Convert!

Designing Web Sites to Increase Traffic and Conversion

Ben Hunt

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118036945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Web Design

Solve your traffic troubles and turn browsers into buyers

When web design expert Ben Hunt set out to quantify the difference between an ordinary web site and a great one, he expected to find the key in design simplicity. But when his team more than doubled the conversion rates for a wide range of sites, they identified simple yet powerful solutions involving design, copy, appropriate analysis, classic optimization techniques, and targeted testing. You'll find the fixes easy to implement, and they're all right here.

• Understand the essentials - your market, your proposition, and your delivery.
• Create a site that is seen by the right people, provides a compelling experience, and generates the desired action.
• Learn how to use testing to improve your site's conversion rate.
• Discover the holistic nature of web site optimization and why multiplicity matters.
• Examine dozens of simple techniques for building traffic, engaging your audience, and crafting effective calls to action.
• Combine creativity with analysis for the best possible results.

Ben Hunt is Principal Consultant for Scratchmedia Ltd. He operates webdesignfromscratch.com, which provides tutorials and advice to over 120, 000 web developers each month. Ben has been designing, coding, and producing web sites for clients worldwide for more than 15 years, and is considered a leader in the web usability industry.

Forewords by Ken McCarthy, founder of the System Seminar, and Drayton Bird, Drayton Bird Associates.

Part I

Designing for Traffic

In this Part:

• Chapter 1: How to Transform Your Web Site’s Success
• Chapter 2: Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals
• Chapter 3: Expanding Your Reach
• Chapter 4: Using the Awareness Ladder
• Chapter 5: Working through the Awareness Ladder

Chapter 1

How to Transform Your Web Site’s Success

How well is your web site doing? What does success mean? Maybe you have goals you can measure. How many of those goals does your site achieve, and what does that mean for your business?

Whether you know your site’s current performance, or it’s currently a mystery, I want to help you make it far more successful. This book shows you how. Using the process I teach you in this book, you will get more value for each dollar or each hour you invest in your web marketing.

Does This Sound Like Your Web Site?

Do you remember how your web site was created? The process probably went something like this. The web designer was briefed. The designer used her experience, insight, and what she knows about the market to create her best guess at a design that would please the client. There was some back and forth about the design, taking into account different people’s insights and preferences. Finally, the successful design was built and launched.

The result is a web site that has all usual content you would expect. Your home page tells people who you are and what you do. The site talks about all the products and services you offer and their features. There may be an FAQ page to answer other questions prospects may have. There is some means to purchase or to take the next step, like a “Contact Us” page.

The site may have analytics set up, which tells you how many people are visiting the site, what they searched for when they arrived, and where they go on the site. You probably do not do anything with that information.

You may even have set up pay-per-click advertising, or done some link-building activity.

It all seems pretty complete. But I bet it doesn’t produce great results. I frequently hear web site owners tell that they have paid thousands for a web site that has delivered no business in years.

Here’s the problem. Most site owners—even most web designers—don’t realize how much more powerful their web sites could be. The vast majority of sites on the Web today could attract far more visitors, and convert far more of those visitors to take desired actions and complete the site’s goals.

The reason why most people don’t know how to make their web sites perform better is because they are being built the way they have always been built (which is badly). In this chapter, I describe this old model of designing web sites, explain why it is insufficient for your needs, and introduce the new way to go about marketing your business on the Web.

The good news is, it is actually quite easy to achieve significant success online. You just need to know the steps and put them into practice. All the steps you need to know are in this book, together with a complete worked example, case studies, samples, and a wealth of tips and advice. Follow the steps I give you, and I guarantee you will make your web site more successful.

The “First Best Guess” Method of Web Design

I describe the approach to web design that you’re probably familiar with as the “First Best Guess” method. The decisions that drive the structure and design of sites is based mainly on guesswork, or on looking at the competition’s sites, which were designed based on guesswork.

When it comes to delivering results, this method has a poor track record. It is fundamentally flawed, because it is ignorant about what factors really influence success and how to optimize those factors.

Bad at Attracting Traffic

With regard to attracting visitors, the old method takes the view, “If you build it, they will come.” The client and designer assume that all you can do is sum up what you do as clearly as possible, ensure the search engines find the site, get links from relevant directories, and wait for visitors to turn up.

If you need more visitors, you can buy traffic through advertising, which does not always pay off. You might also hire a search engine optimization (SEO) firm to generate better search rankings through an extensive link-building campaign. This also does not always work.

The fundamental flaw with this approach to getting visitors is that it is far too narrow. It takes a singular approach. You have a home page, which says what the company does and what you’re about. You have a page for your services or products, and maybe another page that describes each one.

The result is that you get a generic home page that gives several weak and mixed messages. The product or service pages give more detailed information that might attract people looking for those things. The “frequently asked questions” page might add a few more useful terms that stand a chance of matching the occasional search engine query.

It isn’t that there is anything wrong with this approach. The problem is that it isn’t enough. It falls far short of what is possible. The rest of Part I of this book will show you how much farther it is possible to reach, and exactly how to do it for your own web site.

Bad at Conversion

When it comes to converting visitors into customers, again the traditional approach is pretty ineffective. The site talks about what you do and how you do it. It tells visitors about the features of your products, and provides the information they need. And it gives them a way to buy, to request more information, or to contact you. What more could it do?

The answer is: a lot more! When a web site is designed correctly, it can engage directly with many more different types of visitors and lead them to find exactly what they want.

A site that is at once too narrow and too generic will fail to attract the right people. When search engines find a page that talks about a bunch of different things, they will identify that the page is about several topics (but none with much strength). Search engines match pages to people’s searches, so generic pages will only be matched to generic searches. But no one is searching for a bunch of different topics together. When someone searches, they search for a specific thing, and they will get the result that is most relevant to that thing.

Say your business is tax advice. You may attract someone looking for “tax advisor” in your local area. But how many people who need tax advice are looking specifically for “tax advisor”? Only a minority. Many more will be looking for a range of more specific needs, such as “managing tax on saving for child’s college fund.”

For those who are searching for your generic offering, how much competition is there for that term? If your web site does not appear on the first couple of search engine results pages, it is unlikely to bring you much business.

If visitors do arrive at your “tax advisor” home page, they will find a broad message that describes all the different things you can do. If they do not connect quickly with a message that tells them they are in the right place to get what they want, they are unlikely to persevere. They will go back to the search results and try again to find a better fit.

Part II of this book is all about optimizing your conversion rates for visitors who do come to your web site. It breaks down in detail the steps for generating conversions, and gives you clear steps to get the maximum value from every visitor.

A New Perspective on Web Design

The methods I teach you in this book require a new perspective on what “web design” means.

Design does not mean creating stuff that looks good. That’s art. Someone who creates web pages that look good, whether or not they work, is not a web designer but an artist, or a graphic designer at best.

You should view design as the creation of a new solution to a problem. That often means creating an experience for people, whether it be a lecture, a dinner menu, a ceremony, a sales pitch, a perfume, or a charity campaign.

Unlike art, design always has a purpose. In web design, you always have goals to achieve. An e-commerce site should sell stuff. A marketing site should gather leads or communicate a message. A web-based application should allow people to carry out certain tasks.

Your goals define the problem you need to solve. Design is the process you follow to create the best possible solution to that problem. So web design does not start with graphics. It starts with understanding the challenge. Who am I communicating with? What do they want? How can I attract them? And how can I get them to do what the site needs them to do?

NOTE What are your web site’s goals?

What is the value of each goal to your organization?

How many goals does the web site need to deliver in order to be a success?

This high-level vision of web design places it in the broader realm of marketing. Marketing is the discipline of defining markets and offerings that deliver what the markets need in order to achieve a result (which is usually to make a profit).

So a web designer should be a marketer who operates in the web medium. In addition to the functional tasks involved with creating a web site, the design process must include techniques to target markets, to reach out to them, and to lead them from wherever they are to the point of taking action. For most web designers, this requires a new set of skills.

The new skills I will show you go beyond creating appealing graphic designs and beyond search engine optimization. You will learn how you can proactively structure your web site to reach more new markets, and to reach deeper into those markets. You will discover a step-by-step process that continually builds your web site into a conversion machine!

The New Approach

It should be becoming clear that to achieve its goals, your web site needs to do only two things:

1. It needs to get the right number of the right kind of people to visit it.

2. It then needs to get as many of those people as possible to take action.

If a web site does not address the right needs in the right markets, it will not get the visitors it needs to succeed. If it fails to appeal to its visitors, and to lead them powerfully along the path to get what they want, the traffic will not be converted into business success.

Success = Traffic × Conversion

If your web site sells peanuts, the number of peanuts you sell is exactly the number of visitors that visit your site multiplied by the site’s conversion rate. Clearly, ...