Nothing is perfect, not even your website. There is always something to improve, data to analyze, or decisions to be made. But how can you make informed, data-driven decisions about your website and why should you even risk the success you might already be having?
Last Week's Episode: 5 Things We Learned From Starting an Inbound Agency
Why Optimize Your Site?
No matter how well your site is doing, it could always be doing better. There’s no reason to get stagnant with your innovation. Even small changes, some that you may not even be considering right now, can have a big impact on your site and its operation. Something as small as changing a CTA or button can lead to big results.
Where to Start with Website Optimization
There are so many things happening on a typical website that it can be hard to pinpoint a good place to start your experimentation.
Start with things you can easily change and have control over, but make sure you use resources like Google Analytics, Search Console, and Lucky Orange to make data-driven decisions on what you change. Also, to start, be sure to do the things to optimize your site for both Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Things like submitting site maps and installing tracking code will help your site get seen and be tracked.
Not getting the form submissions you want? Change the form questions, re-word the copy, move it, do whatever you need to do until you see results.
People aren’t clicking certain buttons? Change them. Nobody talking to the bot? Adjust the messaging. Like we said above, there are always plenty of small things on your website that could be changed and result in a big difference and you won’t know until you try.
Of course, if you have the resources, you can always employ the expertise of an agency or individual who has the knowledge you seek. But, it’s not impossible to dive in yourself and change some of the simpler, easily controlled aspects of your site.
The Importance of A/B Testing
The cruciality of A/B testing cannot be overstated because it is the most effective way of figuring out what works and what doesn’t.
Here are some tips to help you along the way:
- Don’t change too much all at once. Make your changes in stages so that you know what exactly is helping. If you change too many things at once, there’s no way you can know which one is the reason for the success.
- It sounds obvious, but actually, test the things you’re changing. Don’t Change things and forget about them; instead, follow the data and how the users are interacting and use that data to draw a conclusion.
- You’re going to have to be patient. Depending on how much traffic comes to your site, you may have to observe changes for longer than an extremely active site would require. The reason being, if you’re only getting a handful of visitors a week you can’t make an educated decision on those numbers. The sample size is just too small. For a big site that gets thousands upon thousands of visits, they have the numbers to support a decision much quicker. So, don’t rush it.
How Lucky Orange Helps you Learn About Your Website
Lucky Orange is a top website analysis tool that can show you exactly how people are interacting with your website which should directly influence how you choose to improve it.
Some of these helpful features include…
- Heatmaps: These show where your users are interacting with your site. This can show you which buttons are working, the parts of your site that draw attention, and where you need to focus your efforts.
A Lucky Orange heat map shows you exactly where your viewers are interacting with your site
- Realtime monitoring: See exactly how someone is using your site by literally following along with them.
- Recordings: For each visitor, Lucky Orange stores a recording of their time on your site so you can further analyze each visitor you obtain. These can also be uploaded to and viewed directly in HubSpot.
- Data: You can’t make a data-driven decision without data, and Lucky Orange provides many metrics and values from your site to help you.
The data available from Lucky Orange and how it's displayed make it easy to analyze your site
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