What Changes to Your Website's User Experience Have Improved Engagement?

Introduce Authentic Testimonials

One change we made to our website to improve the user experience involved providing firsthand testimonials from satisfied customers. We noticed that potential clients wanted to hear relatable, authentic experiences over generalized claims of our success. By introducing a “Testimonials” section on our site where homeowners could describe their experiences with McNair Custom Homes, it created a community feel and boosted engagement.

We highlighted different aspects of our building process, our focus on sustainability, customer service, and adaptability in design for special needs. This gave a holistic view of our work. It also invoked emotions in potential clients, encouraging them to imagine what they would feel in a McNair home.

After implementing this strategy, we saw an uptick in online inquiries and ultimately conversions. The real, resonant experiences shared by our homeowners served as the best promotion we could hope for.

Optimize Site Speed

Properly optimizing my site to increase speed and achieve a 90+ score on PageSpeed Insights improved my users' experience and increased engagement/conversions.

Visualize Product Appeal

We've done a number of things to improve user experience, which has increased engagement and conversion rates. These improvements include tweaking our navigation, making our site more mobile-friendly, and skewing mobile-friendly over PC-friendly due to the vast majority of our customers shopping on mobile devices.

We also made our search bar much larger on one site, as we noticed most people on this particular site searched instead of using navigation. That said, one huge change in conversion rates that seems kind of silly is that we began taking photos of our supplement bottles with a few pills spilled out in front, as opposed to just a stock photo of the bottle. For whatever reason, this caused a huge increase in conversion rates.

Ultimately, people should care what a product does or what result it gives, and not the size or color of the tablets or capsules, but it is something we often get questions about, and for whatever reason, this really increased conversion rates a substantial amount.

Highlight Key Content

Last month, I was looking at my homepage and thought, "How can a new user find the most important articles on my blog? Why are they not in plain sight?" So, I created a section on my homepage where I put the best three or four articles for each category, including a nice and engaging meta description for each of them.

Surprisingly, links to these articles increased, but also to the related articles, as I also added internal links with proper anchor text. Sometimes, minor improvements to the user experience can bring amazing results!

Implement Technical Optimizations

User feedback and analytics revealed that visitors were leaving the site quickly due to slow loading times. To address this, we implemented several optimizations. These included compressing images to reduce file sizes without sacrificing quality, minimizing the use of CSS and JavaScript to reduce unnecessary code, and leveraging browser caching for faster load times on return visits.

Additionally, we switched to a more efficient hosting service and implemented a content delivery network (CDN) to improve server response times globally. These changes resulted in a markedly faster website, which led to a decrease in bounce rates, an increase in user engagement, and a noticeable improvement in conversion rates.

This example underscores how enhancing technical aspects of user experience, like website speed, can have a direct and significant impact on a site's performance and user satisfaction.

Incorporate Interactive Demos

As a SaaS startup, we noticed a high number of users leaving our site quickly. To tackle this, we introduced short, GIF-like demo videos for our features that play when users hover over them. This change led to increased user engagement with our website, making them more curious and likely to sign up immediately.

By adding these demo videos to all our sections, we successfully reduced our bounce rate by 20%.

Prioritize Endangered Pages and Mobile CTR

One significant change I made was prioritizing my website's endangered pages. These are pages that Google has placed in a decent position on the SERPs but currently have a low click-through rate (CTR). By improving these pages promptly, I was able to maintain, or even enhance, their designated rating. For example, for one of our clients' websites, we increased first-page keyword rankings from 301 to 1,961, a whopping 551% increase, from May 2021 to August 2022.

Another beneficial tweak was comparing mobile versus desktop experiences. Considering we live in a mobile-first world, it's crucial to continuously assess your mobile CTR. I observed how certain pages were underperforming on mobile compared to desktop, reviewed their appearance in search results, and adjusted accordingly.

Lastly, leveraging the power of content marketing drove noticeable traffic and generated leads. Regular, high-quality blog posting bolstered our visibility on search engines and helped position the brand as an industry leader. We experienced a 623% growth in organic traffic over a period of 15 months.

There's no one-size-fits-all solution here. Tailoring your strategies based on your unique data and analytics is key.