Friday, August 15, 2008

Not More Traffic, Better Pages

A lot of folks spend most of their time trying to get more and more traffic to their web site. At some point this becomes a proposition with very diminishing returns.

With the idea in mind of making your site about your visitor, you need to spend at least as much, and maybe even more, time on making the pages as usable and effective as possible.

From a crass perspective it is better to provide a page where twice as many of the visitors you have take the actions they came to take - and the actions you want them to take – than a page that gets twice the traffic.

Remember, visitors come to your page for a reason of their own. They want that reason satisfied when they arrive. Twice the traffic at the same conversion rate is twice as many dissatisfied visitors.

Spend your time increasing the percentage of page visitors who are satisfied. This will give you more happy users, more positive word of mouth. Better results.

Here are a few good ideas for improving results on your pages.

1 - Consider removing the normal navigation and other distracting elements of your page. Studies consistently show that the headline and then the content in the top left corner of each page are the most viewed – visible – parts of a web page. Use these two spaces to make clear the purpose of each page.

2 - Add “trust indicators. Things like “Hackersafe” logo. Also testimonials. Make your visitor feel safe and comfortable.

3 - Make any forms that are completed on your site as simple as possible. The page of least resistance is a normal human choice.

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