEO is more important than ever to remain relevant and generate more revenue. As a business, implementing SEO is one of the most important things you can do to build your online presence. It’s not only crucial for sales; it’s essential for branding, too. It’s now or never, and never might be too late. Check out Unreal Web Marketing’s SEO services today and see why SEO must be a part of your marketing strategy!
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action — be that filling out a form, becoming customers, or otherwise. The CRO process involves understanding how users move through your site, what actions they take, and what’s stopping them from completing your goals.
What is a conversion?
A conversion is the general term for a visitor completing a site goal. Goals come in many shapes and sizes. If you use your website to sell products, the primary goal (known as the macro-conversion) is for the user to make a purchase. There are smaller conversions that can happen before a user completes a macro-conversion, such as signing up to receive emails. These are called micro-conversions.
Examples of conversions
Macro-conversions:
Purchasing a product from the site
Requesting a quote
Subscribing to a service
Examples of micro-conversions:
Signing up for email lists
Creating an account
Adding a product to the cart
What is a conversion rate?
Your site’s conversion rate is the number of times a user completes a goal divided by your site traffic. If a user can convert in each visit (such as by buying a product), divide the number of conversions by the number of sessions (the number of unique times a user came to your site). If you sell a subscription, divide the number of conversions by the number of users.
Conversion rate optimization happens after the visit makes it to your site. This is different from conversion optimization for SEO or paid ads which focuses on who clicks through to your site from the organic search results, how many clicks you get, and which keywords are driving traffic.
How to Calculate Conversion Rate
If a user can convert each time they visit the site:
Imagine we own an ecommerce site — Roger’s Robotics. A user could make a new purchase each session. We want to optimize so they make as many purchases as possible. If a user visited the site three times, that would be three sessions — and three opportunities to convert.
Let’s closer at our user’s three sessions and how they behaved:
Session 1: No conversion — user was familiarizing themselves with the site and poking around.
Session 2: User bought a shiny new antenna. This is a conversion!
Session 3: User came back and bought a new set of gears and a blinking light — another conversion! Even though they bought two items, this is a single unique order and thus counts as a single conversion.
To figure out our conversion rate, we would take the number of unique purchase orders and divide it by the total number of sessions.
To find out the conversion rate for your site, you’ll look at all unique orders divided the total number of sessions.
Calculating Conversion Rate by Sessions:
If a user can only convert once
Now imagine we owned a second site — Roger’s Monthly Gear Box. Our site sells a subscription for a monthly delivery of robot parts. A user could come back multiple times, but once they purchase a subscription, they won’t convert again.
Let’s look at an example user’s behavior:
Session 1: User came to the site for the first time to explore the service. No conversion.
Session 2: User subscribed to our monthly GearBox service– this is our conversion!
Session 3: User came back to read blog articles and poke around.
Our user here can’t convert each time they visit the site. So instead of looking at the number of sessions, we need to measure conversion success by the number of visitors. To figure out our website’s conversion rate, we would take the number of unique orders and divide it by the number of unique users.
5 Ways CRO benefits SEOs
While not necessarily directly related to attracting organic website traffic or ranking on a search engine results page (SERP), conversion rate optimization has distinct benefits for SEO. Those include:
Improved customer insights. Conversion rate optimization can help you better understand your key audience and find what language or messaging best speaks to their needs. Conversion rate optimization looks at finding the right customers for your business. Acquiring more people doesn’t do your business any good if they’re not the right kind of people!
Better ROI: Higher conversion rate means making more of the resources you have. By studying how to get the most out of your acquisition efforts, you’ll get more conversions without having to bring in more potential customers.
Better scalability: While your audience size may not scale as your business grows, CRO lets you grow without running out of resources and prospective customers. Audiences aren’t infinite. By turning more browsers into buyers, you’ll be able to grow your business without running out of potential customers.
Better user experience: When users feel smart and sophisticated on your website, they tend to stick around. CRO studies what works on your site. By taking what works and expanding on it, you’ll make a better user experience. Users who feel empowered by your site will engage with it more — and some may even become evangelists for your brand.
Enhanced trust: In order for a user to share their credit card, email, or any sort of personal information, they have to genuinely trust the site. Your website is your number-one sales person. Just like an internal sales team, your site needs to be professional, courteous, and ready to answer all of your customers’ questions.
The Key to Successful Optimization
In order to optimize for conversion rates, you have to know where, what to optimize, and who to optimize for. This information is the cornerstone to successful CRO strategies.
If you don’t gather data, then you’re left making changes based on gut feelings alone. Guts are awesome! But making decisions on just gut feelings instead of rooting assumptions in data can be a waste of time and money.
The Analytics Method
This method, also known as quantitative data analysis, gives you hard numbers behind how people actually behave on your site. Start with a solid web analytics platform, such as Google Analytics. Next, add tracking for your conversions.
Using analytics-based CRO can answer important questions about how users engage with your site. Quantitative analysis provides information like:
Where people enter your site, i.e., which webpage they land on first
Which features they engage with, i.e., where on a page or within your site do they spend their time
What channel and referrer brought them in, i.e., where they found and clicked on a link to your site
What devices and browsers they use
Who your customers are (age, demographic, and interest)
Where users abandon your conversion funnel, i.e., where or during what activity do users leave your site
This information will let you know where to focus your efforts. By putting your effort into the pages most engaged with and valuable to your users, you’ll see the largest impact.
The People Method
Doing your quantitative analysis first is especially valuable if you have a large site with diverse content as it lets you know, from a numbers perspective, where to focus your efforts. But now that you know how users interact with your site, you can look into the “why” behind their behavior.
This people-focused method, known as qualitative data analysis, is more subjective. You’ll need the quantitative data discussed above to identify who you should be asking. You can’t optimize for all users, so optimize for your ideal user — that is, the user it’s most important to have as a customer.
Ways to get this data:
On-site surveys
User testing
Satisfaction surveys
Qualitative analysis helps optimize for conversions by providing information about users such as:
Why did they engage? Why did they originally decide to visit your site or navigate to a specific page? What about the page or product appealed to them?
What do they think your site offers that makes you different from competitors? Is there a feature or service offered by your company that makes buying from you a better experience?
What words they use to describe your products, services, and the pain points they address? How would they describe your product or service to a friend? In essence, how do they talk about what you do?
There are certain things that raw data alone can’t tell you about what brought a user to your site or how to make their experience better. But when you combine this information with your analytics data, you can gain a much better understanding of the pages on your site that present the best opportunities to optimize and engage the audience you’d like to target.
The Bad Method
This comes in many forms. Some not-so-effective CRO methods include:
Guesses, hunches, and gut feelings
Doing it because your competitor is doing it
Executing changes based on the highest paid person’s opinion
All these examples have something in common: they’re not data-based and might as well be random shots in the dark. It’s better to spend the time gathering and analyzing the data so you can create meaningful tests based on clear insights. Nobody loves running tests that fail.
Almost ten years ago, nearly everybody who was accessing the web was on a desktop computer. In 2006, only two screen sizes were responsible for 77% of all internet usage.
This trend has completely changed. According to a research study conducted by Mobify, today, ten different screen sizes comprising tablets, smartphones, web-enabled TVs, netbooks, and laptops represent 77%t of total internet usage.
It is interesting to note that there is no single screen size that commands more than 20% of the market share. Nowadays, when marketers design their websites, they must consider different types of devices accessing the internet-from budget-friendly Android devices to smart TVs and high-end iMacs.
A responsive and user-friendly mobile design is the answer for a digital world where tablet and smartphone users demand an intuitive and feature-rich web experience that matches the one on desktop computers. However, implementing responsive mobile design is not the total answer. It may resolve the problem of screen-size layout, but there are other fundamental problems with the responsive strategy that many marketers ignore.
The following are some common mistakes that could impact your responsive mobile conversion:
1. Outsized, data-heavy images
Images represent a major responsive conversion problem. Since a responsive website utilizes one markup for various devices, it is crucial to make sure that only big and appealing images are loaded to Retina iPad displays. In contrast, older smartphones get fast-loading images that have a low resolution.
For websites with rich images, the problems start with mobile page speed because of the size of high-resolution images rendered to an inappropriate device. Wasting valuable bandwidth when sending images to the wrong devices is essentially like throwing money away.
Below are three methods for optimizing images for all resolutions and screen sizes:
Resize images using imagemagick software to optimize their size.
Utilize Lossy Compression to minimize the size of the image totally while at the same time retain depth.
By applying these hacks, you can increase your mobile conversion. This is because these hacks ensure that you can consistently convey the appropriate images to the right devices.
2. Poor page-loading times
Web pages with slow loading times face a big problem because slow-loading pages are annoying to users. An average retail mobile website in the US takes 6.9 seconds to load.
However, according to a study conducted by Akamai, 40% of users will leave a web page that takes over three seconds to load. In addition,64% of online shoppers that are unhappy with their website will move to another site the next time they shop.
Web-users will leave your site if they are forced to wait for a long time in order to view your web page content. Jakob Nielsen, the author of a book called Usability Engineering, says that people can tolerate a maximum of 10 seconds loading time before they abandon a page. Even a delay of a couple of seconds is sufficient to create a bad experience for the user.
Leading companies recognize that the performance of their website is crucial, and appreciating their users’ time can make them have a competitive edge in the market. This approach constitutes a major plank of Google’s commercial ideology.
Facebook designers value the time of their users more than anything else. In addition, they understand that quicker experiences are more effective and feel more natural. Users should not notice the performance of the website.
3. Integrating long forms in your website
Many people don’t like to fill out long forms, especially on mobile. Avoid incorporating long and tedious forms that force users to type in a lot of information. Long forms discourage your users and harm your conversion rates when used for any transaction form. For example, Expedia lost $12 million due to using an irrelevant form field that left their users confused.
On the other hand, HubSpot (A marketing automation solution) increased their conversion rates by 50% when they cut the number of form fields on their site from four to three. Shorter forms are always better on the web- especially on mobile devices.
4. Not paying attention to the user’s goal on your mobile site
Responsive design will not solve all problems. Although having a responsive design solves a lot of mobile user experience(UX) issues, it does not always consider the user’s goals. Smartinsights.com notes that there is a 270% difference between mobile and desktop conversion rates. This is because people do not understand mobile websites.
When it comes to desktop computers, having many words and long titles has an impact that is sometimes completely different from what happens on mobile devices. Additional text on a mobile device will obscure that page and discourage the user from attaining their goal- which is usually the call to action.
Apart from the menu bar, it would be best to concentrate on helping your users navigate through your webpage more easily, particularly the call-to-action buttons. As you are designing your website, keep the mobile user in mind and ensure that their journey across your website is much easier, focusing on your conversion rate.
Conclusion:
Usage of mobile media is rising faster than TV, desktop, print, and radio. Today, more people than ever are accessing the internet using mobile devices. It is therefore critical to design mobile websites that are easier and more comfortable to use. A website that is hard to navigate annoys mobile users- causing them to abandon your site and search for other sites.
If you fail to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, visitors to your site will decline to fill your forms, ditch their shopping cart, abandon your site and conduct business with your competitors. Ultimately, this will hurt your conversion rate.
If you need any help redesigning your old site or creating a brand new website that will be compatible with all mobile devices, Let’s Talk!
However, according to a study conducted by Akamai, 40% of users will leave a web page that takes over three seconds to load. In addition,
Many people don’t like to fill out long forms, especially on mobile. Avoid incorporating long and tedious forms that force users to type in a lot of information. Long forms discourage your users and harm your conversion rates when used for any transaction form. For example, Expedia lost $12 million due to using an irrelevant form field that left their users confused.