Whitepaper website optimization in 6 steps

Whitepaper website optimization in 6 steps

Piet van den Boer

www.pietvandenboer.nl

@pietvandenboer

Whitepaper – Website optimization in 6 steps. www.pietvandenboer.nl 1

Every once in a while you see a website that can certainly use some improvement.
Maybe you even have some doubts about your own website. And you should. Every
website can be improved. There’s always a way to help visitors reach their (or your)
goals better. This whitepaper aims to help you optimize your website in 6 easy steps.

Website optimization is of upmost importance for every company that has a website. By
optimizing your website, you make sure your marketing dollars are spent effectively.
After all, those expensive Google Adwords visitors should be of added value to you. An
increase in conversion rate from 3% to 4% can be very lucrative. Often, even more
lucrative than increasing the number of visitors to your website. Besides, optimizing your
website is of added value to you all the time, not only when you’re running an Adwords
campaign.

Website optimization cycle
The website optimization cycle can be used to optimize your website for Usability and
Conversion rate. The conversion rate of your website is the percentage of visitors that
‘convert’ to prospect or customer. You can measure the number of sales for this purpose,
but also the number of subscribers to your email newsletter could be a good indication. If
you don’t sell any products online, the number of people that fill in a contact form or ask
for a call-back could be of use to determine your website’s conversion rate.

Usability is defined as followed:

The extent to which visitors to a website are able to reach their goals.

Optimizing websites is a continuous process, a cycle. There’s always room for
improvement, even a 0,1% raise in conversion rate can mean a huge difference in sales.
Besides: What worked well yesterday, may not work at all today! So it’s of great
importance to keep optimizing your website. That’s what you use the Website
Optimization cycle for:


The Website optimization cycle

1. Problem analysis
There are many methods for problem analysis. The ones we will discuss here are the
following:

1. Webstatistics analysis
2. Expert review
3. User test
4. Eye tracking / Mousetracking
5. User feedback tools


WEBSTATISTICS ANALYSIS

Google Analytics dashboard

This is the first step in the website optimization cycle. Using the statistics program of your
website, you can find out where improvement is most needed on your website. A
commonly used (free) program for web analytics is Google Analytics. You might find out
that a lot of visitors immediately leave your website, if they enter via a certain source.
This might mean that the message which gets those visitors on your website doesn’t
correspond with the landing page. You can also find out which step in the sales funnel
has the highest attrition rate. You might be asking too much information in your forms, or
the forms just aren’t very intuitive.

Context is very important in determining the meaning of metrics. Always look at what you
and your visitor are trying to achieve on the specific page that you’re measuring, before
you try to add meaning to outcomes.

To see if your website is effective, you can look into several metrics. For instance:

Bounce rate
This is the percentage of visitors that only visits one page on your website. When the
bounce rate on a certain page is very high, visitors enter your website on this page and
leave without visiting any other page. This can be both a positive and a negative thing,
depending on the purpose of this page.

When the page is a FAQ page, this might be a good thing. After all, the purpose of this
page is to provide satisfying answers to visitors, as fast as possible. Visiting just one
page could mean that visitors got their satisfying answer on that one page and left. To be
sure about this, there are also some qualitative methods you can use. We will discuss


those later on.

A high bounce rate can also be an indicator that a certain page isn’t very effective. For
instance, if your product page has a high bounce rate, this is probably not very good.
Your goal with this page is, after all, getting visitors to buy the product. If they leave
immediately after visiting the product page, they haven’t bought the product. They also
haven’t put it on their profile’s wish list or used your sharing buttons to tell their friends
about it.

There is no ideal bounce rate, it all depends on the goals you and your visitor have. A
bounce rate of 30% can be very good and very bad, depending on those goals. Start by
determining your baseline, and work from there in the direction that best suits your goals.

Exit pages
Which pages are most often the last page visited on your website? The log-out screen
for an online banking website is a very predictable candidate for that website’s top 3, but
when the second screen of your sales funnel is high on this list, you might want to look
into that.

Time on page / site
These metrics can also help you determining the effectiveness of your website. But,
before you try to add meaning to them, first look at your goals. When visitors spend an
average of 1 minute on a blog of 500 words, you know something is wrong: They don’t
read your blog. At least not all of them. And not entirely.

Most of the times it’s best to look at the more specific of these two metrics, time on page.
Improvements to your website are done per page, so you should look at the metrics for
the individual page you want to improve. The time on site can however be helpful to you,
for instance to determine which pages are way off the site average. These are the first
pages to look at for improvements or to learn from for the rest of your website.

A high time on page can really mean two things: Either the visitor is consuming a lot of
information, or the visitor can’t find what he’s looking for. For a media website or a
branding website - or even an e-commerce website with video’s and pictures on its
product pages – a high time on page can be a good thing. Since the goal is to have


visitors consume a lot of media so you can sell advertisements, get them to engage with
the brand or help them through their buying process, the time on page indicates success.

A low time on page can also mean two things: Either the visitor didn’t like the content on
the page, or he immediately found what he was looking for.

Pages per visit
Pages per visit often correlates with time on site and time on page. This metric works
roughly like these other two metrics: What indicates a success depends on the goals you
have set.

A lot of pages per visit for a service website can indicate that visitors aren’t able to find
the answers to their questions.

Optimizing by using web statistics

For a media company, the pages per visit can be an important goal. A lot of
advertisements are still sold per 1000 views, so more pages per visit means more $$$.
An increase is in pages per visit is easily accomplished: Just add a break between every
200 words, only show a teaser on you homepage and have every video, picture and
podcast start in a new screen. There are a lot more techniques that you can use to
increase the number of pages per visit, but you aren’t really working on your long-term
goals like this. You’re probably annoying your visitors, which might not even come back a
second time.

It’s important not to focus on just one metric, but to always look at the big picture. Just as
visits per month are no real metric for success - give me 100 dollar and I’ll give you
10.000 visitors, easily – pages per visit alone aren’t a measure for the level of
engagement your content triggers.


EXPERT REVIEW

An expert review is a review you can do yourself, without using fancy tools or web
statistics. What you do need, is an understanding of several methods you can use to
assess your website. The methods we will discuss in this whitepaper are the following:

 Eisenberg’s Optimization Hierarchy
 Cialdini’s six weapons of influence
 Decision Modes
 Trust

Eisenberg’s Optimization Hierarchy

A few years ago, Robert Eisenberg developed the Optimization Hierarchy. You could
read this hierarchy like you read the Maslow pyramid: Work your way up, from the most
fundamental necessities for your website, to the most sophisticated ways to optimize
your website. Without the base of the pyramid, there’s no need to focus at the higher
levels:

Eisenberg’s Optimization Hierarchy


Functional

“Does my website work?”

Check everything that’s needed to successfully use your website, like: Uptime, links and
buttons that don’t work, 404 pages, pictures that don’t load etc.

Accessible

“Is my website accessible for everyone who wants to visit it? ”

Things you can check to answer this question are:
- Cross-browser compatibility  Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera,
Safari. Also check popular older versions of these browsers. To see which
versions are most important, look at your web statistics
- Mobile appearance of your website  Do you have a mobile website? Does it
work on the most popular devices (also on tablets)? If you don’t have a specific
mobile website, are visitors able to use your website on their mobile devices?
- Accessibility for the visually impaired Do you have text-to-speech options and
the possibility to adjust text size? Check the use of signal colors: For someone
who is colorblind, the colors green and red can look exactly the same. If you use
those signal colors, also use text.
- Readability  There are different levels of readability in texts. It’s important to
match your texts with the level of education and knowledge you expect your
visitors to have. An easy tool to calculate the readability of your texts is the
Readability Calculator, find it here. This tool also shows you which sentences you
should consider revising, because of long, complex words or phrases

Usable

“Is my website easy to use?”

When the previous two levels are sufficiently improved, you can focus on how usable
your website is. Your website works and everyone can access it, so now it’s time to see if
your visitors can actually achieve their goals on your website. This is all about meeting
expectations and using conventional design elements.


Some things to look at are:

Navigation

- The search box  Place it where people expect it. In the top right corner. Have it
work like a Google search box, because that’s the search box, to which all other
search boxes will be compared.
- Breadcrumbs  Use them. Preferably somewhere near the top of the page. This
gives your visitors a sense of orientation, even when they enter your website via
one of your online marketing campaigns
- Links  Make them stand out by using another color or underlining them, or both.
This also works the other way around: your visitors expect text that stands out like
this to be clickable.
- Buttons  If something looks like a button, it should act like a button. Always
make them clickable.

Lay-out and content

- Your logo (probably in the top left corner)  It must be clickable, and it must
direct visitors to your homepage. Why? Because that’s how it works on the
internet, and that’s what your visitors expect.
- Useful links  Links to information about your company, career opportunities,
your privacy policy and partner program: Put them at the bottom of your page.
- Text vs. images  Internet users scan more than they read. Make sure your text
isn’t too long and that you use images to make your point

Page footer on Amazon.com


Intuitive

“Are there any thresholds that can keep my visitors from converting?”

This is all about improving the user experience and removing of thresholds for your
visitors. Uncertainties and a lack of trust are a big threshold for online shoppers. Early in
the buying process you’ll want to inform your visitors about: Return policy, shipping
costs, specific product specifications (use detailed descriptions and pictures / videos).

Trust is another important factor that can remove thresholds in the buying process, as
well as the Decision Modes. We will discuss both later on in this Whitepaper.

Persuasive

“Is my website able to seduce visitors?”

This is the last phase, but also the phase that can have the biggest impact on your
website’s conversion rate. When everything else is working fine, you can think about
seducing your visitors to buy your products, to sign up for your newsletter or to make an
appointment.

Some great tools to use here are Cialdini’s six weapons of influence.

For an example of how to assess a webpage using Eisenberg’s ‘Hierarchy of
optimization’, see Appendix 1.

Cialdini’s six weapons of influence

Imagine having to extensively think about every decision you make, all day every day.
When you wake up you weigh the pros and cons of taking a shower compared to
skipping the shower and arriving at work 15 minutes early. You go downstairs and you
can choose between cereal, bread, steak and ice cream for breakfast, or having no
breakfast at all. That will cost you about 30 minutes, easily. When you finally arrive at the
train station (after extensive deliberation of course), there’s an evacuation. What should
you do? There are a lot of things to think about, you can’t just decide that.


Or can you?

In his book ‘Influence’, Robert Cialdini (Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing
at Arizona State University) explains how we have a tendency to lapse into automatic
patterns of behavior, that help us make decisions quickly. One of those is commitment
and consistency: If you have already decided something is the best choice (cereal in the
morning) you don’t have to go through the whole process of deciding that every morning.
Saves time, doesn’t it?

Also, authority helps us make decisions. Those police officers telling you to leave the
train station have authority on the subject. You are inclined to trust their judgment and to
follow their advice, because of that authority.

Cialdini calls these automatic patterns of behavior ‘Weapons of influence’, because you
as a salesman or marketer can use them to get website visitors to buy your products. In
total Cialdini distinguishes six Weapons of influence. We’ll discuss them one by one.

1. Social proof
One shortcut to a quick decision is to look at what others have decided and just follow
them. We humans like to do that. When a group of people makes a certain decision, it’s
safe to make the same decision.

Remember when we lived in the Stone Ages? When our group started running one way,
wouldn’t we just follow them? Instead of extensively analyzing just how big the threat of
that fire / animal / enemy was, we would follow. We still do.

So, show your website visitors what other people have chosen, what they think about a
certain product, service or FAQ answer. Help people decide, by showing them what
others decided.

You can do this by showing reviews, star ratings, Facebook Likes, shares and tweets.
Also, by showing them that people who bought this, also bought that. One company
that’s pretty good at this is Amazon.com.


Social proof on Amazon.com

2. Authority
We can’t always trust the group’s judgment. Sometimes matters are pretty complicated,
and we need an expert, someone with authority. People with authority generally are
believed to have knowledge, wisdom and/or power. That’s why we tend to trust their
judgment. Often authorities are famous, or wear uniforms and have titles. That’s how we
recognize them.

Companies often use famous people to promote their products, or dentists (in uniform) to
promote toothpaste. Experience also is an indicator of authority. By showing the years of
experience or the number of (big) clients you have, people can think of you as an
authority. This means they will trust your judgment over someone else’s. Rackspace
focusses at the big number of Fortune 100 companies that uses their services.

Authority on Rackspace.com


3. Scarcity
When things are hard to get, we tend to value them higher (sounds familiar?). To us,
scarcity is an indicator of quality or popularity (see social proof). Not just the scarcity in
numbers of products, also the scarcity in time has this effect. For instance a discount that
expires in two days creates a scarcity in time. Scarcity works in two ways:

- Products that have recently become scarce, are valued higher than products that
have been scarce for some time
- When we have to compete with others for the scarce product, the scarcity effect is
stronger

A website that applies this principle so good it’s almost scary, is Booking.com.

Scarcity on Booking.com

4. Sympathy
Sympathy also is an important factor in Cialdini’s Weapons of influence. When we have
to make a decision, people that we have sympathy for can influence us heavily. Whether
we have sympathy for the person promoting a product, or for the company that actually
sells it. Sympathy depends on the following factors:

 Physical attractiveness
 Similarity to ourself


 Possitive associations
 Fame
 Compliments

Sympathy on Heineken.com

5. Commitment & Consistency
When we make a decision, most of the times we stick to it. When we say we like a
certain company, or we have an interest in a certain product, that’s not something that
changes easily. Even our smallest actions can influence our future behavior or attitude
towards a brand.

On your website, you can leverage this by making it possible to ‘like’ products, videos, or
your own Facebook page. Also, you can make it possible for visitors to add products to
their wish list, so that they already decide they want it. Another way is to have people fill
out surveys or polls in which they can review your company, products or service. This
can also work with public reviews on your website. Of course, your products and service
have to be good 


Consistency on Bestbuy.com

6. Reciprocity
Do something for someone else and that person feels obligated to do something for you.
This is the basic premise of reciprocity. This is actually why trade was possible when
there wasn’t any police or government yet. We as people feel we need to compensate
proportionally what others have given us. That’s just how we (most of us) are wired.

This works two ways:

- Give something away and your visitor will be more inclined to buy something
- Make concessions, and your visitor will feel like he / she has to do the same

For instance, Audible gives away a lot of audiobooks for free to potential customers.
They then try to sell them subscriptions.


Reciprocity (and sympathy) on Audible.com

These 6 weapons of influence can be used on any website, to try to increase the
conversion rate. Combining these weapons of influence could also negatively affect the
outcomes, although this differs per website and even per user. That’s why it’s very
important to test every change. If it doesn’t work, change it back and try something else.

Decision modes

Another tool to review your website are the Decision Modes. This is based on the Myer
Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and on Jung’s theory of personality types. Through an
elaborate test you find out which personality type you are. This says something about
how you process information, in what kind of environment you feel comfortable and how
you make decisions.

What we will focus at here, is the way people process information and make their
decisions. There are four ways to process information, which result in four types of
people. Everyone acts like each of these types sometimes, depending on the situation.
Every website should therefore be designed to assist each of these types in making an
informed purchasing decision. You can review your website for each of these types, to
see if the information visitors need is available to them.


4 decision modes

1. Competitive
The competitive visitor wants his information fast en factual. Lists of important facts and
bullet points work very well for this visitor.

2. Spontaneous
The spontaneous visitor wants his information fast too, but he’s more sensitive to
emotion. Actions and offers work very well for him.

3. Humanistic
The humanistic visitor will take his time and is sensitive to emotion. Testimonials,
pictures and videos of people are very important to this type.

4. Methodological
The methodological visitor takes his time to look for factual details. Detailed product
specifications, return policy and website security can be important for this type.


All 4 decision modes on Mint.com

For more information about the Decision Modes and the Mint example, watch this video.

Trust

One of the most important things when people buy on the internet, is trust. People have
to trust the website they do business with. Michiel Heijmans names 7 ways to increase
trust on your website, in his blog post at Yoast.com:
1. Use clear and normal language
2. Testimonials
3. Use verified signs, like those of PayPal, MasterCard, McAfee etc.
4. Show pictures of real employees (no stock photo’s)
5. List your physical adress
6. Management of expectations – be transparent about prices, additional charges etc.
7. Show that you care about more than making money


USER TESTING

User testing is a very common way to review your
website. The only thing you need is a computer
with an internet connection and a test person.
This person will visit your site while you are sitting
next to her. She will ‘think aloud’, naming every
problem, difficulty or oddness she comes across
on your website. Afterwards you evaluate the
session, discussing everything she mentioned.

User testing can be done with and without specific assignments. To be sure certain
areas of your website are properly reviewed, specific assignments can be very helpful.
It’s important to choose assignments that match the goal of your website. For instance, a
website selling airline tickets could have the following assignments:

 Book the cheapest flight from New York to Amsterdam on October 12th 2012
 Find out how you can take out travel insurance on your trip, after you booked your
flight
 Find out from which airports you can fly to London, from New York
 Contact customer service

Ideally the people in your user tests are people that are representative for your target
audience.

EYE TRACKING & MOUSE TRACKING

You can also use techniques that help you determine which content on your website
attracts the most attention. Perhaps people don’t press your ‘buy button’ because it
doesn’t stand out enough. The color and size of the button are not always to blame;
sometimes other things on your page just attract more attention.

The principle of eye tracking speaks for itself: Track the eyes of people who visit your
website, so you know what they look at. This tells you a lot about the process people go
through before they actually click a link, and can provide very valuable data. Although it
can be very valuable, it’s also quite expensive to use eye tracking; every participant
needs to install special software on his computer, or come in for an eye tracking session.


Mouse tracking tracks the movement of the mouse cursor of visitors. This also gives
some insight in the process people go through when making decisions on your website.
Although it might be less accurate (your mouse cursor doesn’t always go where your
eyes go), mouse tracking is a lot cheaper than eye tracking and allows for quantitative
data collection as it works like web analytics software. You just install it on your website,
and it will automatically start collecting data. Some mouse tracking tools are free, others
have free trials. Try Picnet and SMT for example.

Both eye tracking and mouse tracking can deliver so called ‘heat maps’, which visualize
where people looked (or pointed their cursors) at most. This following example shows
that a baby looking at us captures our attention. Although it’s great to capture attention, it
distracts us from the message next to the baby. When the baby looks at the message (or
the ‘buy button’), so do we.

Eye tracking

USER FEEDBACK TOOLS

The last (but certainly not least) way you can easily analyze your website yourself is with
user feedback tools. You can use these to get qualitative and qualitative feedback on
your website by visitors. Platforms like Uservoice, Get Satisfaction and Kampyle offer
your visitors the opportunity to quickly and easily give feedback on your website,
products and / or service by giving thumbs up / thumbs down, smileys, ratings etc. It’s
also possible for them to add comments, ideas and complaints.

All this information will automatically be placed on a community, where visitors can
discuss and vote on the ideas and complaints. These kinds of communities can be very
valuable to a company. For instance, Mint.com uses Get Satisfaction to improve their
website, products and services and cut costs on customer service.


The success of a community behind the ratings and thumbs depends on active, involved
visitors. Unfortunately not every company has the luxury of such visitors. If not, it might
be a lot of work to build a worthwhile community.

City Beach Australia uses Kampyle for feedback on their website

2. Finding solutions
After analyzing your website, it’s time to find solutions for the problems you have found.
Besides a brainstorm session there you can also use the following two approaches:

1. Card sorting
2. Usabilla Discover


CARD SORTING

Card sorting is a method to find out the optimal
format of your website. It’s pretty simple: Make
cards for every part / every page of your website.
From the homepage to product pages and from
category pages to FAQ’s, every page needs a
card.

Ask a few people in your target group to organize the cards the way they find most
logical. They can adjust the names of the cards and group them if they want, as long as it
results in a navigation structure they find useful.

You can use this method ‘open’ and ‘closed’. Open means the whole structure can be
adjusted, closed means the main navigation is already decided. Open card sorting
usually involves smaller groups (5 -7 people) and has a qualitative goal. Closed card
sorting can be done by more groups to get quantitative results.

Of course it’s also possible to do this online, several companies offer online card sorting
tools like UX Punk and Optimal Workshop.

USABILLA DISCOVER

Usabilla Discover is a tool you can use to get inspired and share design ideas with your
coworkers. When you visit a website that has a design element you find beautiful /
effective / smart / user friendly you can easily save and share it. Usabilla is used as an
archive for design elements that can be used when thinking of solutions for usability
challenges on your own website.

It can also be used the other way around; find design elements on public profiles of other
Usabilla users to get inspired. All website elements are categorized, which makes it easy
to find specific solutions to your usability challenges.


3. Prioritize solutions

With a little luck your website analysis results in a lot of possible improvements to your
website. After a good brainstorm and an afternoon of browsing Usabilla you’re full of
ideas and are ready to start improving your website. This is the time to look at your
possible improvements and prioritize them. The things you want to change right away
may not be the things that are most needed to improve your conversion rate of customer
satisfaction.

By using user feedback tools you can have customers prioritize the improvements to
your website. They can vote for things they find important. Another way to prioritize is
‘Buy-a-feature’.

This works as follows: You estimate the costs of every improvement. Every coworker or
customer that takes part in ‘Buy-a-feature’ gets a budget that allows him or her to buy
only a part of the improvements that are on the list. The improvements that are bought
most during this ‘game’ get highest priority.

Innovation Games offers the possibility to play Buy-a-feature online, which makes it
easier to involve customers.

4. Designing solutions
The next phase is designing and building solutions. Even if you’re not a design expert,
it’s possible to visualize the improvements on your website. This might help you when
talking to the people that will actually design and build it.

For instance, you could use Cacoo. This is a relatively easy online tool that helps you
design wireframes and diagrams. It’s also possible to upload a screenshot of your own


website so that you can make adjustments in the Cacoo editor.

Using Cacoo for wireframing

5. Testing solutions
After the solutions are designed and build, it’s time to test them. You might be convinced
that they work, but that’s not a guarantee for success. Or like they say at Amazon.com:

Data trumps intuitions

Testing new features or adjustments to your website can be done several ways. We will
discuss some of them below:

A/B TEST

Your visitors are randomly shown two versions of your website; 50% sees version A,
which is the original without any adjustments, 50% sees version B which has been


improved. Looking at your web statistics you can easily see which version contributes
more to your website goals.

MULTIVARIATE TEST

Now you’re not just testing two versions, but more. In the case of the ‘buy button’ you
might want to adjust the color and the position of the button. You test a red button and a
blue one, positioned left and right on the screen. Now you have four different versions of
your website, which will be randomly shown to 25% of your visitors each. The best
version wins.

GOOGLE WEBSITE OPTIMIZER

Google offers a useful (free) tool to do these tests: The Google Website Optimizer.

6. Implementing
The last phase is the implementation. You have the results of your tests and choose the
version that works best. This can be either the original version of your website or an
improvement.

Are you done now? No, you start all over again, there’s always enough to improve!


Appendix 1

Level Score (1-10) Action Items

Functional 8 - Uptime 95%

Accessible 5 - Doesn’t work properly in Google Chrome
- No mobile website
- Improve readability

Usable 9

Intuitive 7 - No use of ‘Trust’
- Decision Modes good, focus more on
Spontaneous visitor

Persuasive 4 - Cialdini: Hardly used, only social proof
(Facebook likes per product & reviews)


Whitepaper website optimization in 6 steps

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