85% of people visit a website before contacting a business. This means that your website plays a critical role in whether someone ultimately decides to do business with your company or not. Ensuring that your website is built to capitalize on opportunities by turning visitors into leads and sales should be a key focus for all businesses, especially when considering a website redesign.
To develop the overall strategy and creative direction for your website redesign, it is important that you are absolutely clear on the key elements of your website that need to be improved. After all, it is much more profitable and efficient to focus on turning more visitors into leads rather than focusing on increasing website traffic.
These 10 website redesign questions will help you to improve your website performance and make your website redesign a success.
1. What are the objectives for my new website?
Get clear on what you are trying to accomplish with a website redesign. Asking yourself these website redesign questions will help you to create a website redesign strategy that will help you achieve your objectives. For example, I would like to increase leads by 50%. I want greater control over updating and managing my website. I want to be able to turn my website into a content hub.
2. What is my current conversion rate?
Your conversion rate is the number of visitors your website receives compared to the number of people who take a desired action on your website. An action could be filling out a contact form, downloading a free report, or purchasing a product on your website. Knowing your website conversion rate is important for benchmarking how well your website is performing and identifying opportunities to maximize performance.
3. What can be done to increase my conversion rate?
Most businesses tend to focus on driving more traffic to their website. However, it is more cost-effective and profitable to focus on increasing your conversion rate by turning more website visitors into leads or sales. Conduct an audit of your website to identify your top exit and top-performing pages. Then, compare them to see how to improve your exit pages to increase conversions.
4. What marketing strategies are driving the most conversions, and what can I do to optimize them?
Thereās a famous quote in advertising that says, āI know at least half of my advertising budget works; I just don’t knowĀ whichĀ half.ā Fortunately, with Internet marketing and technology today, it is very easy to track your advertising and identify what works for you and what does not. Whether you are utilizing Google Analytics to track online metrics or you are tracking phone calls, you can attribute where the bulk of your customers are coming from, which allows you to allocate more of your budget to those areas.
5. How can my design be improved to achieve my goals?
An effective website design will help you turn more visitors into leads and sales. Often times businesses have a pretty design, however it is lacking in effectiveness. Do you have a carefully crafted value proposition that is placed above the fold? Do you have a clear call to action that is strategically positioned? Do you have social proof in the form of testimonials or industry affiliations that are prominently placed on your website? Great design is all-encompassing and is designed to turn visitors into leads and customers.
6. How can I improve my usersā experience?
Providing a great user experience to your website visitors will help you reduce your bounce rate and increase conversions. Your website user experience goes beyond a website that is easy to navigate. It involves making sure that your website loads fast, ensuring that it is mobile friendly, making sure that all links on your website work, including forms that you expect your users to fill out, and making sure the checkout process is seamless if your website sells products.
7. Who is my target audience?
Looking beyond your personal preferences and assumptions will help you to create a more compelling website. Your website is having a conversation with your visitors, oftentimes before you or your sales team have the opportunity to speak to them. Knowing who they are will help you craft the right message and experience, which will help you to increase conversions. Start by creating a customer profile that includes all your customers’ key characteristics or buyer persona, such as age, title, education level, interests, gender, industry or profession, challenges, location, device type used to access your website, etc.
8. What stage of the buying journey are my visitors in when they visit my website?
With website personalization available to small businesses, knowing the stage of the buyer journey that your visitors are in by the time they land on your website will help you provide more personalized content to help affect their decision. For example, buyers in the research stage are looking for educational materials and customer reviews, while buyers in the awareness stage are looking to learn more about your company and what solutions you have for the challenges that they are facing. Creating content for users in all stages will ensure you capture visitorsā interest at every stage in the buying journey.
9. What expectations do my visitors have when they land on my website, and how can I exceed them?
Positively influencing your website visitorsā behavior hinges on your ability to meet their expectations. There is a reason that the most effective websites have similar structures. This is because users have come to expect certain things from a website. For example, users expect the logo to be on the top left; they expect to click Contact Us and find a phone number or a blog on a company website. They expect a website that loads fast and a website that is easy to navigate on mobile devices with a click-to-call option. Know what your customers expect and give it to them.
10. Who are my top competitors, and what are they doing better than me?
Evaluating your competitorsā websites before embarking on a website redesign will give you an opportunity to discover not only what they are doing better than you but also what they are not doing and what they are doing but not very well. These opportunities allow you to take advantage of, set your business apart from the competition, and capture a larger market share.
Ā What other website redesign questions would you add to this list? Comment below.