Website Audit: Tips to Know Where Your Website Is Leaking and How to Fix It

The whole process of communication and sales is anchored on attention. Getting the attention of a user, keeping the attention of the visitor or guiding the attention of the your lead (prospective client) through the purchase journey without allowing them drift away.

This article is gleaned from my learning experiences in the CXL Institute Conversion Rate Optimization mini degree.

The first consideration to determine whether you will capture the attention of your users or not is RELEVANCE.

1. Relevance: In this context, it’s the usefulness of your content to the users, their motives and fantasies for visiting your website or opening your app. Relevance is a feeling and it only needs less than 50 milliseconds to be formed.

Attention capturing is best done with implicit codes in different cultures particularly visual codes as the brain processes visual cues faster than the written clues.

At the first flash of the eye on the home page, long before the words are read and processed, a perception of the website is already formed in the brain of the visitor.

Websites have body language they exhibit towards visitors and these are all implicit messages that the visitor can hardly explain how he/she got the ideas they have of the website even before digesting the content.

When analyzing your website landing page, a key consideration is the source of the traffic, i.e. where the person is coming from and the reason that made them chose your website. For instance, the person that typed a phrase in a search engine — Google.com or Bing.com may not be very familiar with your website, in fact he/she mighty be visiting your site for the first time and this means that the expectation created in their mind by the search result is what made them click on your link.

Then the question that follows is, “does the landing page deliver on that promise?” If the search result had said “Easy, fast and personalized banking” would those promises be fulfilled in the landing page?
This factor is so important that research has shown that reworking the Ad text can raise the landing page click through rate by up to 50.3%. This is how important it is to maintain a high level of synchronicity between the search engine result page and the landing page.

After optimizing the Ad, working on the landing page template promises only about 32.8% increase in click through rate.

When optimizing a website always ask “where is the traffic coming from and what content connects the website experience with the traffic source”.

For the emotional satisfaction of these expectations, we look at the picture or other visual elements used on the landing page. I suggest you ask yourself, if the website was written in an unfamiliar language, what can you say the page is about.

For detailed mapping of the users’ persona, you may use the “limbic map” to help you graphically locate your different personas in the psycho-graphic mix.

In an experiment, optimizing the sales journey template delivered 18% of the uplift in click through rate, focusing on the massage and its relevance to the customer delivered 79% of the increase and combining the two by testing the different assumptions (the Decoy Strategy) delivered the most increase in the click through rate.

To analyze your website, print the landing page and show it to someone that is not familiar with the website for just 5 seconds and ask the person to describe what they think the website is about to see how obvious your message is on the website.

After this you can show it to them for a longer time and ask them more questions on the website.

Trust and Orientation
1. Research: What values and emotions are relevant to the page
a. When you looked at the source from where the visitors are coming.
b. The user personas you have made on your customers

2. Analyze: What values and emotions you are currently using on your website.

3. Optimize: How can I make a focused version of the page.

4. Competition: On what values is the competition focusing and what’s my niche market?

2. Credibility Based Design.
A Stanford research carried out with about 2,500 persons on how they access the credibility of a website said its mostly about the design, color, layout, form, how simple it is together with the information architecture.

• 38.5% said it’s information architecture
• 25.1 said its information focus (Clarity).
• 15.5 said key Visuals
• 14.8 said useful information.

Elements to Increase Trust.

a. There has to be room for peer review: Nobody likes going into an empty store, if people ain’t there you feel like there is no real value to fain from there if not people would flock the place.

In the same way, if there is too much clutter around the product, there is this sense of low quality as costly products are kept with some sense of exclusivity leaving much space around them.

There has to be a balance in these elements to sustain a sense of value yet having people very interested in it.

Booking.com uses a major digital real estate to demonstrate social proofing, showing the new users that the old customers are very happy and they have nothing to fear.

The “Asch Elevator Experiment” demonstrates how hard it is to overcome peer pressure. How it takes only four persons to define the norm. Its very difficult not to do what others are doing.

b. Analyze if your design is trustworthy.

c. In cases where you don’t have a strong brand, use social proofing.

d. You can also use data to demonstrate success.

f. Authority: In cases where you don’t want to give out your data so the competition don’t stand a chance to copy you, use Authority. This in many ways can create trust. If you have celebrities as clients you can use their testimonial to authenticate your brand.

People like doctors, pilots, lawyers, IT professionals can help raise the positive perception of your brand.

g. Trust badges: This can very well also impact your brand. Industry badges like the ISO standard, online security badge from companies like Norton internet security and many other product standard badges can help raise your public perception.

3. Orientation.
How do you show the customer where to find what he needs — where to click.

This is the practice of designing your website such that the customer is directed on where to click, and not drift off the customer journey. This technique makes them see what you want them to see on your website.

• Avoid design and content clutter.

This is a situation where there are too many options, too many things that are competing for the user’s attention that they can’t possibly choose one and for go all the rest. This also makes it impossible for them to be satisfied to have chosen one correct product when there are too many others just like the one he or she chose.

This design style helps people find the right thing.

It could be suggesting the most purchased plan in your pricing table, using the decoy pricing effect where the user is made to see a higher price which in effect makes the lower one a good price.

Conclusion
To audit a website, you must first determine what you want to achieve and everything else will take root from the initial motive.

If you want to achieve higher click through rate, look at where the customers are dropping off, the motivation that might not be met by the page or content and adopt some assumptions to be tested.

If you want want higher retention on a product, you may want to consider the value delivered on the first purchase, how the product can be sold to encourage subsequent purchases.

Understanding your customer is however fundamental to everything you do as a growth marketer.

For more detailed information on the subject of website audit, please join the CXL Institute minidegree program on Conversion Rate Optimization course.