When was the last time you cleaned your house? Like really cleaned your house? If you’re anything like me, it was probably the last time you had people over. Your usual clutter is fine with you, you know your way around it; things aren’t quite in the right place, but you’ve gotten used to less than stellar organization.
Imagine you just got a phone call and were informed that a group of strangers were coming to spend time in your house. Based on what these strangers saw and experienced, they would create an opinion of you that could potentially forever influence your reputation. Your blood pressure has probably increased and your mind is suddenly noticing all sorts of things that are out of place, floors that could be swept and dust bunnies that could be killed.
Imagine you just got a phone call and were informed that a group of highly interested, demographically targeted, financially affluent visitors were about to descend upon your website. Most marketers would consider this to be a reason to celebrate! Traffic is increasing! More eyeballs! More dollars! Our jobs are done, let’s take the rest of the afternoon off.
How much time have you spent tidying up your website in anticipation of new visitors? Contrast that with the amount of time spent discussing new strategies to drive traffic, increase click through rates or write email subject lines. Are you spending time (and money) bringing visitors to a cluttered and less than optimal website?
With spring upon us, and we take the time to de-clutter our homes, keep this mindset and turn a critical eye towards your web properties.
Spring Cleaning Checklist
- Talk to strangers – The same way you’ve learned to walk around the clutter in your house, you do the same on your website. You know how to find things, so take yourself out of the equation. Get some friends who haven’t seen your website before and give them a task to complete. Watch how they navigate and listen to what they say. If you want to get more technical, use an application like Silverback. But don’t get carried away with tools, the key is to find areas of friction and confusion.
- Watch for bounces – Dig into your analytics tool and look for the bounce rates (single page views) of your main entry pages. Look into the keywords that are driving traffic to these pages and look for relevance. Are your headlines, offers and messages clear and concise?
- How’s the navigation? – Combined with your task observation data, look into your navigation on a page-by-page level. Don’t get fooled and lured into putting too much stock into hoping that your users will follow one clearly defined path through your website – they won’t. Instead, look for areas where visitors are getting lost or wandering off course. Are there opportunities to include more in-text links to relevant next steps, to help lead your visitors down the right path?
- Block the exits – Look at your top exit pages. Are your visitors leaving through the doors you expect them to, or are they afraid of the clutter and jumping out the windows? Examine unexpected exit pages from the perspective of a visitor… is there a logical next step?
- Check your scenarios – Your visitors are coming to your website to get something done. Whether you’re selling stuff, providing interesting content, or giving support, task completion is something that is mutually beneficial. If you have elements that are distracting, dissuading or otherwise preventing your visitors from getting things done, you’re not doing anyone any favours.
- Try something new – I’m all about re-arranging furniture to make a room more inviting, exciting or relaxing. Try something new this spring. Take your insights from the previous 5 steps and set up a test using Google Website Optimizer Its free. Don’t waste time arguing or debating about whether the new headline is better than the old one, or which image is more inviting on a landing page – let your house guests decide.
What other strategies do you recommend for keeping a website tidy and uncluttered?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Fantastic post. Everything makes sense. I love the analogies. I’ll be looking into reworking a site soon, at which point I’ll be re-reading this for sure.
Housecleaning is good, but I say storing things in the attic is not a bad idea… just make a big notice on the top of those pages, “ARCHIVED”…. still good for the Google footprint.
great post Neil. ‘block the exits’ is incredibly important. in running quite a few different commerce site I used to use my analytics tools to identify top exit pages and also ‘error’ pages. it’s sometimes not intuitive to look to the errors/issues for opportunities however, in my experience, it’s some of the best chance for success. again, great post!
I am in accordance completely..