Website Optimization: It’s not You, It’s Your Website

Article written by Lindsay Tramel-Jones

I’m Lindsay Tramel-Jones and I am the owner of Organized Chaos Design Company, a brand identity design agency located in Maryland. We are on a mission to help female business owners create their own tables that are authentic to them, simultaneously empowering them to stop hustling to sit in places not intended for us. Our agency rebrands coaches that are ready to go full time in their business with our signature, done for you process known as the Brand Refinement. You can find out more about my team, myself and the transformations we are making  at www.organizedchaosdesigncompany.com

During our time in business, we noticed that when a coach’s service isn’t selling, their first instinct is to create something new. For example, “let me create this new, cheaper group program” or “lower my rates.” They rarely take the time to analyze their 24 hour a day marketing and selling  machine, their website. Your website has a huge effect on the likelihood of visitors making a purchase.

According to research conducted by the Stanford Credibility Project “46% of respondents reported that they assessed website credibility based on the overall design of the site, including elements like typography, layout, and color schemes.” That means that almost half of your visitors will question your skills due to a poorly designed website. 

If that’s not enough to get your website together, the Nielsen Norman Group studies the effects of user interface and user experience on websites. They define it as the  aesthetic-usability effect. It refers to “users’ tendencies to perceive attractive products as more usable. People tend to believe things that look better will work better — even if they aren’t actually more effective or efficient.” Bottom line is if your website looks better people will inherently believe that the service is better. Feeling a little worried? Don’t sit in anxiety, there are some clues that your website is working against you instead of working for you. Check them out and see where you can improve how well your site works for you.

5 Clues Your Website Might be Working Against You:

You send a warm lead to your website and you never hear from them again.

If you do not make your design easy to follow, website users will leave. Once you get people to your site, it has to tell them where to go. The words and flow should lead them.  If people get lost on your website it’s because you don’t guide them on the journey. Every page needs to have a goal and a journey in mind from beginning of the page to end of the page. The journey doesn’t solely depend on the design, you need to have website copy that makes sense and speaks in a tone that attracts them with words they are familiar with. 

You use an over abundance of specialized lingo.

Most entrepreneurs create words to call their clients. It is creative and intuitive, however when people stumble across your site without getting to know you through social media, they are not going to know what those words mean. Not to mention that they do not help your SEO. Your goal is to have organic traffic, people will not be able to find you on search engines if you’re not using words that people use to search.

An overabundance of animations & pop ups.

Gathering email addresses is a huge part of small business marketing strategies, but the email subscription popup has proven to be annoying and a turn off to customers. They interrupt the client’s journey. Think about how you feel when a website has a few popups, especially when you’re on your cell phone and it is hard to close the popup out. You leave the site right?

Your site loads slower than molasses:

I’m a sucker for beautiful branded photos, but photographers love to give us large photo files that slow down our site loading time. If visitors have to wait a long time before your site loads, they will leave. One way to combat this is to compress your photos. On a MAC you can do this in photo preview and change the size. When you receive your photos from the photographer, ask for web size. Another way to speed up your site is to host your videos on YouTube or Vimeo and embed it on your site.  Keep in mind, while you are changing the size of your photos, change the names. This will help with being found in search engines, more on that in the next paragraph.  

Use commonly searched phrases on your site:

When you rename your photos, rename them to phrases that people search for. For example women-in-stem or seattle- business-coach. When you create your keywords on your pages use the same concept. Those keywords are what you see when you start typing into the search bar on the internet. A good resource to use is https://trends.google.com/. This will help you choose which keywords to use. 

Before attempting to create another offer, check your website to see if you are delivering an easy to follow user experience. If users are not captivated by your website and the interaction that it offers, you will lose them. That warm lead will quickly become cold. A possible lead may never find you because of your word choices or that visitor may leave due to being annoyed by the popups. Review your website to see if it is meeting the mark and if you have any questions reach out to us on instagram and facebook @organizedchaos.designco or on pinterest @organizedchaosdesign