We always say that creating a badass website is the key to getting customers. That is why there are so many designers and the best content writers who labor to create the best combination of tried and tested texts and designs to create everything from home pages to product pages and more. But what if you’re not able to find any traction despite it?
It is true. There are many multiple cases of companies working day and night to create the best space on the internet to show off their brands, only to realize that three things are happening -no one is showing up. It is those moments that make many think –why bother creating a beautiful landing website if it isn’t working?
That is where you come to realize the barrier between your expectations of what people may think of and what they actually think.
Why Do the Majority of Websites Fail?
Web design is like building a house. You put the pieces of designs together to create a navbar, a header, a footer, the main page, and the menus, and then you add paint by selecting themes. Adding icing on that website cake are the extra sprinkles of design, an animated pop-up here, and a text responding quirky to a click there.
However, trouble arrives when such designs when designers overlook the most critical component of this equation –the users.
Without understanding the needs of the users, a designer building a website is like an interior designer building a house. From SEO consultants to marketers, other elements must come into play to create a strong foundation for this “website” house that customers feel safe checking out.
Let’s get out of this analogy and dive into the technicalities of why the majority of websites fail.
Forgetting that the User is a Priority
The moment companies lay eyes on an initial design draft and start basking in its good looks, ego takes hold, and users are forgotten. Companies forget how people would even find the login button on the home page or where they would go to complain. They also forget that some elements in the page might be “over-designed”, meaning they might look great from an aesthetic aspect, but from a user’s point of view, it is great.
Making it easy to navigate your website is the most important thing to take care of. You want people to come and look at your website. If you place needless obstacles in front of the people, they will do the obvious thing –bounce off your website and go to your competitor.
Everything from extra navigation steps to a form that is just hidden a tad below where it should be placed is enough to tick off a visitor. Taking care of all the semantics, no matter how pedantic they look, is, therefore, crucially important.
Not being on the search engine
“It looks good; naturally, it will get attention without me doing anything” –is an ideology that has never worked for anyone. Regardless of how good your product looks, the only thing that will compel people to look at it is if you display it in a place where it can be seen.
In the context of web design, that would be the search engine. If you have created a great design but have forgotten to pay heed to search engine optimization, your website won’t show anywhere. And since your click-through rates (the number of times people click on the search result) depend solely on the impressions (the number of times your website appears on the search result), you won’t get any traction.
However, it is foolhardy to think that only content makes your website searchable. It is the design phase from where the SEO starts, so you have to create a better architecture for your website so that the website crawlers can easily read your website.
Pages are Loading Slow
The number of people who bounce off your website contributes to your website’s “bounce rate”. And if your bounce rate is high, your website engagement is low. Do you know one of the biggest reasons people come and leave your website without seeing anything?
Slow speed. Unless your website loads everything from texts to images to buttons within 5 seconds, don’t expect your visitor to stick around. What is the reason behind a website’s slow speed? There is a multitude of reasons behind it.
Unoptimized Images
A good designer loves great images. While there is nothing inherently wrong with that, quality has costs. High-quality images come packed with high resolution, making the image bigger.
Javascript Issues
Javascript is truly a dynamic gift to your website. Adding dynamic elements to your web pages breathes life into them. However, implementing them haphazardly is a recipe for disaster, which generally comes in the form of the site taking too long to load
Unclean Code
Two types of code can do the same job, but only one kind of code consumes less space. To complete the task quickly, many designers grab the templates from stack overflow or other similar sites, paste them on an editor, make some adjustments, and run the page. Most often, these codes have stray lines of useless content that put additional load on the page
Not Paying attention to Mobile Devices
When working on desktops, it is easy to forget that over 50% of global internet users use mobile phones to interact with a website. It means that if you’re not optimizing your website for mobile devices, you’re overlooking more than 50% of your customer base.
It is a serious web design “crime” not to have a mobile version of a website. We “say” crime because it is in demand and is easy to do, yet many companies ignore it. When it comes to optimizing your website for mobile, you have three choices in front of you:
One, create an app. Second, design a responsive website. And third, redirecting people to the mobile version of your website.
Now that you know the issues, you might think that all you need to do is fix them, and people will start coming to your website. “It might get easier for me,” -you might think, right?
No. Even though these issues are surface-level, there are so many layers to them that you won’t understand the main reason your website is failing.
That’s where Hortjar comes into play.
What is Hotjar and How Does it Work?
Creating a website is easy, but getting insights about how the user responds to it so that you can deliver what you promised, is difficult. Google Analytics is great, but its information can be too technical to understand. And while you can get information such as page traffic, the churn rate, or the drop-off rate. But what good having access to that information is if you do not have an idea of the reason behind those stats?
That is one of the issues Hotjar aims to fix -it gives you the exact insight you need to determine what your customers think about you.
Hotjar is a product experience insights tool. Armed with behaviour analytics and feedback data, Hotjar gives you access to data that you can actually use to understand your customers, including. They include heat maps, session recordings, surveys, and feedback.
Does it mean that it is made to replace legacy tools like Google Web analytics? No. Hotjar is designed to complement those tools by adding to them insights that you can use to know what your audience really thinks of you.
Here are the benefits of using Hotjar:
It will tell you visually how to empathize with your users
It is no news that in order to sell, you have to understand the psycheof your customers. However, the standard way you go about understanding it is abstract at best. Think about it.
Traditional analytical tools, from Google Analytics to Mixpanel, give you a lot of information about your website or your products, but do they tell you why your customers behave the way they do?
At best, these tools give you a bird’s eye view, which is great. However, if you want to empathize with your audience, you must come down and stand beside them to understand their requirements –that’s where Hotjar shines. It puts you in the shoes of your customers and helps you see your website the way your customer sees it.
Heatmaps
With heatmaps, you get the aggregate user behaviour of each webpage. From where the users are clicking to where they are scrolling and which items have their most attention is the information you will get through heatmaps.
Heatmaps are designed to give answers to one basic question to marketers -why are my users not converting? It tells if the users are
- Able to reach valuable content or are unable to see them
- Navigating to the main links of your page properly, such as CTAs, opt-ins, and others, and taking that opportunity to become leads
- Getting diverted because of the non-clickable elements of your page
- Encountering any issue with their device
Recordings
This is one of Hotjar’s biggest features. It lets you step into the shoes of one individual user and run their recorded sessions on your website. By watching a recording of your user’s behavior, you won’t have any ambiguity when it comes to deciding where your website is faltering and where it is doing the best.
With these recordings, you get access to
- Mouse movements that let you know which options your users hovered over
- Scrolling to let you to know the extent to which your visitors explored your page
- Clicks that tell you which options your users chose –its importance is obvious
- And keyboard strokes to learn about what they are mostly searching for on your website.
The details you get from the recordings will let you empathize with your user’s experiences properly. It will also tell you how your user interacts with the elements of your website, what bugs they are encountering, and what factors are responsible for pushing the users away from your website.
You can put someone to go through 10 to 20 recordings a day, and you will have enough data to reach an informed decision about your website’s design and user interactivity.
Collecting Feedback and explaining User’s Behaviour
You might think that just because you have seen the recordings and heat map, you can draw conclusions about the drawbacks of your websites based on the repeated scrolls and the clicks –don’t think that way.
People are moody, sometimes they scroll on a website without any reason, and sometimes,their own hardware is the reason behind their inability to interact with your website properly. However, you can’t just guess these reasons. That’s where Hotjar’s feedback feature comes into play.
Hotjar takes a unique approach to implementing feedback with user experience in the form of:
Surveys
Why do the users leave?
With pop-up surveys, you can put forth important questions to your visitors. You can ask them about their experience, and what is making them leave the website. You can also ask if something almost stopped them from interacting with a particular element of your website.
Measuring the Exit Intent
Users exit the websites for three reasons. One, they have found what they were looking for. Two, they didn’t find what they were looking for. And three, they couldn’t interact with the websites properly. Through the survey page, you can ask ‘what are you leaving the website? “. You can make it easier for them to answer by giving them options to choose from.
Asking what the users are looking for
If you come across a user who is pressing on a particular option and isn’t getting anywhere, it means two things. Either the button is wrong, or there is no button, to begin with. Here, you can ask what your users are looking for.
Feedback
Another expendable widget that the website provides is feedback. The feedback widget is highly unique and immensely contextualized. It will help you:
Get Better Insights into what your website is doing wrong or right
Using the feedback widget, your users will be able to highlight specific things they like or don’t like about your page. It can be the nature of the navigation pane or the correction of some content. For instance, if a customer can say that your services are too expensive, you would be informed about it right away.
Iterative Improvement
The feedback module will let you ask questions whenever you see a customer going through a hiccup when trying to interact with your material. You can collect feedback to improve your website constantly.
Deep Insights with no steep learning curve
Many legacy analytics systems, like Google Analytics, require you to put a lot of time and effort into understanding them. It is one of the reasons why these tools have their very own courses. With Hothar, however, you will have access to tools that won’t only be less complex to interact with but also offer you an insight into your user’s behavior.
However, what makes Hotjar even better is that these insights will be provided in a less clunky and more straightforward manner.
Setting up Hotjar is extremely easy and doesn’t require anything more than adding a tracking code to the snippet of your website. And secondly, the way Hotjar delivers the insights to the users is simple –which is great for everyone, from the product manager to the marketer, to understand it.
Works for Team of All sizes
Whether you’re running a small-sized team focusing on lean UX on a small budget or are part of a global enterprise, Hotjar is one of those rare shoes that fits all sizes. Furthermore, in order to make your experience even more streamlined, Hotjar combines all four major insight tools in one.
Affordability is another factor that this tool is getting the attention of so many. That said, it is understandable why many would consider some of the features of our website to be a “privacy invasion”. However, Hotjar is CDPR-ready and takes a privacy-by-design approach to protect the users.
How to Get More People to See Your Website?
While the insights Hotjar will provide you will be more than enough to drive more traffic to your website, you should never forget to focus on the fundamentals of what makes your website more searchable by Google.
If you go online, you’re going to find over 50 things you can implement to make your website perform better. However, let us keep things simple and discuss 10 critical tips to get more people to see your website.
Create Valuable Content
When your aim is inbound marketing, your goal is to attract the right customers for your company. In order to do that, you need to create valuable content, which in turn requires you to understand the buyer persona of your customers. The four ways you can make a valuable blog post are:
- Identifying the buyer persona: Conduct qualitative and quantitative research to find a buyer persona that your brand sells to. Understand their pain points and make a note of them.
- Dive into SEO research:Go online and dive deep into what your buyer persona is searching for. Create a list of keywords and analyze the content your top-ranking competitors are delivering.
- Start writing a draft:Start working on writing your first draft that aims to answer your audience’s questions. Implement interesting angles so that what you write is different from what people are used to reading online,
- Publish your content:After a couple of rewrites, publish your posts and focus on SEO tools to optimize your content. Yoast SEO is one tool that has helped many content creators; even its free version is amazing
- Promote the content: Finally, promote your content through reliable social media channels or email newsletters to generate traffic.
Create topic Clusters
Creating a pillar topic cluster on your web page. Pillar content is a longer blog post (like this one) that covers a wide array of topics. You can then write derivative cluster content or supporting blog posts to direct people to the pillar content. It is a long-term growth strategy; results show that it can increase website traffic by manifolds.
Focus on Organic Social Media
Organic social media is not a novel strategy, but since it is used sparsely, marketers forget about it. Organic social media content refers to content that lets you directly connect with an audience. From Instagram stories to live videos to Facebook messenger, organic social media has all the tools to interact directly with your audience.
For instance, using Facebook’s automated lead generation feature, you can create a chatbot experience and link content offers. Treat it as a lead magnet and see not only your traffic increasing but your visitors converting into leads.
Assess the Website thoroughly
Let us go back to Hotjar. It allows you to analyze your website’s performance deeply. Combine it with traditional analytical tools, and you will get all the information you need to drive more traffic to your website.
Leverage Influencers
Influencer marketing has been around for a long time, but it was only during the pandemic that companies really started to pay attention to it. An influencer’s good word will allow you to funnel their audience toward your website, increasing your traffic.
Create an Email List
Don’t forget to re-market your products to your current visitors. Create an email list and keep your visitors constantly engaged with your brand. This strategy only works if your email list increases, so you must use these tips to create better emails
- Create content offers that prompt users to share their email on your website
- Use a newsletter sign-up form: Every page of your website must have a sign-up form. It will allow a delightful visitor to become more integrated with your brand by becoming a lead.
Engage with the Community
Your brand recognition will drive more traffic to your website. And to get the brand renowned, you must engage with your audience. Start a Facebook Group discussion, go to public forums, or talk to your followers on social media –do everything in your power to engage with your community, so they feel the desire to see your website.
Do Not Forget On-Page SEO
From keyword density to the right URL to readability, on-page SEO optimization techniques are non-optional. You have to engage with them. Ensure every page has your primary keyword inserted properly in page instances like meta title, page title, meta description, image alt-texts, and URL.
However, do keep in mind not to overdo it. Keep the keyword density within the 1 to 2% range. While the official Google channels say that you need 10 to 15%, following that logic will clutter your website with keywords, which would impact your content’s readability –leading to customers leaving your website without engaging much.
Focus on Quality Backlinks
If you position yourself as an authority in an industry, you have a higher chance of being seen by your audience. One way of achieving that is through the pillar content approach, but the other, easier way is to use quality back links.
Quality back links allow you to establish authority online by having your content on reputable websites. Guest blogging is one of the most powerful and tried-and-tested ways to acquire quality back links. However, ensure your content game is on point before you attempt that.
Historical Optimization
Historical optimization is the most underrated way to improve your chances of getting people to see your website. It means going back into your old blogs, optimizing them, and updating them according to today’s standards.
Introduced by Pamela Vaughan, the principal marketing manager of Hubspot, Historical optimization is a way for a website to keep on generating traffic using old blogs and not only relying on new ones.
How to Get More Conversions
Once you have crafted the content and implemented a great SEO strategy to get people to see your website, it is time to make them stay long enough to convert them. That’s where you’re going to need tools like Hotjar to work their magic. But to use it correctly, here are some pointers for you to follow:
Deeply understand your selling point
You know what you’re selling, but do you really know what you’re selling? This question might confound a lot of you, but it is an important question to ask. You see, saying what you are selling is one thing, and saying you understand your product is another.
So, understand your product. Take time to introspect and find the most basic features of your product that your visitors can empathize with. And then, write it down on the CTA or the content.
This “less is more philosophy” removes the fluff and hits the mark from the very start, which leads to not wasting your visitor’s time. And when there is no time to waste, your visitors can haste to buy from you.
Focus on Making your Website Even better
Use all four tools that Hotjar offers to make your website better. Use the heat map and recording to find out where you’re lagging, and use the feedback and surveys to learn how to improve yourself. The closer you get to a version of a website your customers truly want, the faster you can convert.
Focus on Blogging a Lot
Blogs are your way of communicating your solutions to the audience. The better you communicate with them, the faster they will trust you. Use the feedback tools of Hotjar to learn about the pain points of your customers and address those concerns through blogs. It will help you broadcast your solutions better.
Creating Content that helps your website get more visitors and conversions
We know that we have talked about content a lot but bear with us. Let us tell you how you must structure your content with the CTA (call to action)to get the best results.
Introductory Content
When introducing your brand through the home page, add a proper CTA at the end to draw your customers in. Or, if you have provided enough context of what you deliver through that introductory paragraph, you can use the CTA “Book a Call”.
Product Review
When you’re writing a product review, naturally, using the CTA “buy now” would be the best. However, it is better to give your users some breathing room by slowly attracting them to the product. Use the “Go to Product” to let your users explore the product more.
Releasing new Feature
Suppose you are releasing a new feature for your software product, then the best CTA to use in this case would be “Get the Upgrade now”. The “Get the upgrade” part clearly informs your visitors of the action they must take, and the “now” creates urgency.
Releasing a new reporting tool
When launching a product such as a reporting tool, you don’t need to resort to “buy now”. This CTA is old and won’t prompt much action. Instead, take a more contextual approach with ‘Get your free report now “. It will give your users a taste of what’s to come. Secondly, it will also act as a lead magnet.
Bottom Line
We have dove deep into how to know what people really think of your website, and you now have the tools to optimize your website better to get more traffic and more conversions. Hotjar has emerged as one of the most critical tools in this regard. By providing the right mix of information and suggestions, it arms you with the knowledge to optimize your website for the better.
Tools like Hotjar have captured the market’s imagination because people are taking a no-code approach, and they need better information that doesn’t require any deciphering. By providing a simple, realistic, and straightforward detail, such tools are removing the learning curve that deters most marketers –which is an inclusive thing to do in this economy.