Continuation of Building a web design for conversion - Part 1: Analytics
In our last post, we focused primarily on analyzing the facts of what a majority of visitors like from your current website. At this stage we will be discussing the process of designing for conversion. To get started on the design, we need to understand what the visitors typically do on your site. For example purposes, we will focus on our recent site revamp for reference.
Understanding our target audience and web visitors
After analyzing fishpunt.com, we found that 70% of our visitors were going to 1 of 3 locations:
- About Us
- Portfolio
- Contact
The next step is looking for the most common paths that visitors took once they went to each section and studying the thought process that could be guiding visitors that way. Here are some of the example paths that we made a bulk of our changes from:
- Home > About Us > Portfolio > Portfolio - pg 2 > Portfolio pg 3 > Contact
- Home > Services > Contact
- Home > About Us > Contact
- Home > Portfolio > Portfolio pg 2 > Portfolio pg 3 > Portfolio pg 4 ...
- Home > Blog > Latest Post ...
So in reviewing the patterns above, we came to the determination that a majority of our current and potential clients are really interested in who we are, what we have done, and what we can do.
The next question that we had was "How can we make more of an impact?".
Enhancing the areas of interest on your site
"Who we are" section
We began by sharing more about who we are, by adding individual Team Member profiles. These profiles contain specific information including:
- Our interests
- Our experience
- Our goals
- Our personal links (website, Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter... etc.)
We noticed a 34% increase of time spent on the site because visitors that were interested in our "About Us" page, often visited each individual team members profile. This allows the visitor to have additional information at their own comfort.
"What we have done" section(a.k.a. Portfolio)
We wanted to provide more quality information at the range of work that we provide as a company for each project. Images were not enough to really portray the depth of service, so we added specific statistics that would enhance the understanding of what we did on that project. Whether it was a simple HTML build or a full Drupal site that had been optimized for search engines and mobile phones.
We noticed an increase of 28% more page visits throughout our entire portfolio after implementing these changes.
"What we can do" section
This is extremely important to us, because we provide a one-stop shop for all marketing and design services. We too special interest in really breaking up our level of services and sharing a quality breakdown of each category that we handle.
Here are the following items we implemented:
- 4 primary services that we handle listed below slideshow area:
- Graphic Design
- Printing Services
- SEO Marketing
- Web Development
- Grouped listing at the bottom of each page with 6 sections:
- Graphic Design
- Marketing
- Printing Services
- Video Production
- Web Development
- Website Optimization
- Updated Services page with same 6 sections listed
- Enhanced front page slideshow with new images
- Map display with contact information & hours of operation
This change resulted in 14% less time spent on services page before clicking on "contact".
Of those that clicked from services > contact, we noticed a 29% increase in forms submitted.
Final evaluations, and future goals
Overall, the updates to design and structure of our site increased our conversion while providing a better user experience. This was accomplished by the study of patterns in analytics and logical reasoning. By studying patterns we can cater the design and function of our site to the user, and subsequently affect ranking in search engines that are created to act as typical users. We come full circle to see that focus on the user experience will ultimately create better rankings in search engines.