Have you ever landed on a website home page and found yourself lost in the navigation? Some companies design their website to list their services without thinking about how easy it is for a customer to navigate the website and find the answers they’re looking for. Easy navigation is one of the best ways to improve the customer experience and boost conversion along the customer journey. We all want to find what we’re looking for with minimal clicks.
Review the site map
What are the most important services you offer? The biggest sellers, the ones that get the most ‘hits’? These are your landing pages. Take a look at Castle’s homepage:
Castle’s customers invariably want to know about leasing, legal compliance, short term hire, buying a used minibus and training. These are the most popular services on offer and the ones that get the highest number of visitors to the pages.
The old website offered similar landing pages, but the content was aimed only at those who understood the technical language, meaning a newcomer would likely have to click through more pages to find their answers.
Who is your website designed to attract?
Of course, your website is talking to your customers, but what about the new ones? With Castle Minibus the website needs to appeal to both the school business leaders and bursars and the individual minibus drivers, all with experience of transport management and those without.
It’s no use using technical language that only people who have gone through the process of learning to drive a minibus would understand, this alienates the newcomers.
Take a look at the Training landing page:
The main page doesn’t assume the visitor knows what they need and asks the question they’re searching for the answer for. The drop-down menu features three choices for the individual who knows exactly what they want and can get straight there.
Engaging and attractive content
New, professional images in large display, videos, bullet points, information boxes and simple contact forms all help to break up the content and make it easier to see and digest. Sticking with the home page, the largest page containing the most information, it is clearly laid out with clickable elements throughout the page.
Slightly below the fold:
Further below the fold:
The homepage goes on to display; testimonials, an important social proof and confidence booster for any website; blogs, essential for injecting keyword search terms and updating content and a contact form.
What message does your website convey?
Castle’s old website focussed on services and the safe operation of minibuses. Whilst being ‘Champions of Minibus Safety’ is still the message the company wish to convey, they want to send the message that legal compliance is also at the heart of everything they offer to schools, with the aim of helping schools install a compliant safety system for school transport management. Every page on the new website has a segment dedicated to safety. ‘Safety First’ is written specifically for each page and is designed to punch home the ethos of the company. Compliance has its own landing page displaying the various training and events available to book, and a new email address with a dedicated compliance team behind it for customer support.
Easier website navigation increases customer engagement and conversions
From this screen shot of Google Analytics, comparing the first month of the new website to the last month of the old website, you can clearly see that customers are far more engaged. Website referrals have increased for organic referrals due to fresh content loaded with the correct keywords, paid search referrals are up thanks to a re-focused PPC campaign and social referrals are even up due to posts directing customers to more focussed website content.
And a dead giveaway that the easier website navigation is engaging customers better is that the number of pages visited per session is down, but visitors are spending more time on the pages they want. No more unnecessary clicks risking losing that conversion.
To talk about a review of your website and ensure it is working to engage your customers and make conversions, call 01993 224522 and speak to Lucy or email lucy@psmkt.co.uk. Our website pages talk more about websites and web copy.