Revamping Website Content for Improved User Experience

When companies build their website, they often focus so much on SEO, that they forget about the use experience. These days, Google's algorithms are advanced enough to figure out how well a user might experience a page and rank the search results accordingly. The fact is, most people go out to websites and review a company's website first, before they visit a store, or before they make the decision to buy something from the company.

Let's take a look at the user experience, why it's important, and why revamping your website might be in order.

Websites are still mostly text. Even when you are looking at images, there's text behind the scenes known as meta data that's at work. Google looks at those words first when someone types a query into their search engine box.

If your website content is confusing, laid out strangely, or in a font that is hard to read, the algorithms can tell that.

Make sure that you have headers, the layout of your page makes sense, the words are readable, and that the images are not interfering with the words on the page. This makes a page more easy to scan and improves the overall user experience.

Images and video are very important these days. The more someone viewing your website can view what you do, or see how it's done, the more favorable someone visiting your site will feel about it. However, it has to be done strategically and carefully.

Images that are too large, in pixel size and general height and width, will cause the page to load too slowly slowly. If your image is very big, it might take up most of the page, making it hard to find the text below it and important things like contact buttons.

Make sure your image is a size that works for your website and the CMS you are using. Images that are too high-def or too large in terms of file size, can slow everything down. Images that are too high and too wide are unpleasant and hard to view on the page. Keep it smaller and the user experience will be much better and spacing them out properly will allow the user to follow the page the way you want them to.

There are tools out there that can create what is called a heat map. The heat map shows you the home page or whatever page you have entered and where the user's eyes are more likely to visit first, then second, and so forth down the page. Tools like SEMRUsh and HotJar can provide this detail.

The heat map can show you how someone is scanning and reviewing your page. Are they looking at the things you really want them to see? Are they getting hung up on an image, rather than visiting the contact form?

Layout and flow are important to the user experience. You want the user to be able to easily follow the content on the page, scan the images, read the information and, hopefully, take time to either buy a product or fill in a contact form to become a potential lead. The more effective you can make the layout and flow, the better the user experience, the more likely they are to become a customer.

You spent so much time building your website. It feels like you just finished it, and already there are people telling you to revamp it. This is the nature of the internet these days. Google and other search engines are constantly changing what they look for on a website. To stay at the top of those search engine results for the industry and products you offer, it means creating fresh content on your website.

Rather than just jamming more and more onto your website, consider the user experience. Look at the images, the load times, the heat maps, layout and flow. If need be, don't be afraid to change everything, re-order the entire page and change it so that people have a better experience online, so they are more likely to become one of your customers or clients.