Optimized & Converting web site; What next?

Optimized & converting web site

You have a web site and it is well- designed, optimized, and attracting visitors, and therefore converting. You are adding content regularly and ensuring that you have optimized your pages by applying SEO best practices. Is there anything else that you need to do?

What next?
How do you take your online presence to the next level?

One way is to continue to improve your web presence is by studying your analytics reports which has a ton of information such as, pages that are receiving maximum traffic, the higher converting pages, drop off points, bounce rates, path of entry, exit, and lots and lots more. Based on this data, you take actions and the process continues.

This age old principle of making  changes, and finding out the outcome of those changes after months ….will this continue to serve us, or should we resort to a more scientific way of applying changes and measuring results?

With the web evolving at a rapid pace, how can you ensure that your web pages are catering to and meeting the requirements of your end users?

Things around us are constantly changing, some of the technologies that we are using may get dated soon. We do need to take pro-active steps before it gets too late.

Experimenting and Testing Web Pages

Making small changes by optimizing content is a continuous process that we proactively do, after going over the analytics reports. But before making these changes, do we test these?

How would you know if the changes that you make will result in an optimized & converting web site?

For now most of us make changes and wait until such time that we have enough data to arrive at a conclusion. Optimizing is a continuous process and it is recommended that we do so…but what If we were to consider making major changes to our website, such as changing the page design, would we still go ahead and apply the changes without testing ?

Making critical decisions like changing your website design without testing would be leaving too many things to a chance, and will eventually results in waste of time, resources and effort! Think about it…with more and more of your visitors transacting on your website, can you really leave things to a chance?

Your website has a specific objective. Any activity that you perform on your website has to align with the objective in order to get the maximum possible returns. The basic objective is to have an optimized & converting web site! This is where experimenting and testing steps in.

Experimenting with different elements of a page, creating different versions, and testing out which version provides the best possible outcome, is by far one of the better ways of aligning with your website objectives. And this in turn will result in happier customers.

A win-win situation!

An example below shows, the control and the Variant pages, these can be as basic as testing out a different title in the variant pages to something as major as changing the entire design!

A/B testing is perhaps the best and the easiest ways of starting off with the basic level of testing your web pages. Many of us have not gone this route because of lack resources, time, and knowledge. However, there is a solution now.

The good news is Google is now offering A/B testing to everyone for free. Google has recently launched “Google Optimize: which lets you do carry out A/B test for free. It takes just about 10-15 min to get started. Here is the link to the Google optimize URL:
https://www.google.com/analytics/optimize/features/

Try it out, you won’t be disappointed. Finally, there is a ready solution that will enable all of us to test and apply changes easily. It is quite exciting how we can now easily run a test using a variant page and arrive at a conclusion (based purely on scientific methods) on which one of the pages should be  retained!

Please share your thoughts on A/B testing or any testing that you have performed on your site, and the results that you got.