Creating a user friendly website is very important in these days. website that easy to use and navigate will help to keep visitors engaged and encourage to stay longer, increase the chances that they will interact with your site such as making a purchase or filling out a form.
User friendly website for SEO
Are you aware that Google search algorithm now also assigns weight to the user experience on your website. Rather, this is one of the main factors that Google uses to rank websites. So your website can rank higher in the search engines, if you improve the user experience by making it easier and intuitive to use. And this also means a natural increase in the number of people visiting your website and those who will share your content with their friends and followers.
Huge improvements in the field of artificial intelligence. Now a computer can tell with a very high level of confidence and accuracy if a website is high quality or not by using signals like:
- Ease of navigation scheme on the website.
- The proportion of advertising versus actual content on page.
- The amount of real activity that the website generates
In short, the website user experience is now a big factor in the SEO and traffic sphere.
How to Improve Website’s User Experience
Getting data about your website is the best way to improve your user experience. And two highly recommended tools for this are CrazyEgg and Google Analytics.
Bounce Rate
Google Analytics – Skim through your data and locate pages with very high bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit your website but leave without visiting any other page on it. A higher bounce rate is generally indicative of poor quality information on page which couldn’t satisfy the user. And low time spent on site is a very good indicator of poor user experience.
Try to dig out the reason behind the high bounce rate on these pages. Was it due to less content? Are the pages stuffed with too many ads? Is the navigation confusing? Improve these pages and then wait a few days to see how these affect your bounce rate stats. Keep improving content through out your website on a continuous basis.
Heat mapping tool
CrazyEgg.com – CrazyEgg is a heat mapping tool for your website. This tracks where the mouses of people mostly hover around and where they click most. By tracking this you can get an idea about:
- If you see that people hover their mouse at a specific area, it might be a confusing text and you may like to clarify the points in that paragraph further.
- Are people clicking on non-links, for example on a flowchart. Try to think deep that why more people are clicking on the flow chart? May be they want to see a bigger version of the flowchart. Try to upload a larger version of that.
- Visitors misclicking. For example, people might be clicking several times without success before finally clicking a link on your navigation. This might convey that your links are too small for easy clicking.
A lot of different kinds of information can be provided by heatmapping. Even if you are a not a regular user, you might sign up for thier one month free trial to find big black holes that are there relating to user experience on your website and it will help you to creating a user friendly website.
