Having a good website is the first step to generating customers, gaining traffic and communicating with your target audience, but what elements should it include to be considered optimal for conversion? And how do I know if my website is properly optimized to attract users?
These are some of the questions you should ask yourself to assess whether your current website is right or whether, on the contrary, it needs some adjustments to optimize it. But how can you analyze your website to know which elements are missing for optimization?
In this post, we will tell you what you should analyze to assess your website.
What Does It Mean to Have an Optimized Website?
When we talk about an optimized website, we mean one that has certain characteristics that make it easier to fulfill its purpose. For example, we could set the following purposes:
- Get more sales or subscriptions, depending on the goal you have set.
- Get more traffic and visits.
- Rank better in search engines (like Google) so people can find you more easily.
- Spark your visitors' interest and get them to stay on your website.
- Be able to reach your target audience and interact with them.
- Gain visibility online and increase your brand awareness.
Which Points Should You Analyze on a Website?
There are a number of points you will always need to analyze to check whether your website is ready to convert or whether, on the contrary, you need to make some changes to help improve its optimization.
The most important points to keep in mind when analyzing your website are:
1. Objective
You will need to analyze what the main objective of your page is. It is important to define this point, since it will depend on the type of website you have.
Think about what your page will be used for. You can use the following questions as an example:
- Do you want to sell?
- Build awareness of your brand?
- Offer quality content to your readers?
Having an eCommerce store, where products should be highly visible, is not the same as having a corporate website, where you will want to clearly show what you do and what you offer.
2. Content
Here you should think about the people who visit your website and ask yourself: Why do they do it? What do they expect to find? With these questions, you can establish an information hierarchy that places first what interests people most or what is most profitable for you to show.
Once you have identified who you want to reach and what you want to offer them, it is time to start thinking about your next content, because another essential aspect is offering up-to-date content. And by this we don't just mean changing content, but also other more static pages, such as the contact page, the team page, etc.
Now, if what you have is a blog, it is also highly recommended to keep updating the articles. One piece of advice is to only promote current content that adds value, in order to achieve growing interest among our visitors.
A tip is to take advantage of all the pages you have to place content, links, offers or CTAs geared toward a specific goal. All these small changes will help you connect better with your target audience and be one step closer to achieving your goal.
3. Design and Branding
Design is essential to having an attractive, eye-catching and pleasant website.
I talk about design third because it will help you put all the previous elements into practice, that is, highlighting some elements more than others, paying attention to content, establishing an information hierarchy, etc.
Also, as crazy as it sounds, design needs to be updated too. Styles and trends change, and you have to adapt to them so that your website conveys a sense of novelty, experience and freshness.
4. Usability
Usability refers to the user's experience when they visit and browse your website. When you get someone to visit your page, you will want them to stay as long as possible, and to do so, you need to analyze what is known as your website's usability.
If users don't understand your website well enough or can't find what they are looking for, they may get tired and leave, so all the effort you have put into the design, content and rollout of the strategy will be for nothing.
To avoid this, follow these suggestions for your website's structure:
- Does it have menus and submenus that follow a logical structure?
- When you are on a page, is it easy to go back to the previous menu?
- Is it clear what sections there are, and is it easy to access all of them?
Some other recommended practices are:
- Place the main menu in the top bar
- Put the contact information, legal notice and privacy policy in the footer
- Also include a menu in the footer with all the sections on the website.
- All pages should be accessible and easy to reach.
- No page should require more than three clicks to access.
- Have a responsive website.
- Make sure all content is readable and understandable and that the typography is pleasant.
- Try to make the page load as fast as possible to keep users from leaving.
- Make sure your website has a secure connection.
5. SEO
The acronym stands for “Search Engine Optimization,” that is, optimization for search engines (for example, Google), and it covers aspects to apply to your website so that you rank higher in search engines. That way, if a user searches, for example on Google, for a concept that may be related to your page, you can appear in the top positions and have a better chance of that person clicking on your page.
Keep in mind that the main rule of SEO is that if any element is negative for users and their experience, it will also be negative for rankings. So, if you optimize the points we have covered on content and usability, search engines will also rank you well.
Other aspects that can help you with SEO:
- Page speed: as we have seen, slow loading hurts the user, and search engines see it as something negative that should be penalized. A key step is to compress or reduce the images on your page if they are very heavy or very large.
- We also covered security in the previous point. Search engines also consider it essential for your website to have a secure connection.
- Responsive design: this point is also very important.
- What your users are searching for and the content of your website should be closely related, so you need to use keywords in the title, the URL and the content.
- Backlinks: another very important aspect is having other pages link to yours, which means they consider you a reference. This is known as “backlinks” or “referring links.” For search engines, this means you are good and an expert in your topic, and it can help you climb positions.
- Internal linking: in the same way, it is essential to link pages within your own website. The more links you include to a specific page, the more important it will be to Google.
- Check that your pages are indexed, that is, that search engines are crawling them and that they appear in their results. If not, no matter how much optimization you do, you will not appear when a user searches for a term.
7. Legal Issues
It is also important to check that you comply with the law regarding information privacy. You will need to comply with regulations on cookies and data collection. This issue is vitally important to avoid financial and legal penalties, so consult a specialist about which legal issues affect your website, since depending on how you plan to use it (sales, lead capture, remarketing…), you will need to apply one set of regulations or another.
8. Run Tests
In many of these areas, there will be no absolute truth about what is most effective or what works best for your page's goal. For that, I recommend running tests or A/B tests, varying just one element and seeing which option gets better results. Especially for copywriting.
To do this, it is best to use a tool that lets you show one option to half of your users and the other option to the other half. Some CMSs, like HubSpot, let you do this, as do WordPress plugins. There are also several platforms outside of CMSs that do it. There is even one from Google (Google Optimize) that is integrated with Google Analytics.
Conclusion
Now we know which elements of your website you should analyze and improve. As we know, there is no exact science about what works best, but these points are the first step you should take to optimize your website. Then A/B tests will help you find the winning combination for your target audience.
If you want to learn more about optimizing your website, check out our Website Grader.
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