User-Friendliness – The Key To Conversions

Website owners often forget to put themselves into the shoes of their visitors, and this oversight can lose many potential customers. Little things that a website owner would never consider might be turning away droves of potential conversions. The copy on the site is one of those little (or not so little) things. What potential customers read on the site could be the deciding factor as to whether they make a purchase or not. Communication is an all-important factor when it comes to buying and selling.
For instance, some sites sell customizable items. Most of these sites have a list of options for the customer to choose from, which is the right way to do things – offering choice without asking the consumer to do too much work. But what if the customization process was only a few fields that asked the buyer to enter exactly what type of product was wanted? The open-ended nature of the questions can be overwhelming to anyone who is not an expert.
Most people are not really comfortable with writing out the details of what they want and would not even bother to go to such a site when they could get more focused customization elsewhere. In this case, the copy hardly matters, because the site itself is intimidating.
Unfortunately for the copywriter, most website owners would assume that it must be the copy on the page. They assume that the low conversion rate must be because the material isn’t convincing anyone to buy the product being offered.
Web Page Copy Applies to the Whole Site
Only when copy is made for a specific landing page that just gets hits from a targeted PPC ad campaign does it only affect one page. Visitors to a website click on many links and go to many pages to see what the site has to offer. Not only that, there are literally hundreds of different ways for a visitor to find any given page. It is important, therefore, that a site owner considers where someone has come from – and where that someone might end up.
Test It Out
Before the site is even publicized, it might be a good idea to ask a few outsiders to take a tour of the site. Start them from different points such as a search engine, a link from another site, the home page, and so forth, and then just have them browse like any customer. Have these testers take a few notes to detail what parts of the site they did and did not like or find easy to navigate. They should also critique the copy and note if it is too difficult to understand in parts.
If some of the problem spots are already known, the testers may even be given specific instructions. They could read the copy, and then attempt to explain just what the writing was trying to get across. The testers could also attempt to register, if this is a registration site, then rate how easy it was to do so.
Try making a map of the website. Seeing a chart will help create understanding of how copy affects the pages around it. Take all the information gathered to strengthen the weak points that might exist on the website.
Once things are reviewed from the perspective of visitors and altered accordingly, there are sure to be more conversions – which makes all the extra effort worthwhile.