If you’ve been following our blogs recently, you’ll know we’ve discussed how important it is that Google loves your website in order to rank well for SEO. Yet impressing Google is only one half of the equation – you’ve got to have a website that potential customers visiting your site are going to love too.
The best way to do this is to ensure your website is user-friendly. A user-friendly experience for your customers is an experience that is far more likely to end in an all-important conversion or sale. Equally, a bad user experience is likely to make visitors leave your website quickly without engaging with your brand. So, just what makes for a great user experience?
Home is where the heart is
Even if you have a fairly small site, after a few clicks it’s easy for a user to get lost. Sure, they could keep hitting the back button to get back to a relevant part of the website, but no one wants to waste time endlessly clicking to get back on track.
Your homepage is the most important page of the site, as it is a place where users can easily find relevant areas they are looking for. Or it should be. It’s therefore in your best interest to make accessing the homepage from any section of the website easy.
The best way to do this is by placing your business’s logo in a visible area at the top of every page of your site, which when clicked, will take the user back to the homepage. You see the little white monkey in the top right corner of this page? Give it a click and then come back. Go on, we’ll wait.
Welcome back. You see how clicking the monkey took you back to the homepage? We place our fancy logo on every page of our site to make navigation easier for everyone. If you’re looking to enhance the user experience of your website, you should be doing this with your own logo too.
Make contacting you a breeze
Users shouldn’t have to scour your website for an email or a telephone number – users should be able to find your contact details in at least two clicks.
Sound difficult? It’s really not. If you’ve followed the previous step, visitors should be able to access your homepage in just one click from anyone on your site. Your homepage should then have an easily identifiable link to your contact us page. Two clicks. Any more and people will start becoming frustrated.
To make things even easier, you can give users your contact details before they even click on your site thanks to Google.
Using Google My Business, you can add in your various contact details so that not only will they appear under your search result in the search engine results page, but they will also appear in a handy info box to the right of the page too.
Avoiding 404s
What happens if you click a link on a site and the page can’t be found? You’re greeted by everyone’s worst enemy – a 404 page.
This error code can appear on your site if you don’t monitor all the links to pages on your site. Content gets moved or removed from time to time, links may simply break or the link itself may be incorrect, leading to a 404-page error.
While they can be fixed, not finding them quick enough could cost you a customer. If a visitor comes to your site and comes across one such error, they’re likely going to bounce and visit another website to find what you need, and you’ve just lost a potential sale.
Monitoring for 404’s is therefore important – but it doesn’t have to be a chore. There are plenty of tools out there to help scour your site for these errors, such as Screaming Frog’s Broken Link Checker.
A fast site is a friendly one
Forget fast and furious – a fast and friendly site is one of the best ways to enhance user experience. Internet users (the Web Monkey staff included) are impatient creatures. We want answers to our problems and we want them now.
This means it’s in your best interest to make sure pages on your site load as fast as possible. At a minimum, you want a page to load in about two seconds. Any longer and people start will start hovering over that back button and begin looking somewhere else.
Tools such as Google’s Pagespeed Insights are a great way to checking to see how fast (or slow) your website’s pages load, as well as the steps you can take to make them load faster.
Need some extra help making your site user-friendly for visitors? Get in touch with us today to find out how we can help make your website one everyone will love.
