It’s my job to review and optimize websites.

What I find is that most of the BIG website usability problems and costly mistakes are almost always the same.

Stop Distracting Your Visitors & Losing Sales!

Here are the NINE most common website usability problems and how to avoid them…

1. Lack of Flow or Funnel Planning

In fact most people won’t do anything unless you ask them to!

That means that you need to be clear about what you want a visitor to your website to do by using “calls to action” on your site.

It’s obvious yet you also want to plan the exact pattern or process your visitors will go through to complete the desired action.

Let’s say that you sell candles and your desired action is for your visitors to place an order.

For example…you sell red and blue beeswax candles.

You should use your home page to get people’s attention and tell them why your beeswax candles are so great.

Then at the end of the home page, invite them to visit you red beeswax candle page or your blue beeswax candle page.

The visitor will click on either one and then you tell them about your red beeswax candles and all their benefits.

At the end of that page, invite them to add the item to the shopping cart.

In the shopping cart page you invite them to start the checkout process.

Always take your visitors to the next step, don’t just have the information on your site and hope that people will find it.

Plan each step and make the process easy and have the right calls to action.

2. Less is More

The first step I do when I review a website is looking for elements that I can remove.

Yes, the more clutter I can get rid of the better the website looks.

If you have a feature that 0.01% of your visitors use now is the time to get rid of it because it’s most likely confusing the other 99.99% of your visitors.

Go through your website and start seeing where the sticking point and distractions are by taking them away until you only have the essentials.

Resist the temptation of having a lot of stuff in your pages.

3. Group Similar Sections Together

Organize the information and content on your site in a way that you only have a few sections and several sub-sections.

This conversion rate optimization technique is called vertical architecture which allows you to access almost every page on the site from home page.

This relates back to the previous point on how less is more.

If you have too many sections it is most likely confusing your website visitors instead of helping them.

And a confused mind says NO!

4. Make Text Easy to Read

Use every-day words for your website.

Keep the language simple and use everyday words in your content, drop the fancy words:

• Use short sentences and short paragraphs.
• Get your point across with as few words as you can.
• Use bullet-points
• Bold text and
• Subheads
• Make the text easier to read….

Do you see how easy-to-read text makes all the difference.

This has been tested and refined, teaked and polish to make a clear defining point between a successful and profitable website or failure.

5. Say What You Offer Right Away

Every day I see websites that fail at telling their visitors what they are about in less than 30 seconds.

Why are these companies putting their visitors through this kind of torture?

If you are McDonalds, you don’t really need to explain that you sell burgers.

What if your brand isn’t that popular or well known?

This is where you keep it short and sweet and highly relevant to your target audience.

Use your unique selling proposition to easily and quickly let your visitors know what they can find on your website and the benefit to them.

Web writing is an art in itself. Because the internet is a dynamic environment, web copy is unlike copywriting for any other medium.

6. SEO website content

Do research to test and track how users find your website.

Up to 80% of web traffic is driven by search engines. That means your web copy should be written with this in mind… we call this SEO web writing.

Choose a competent web copywriter with expertise preparing SEO website content to improve your site ranking.

7. Search engine results

What is the user behaviour once they locate your website?

Quite simply, visitors will click through from a search result thanks to good web copy. SEO website content will improve your click-through rate further.

8. Quality web copy

The internet is a visitordriven interface. and that means people enter and exit your site at different points.

Importantly, web copy won’t be read in a given order so good web writing takes this into account.

9. Plan web copy that stands out

Your website is a silent salesman for your business as it sends you global and reaches customers or prospects you might not otherwise contact.

Allocating time, effort and budget to getting your web copy right will get you the results you want.

That’s nine ways how to boost your website marketing and increase conversion rate optimization… there’s plenty more.