Are you running enough tests on your website?

How do you know if your website content is working in your favour?

“Testing…I’ve never heard of that? I know what I’m doing and my designer never even mentioned this before, so why would I bother”

Sound familiar? It’s an all too common conversation I had these days with business owners who are just not into their website content. Often it can be a struggle just to begin with good content writing let alone start to think about testing to see if the words we’ve chosen are the right ones that connect with our readers.

There’s a lot more to it than just words of course. Coming up with new and innovative ways to engage your reader needs the help of creative minds. You need someone on your A Team, who can bring ideas to the table and have the ability to see these ideas to completion and get them happening on your website.

There’s many elements to test on a web page and if you’re running a blog too (and I hope you are), then there are two very different approaches to testing pages and posts.

Testing landing page copy, improving navigation and other elements can lead to better conversion rates. What I mean by that is, you can mix it up a bit, don’t get stuck with the same design. Try new things. If you’re not good with this, employ someone to do it for you, someone who understands online marketing and online human behaviour. Testing is good for search engine optimisation.

Here’s a really informative infographic showing the frequency of testing and types of testing that are carried out by website owners.

Highlights of this web page test survey reveals:

1. Call-to-action buttons are tested the most, by 72% of online retailers. This exhaustive testing incorporates testing button sizes, shapes, colours and positioning. The words on the button, the font and text size, whether the text is BOLD, italic or UPPER and lower case.
2. 71% tested their page layout (the online version of traditional merchandising).
3. Only 43% of respondents tested images. Images provide massive conversion rate opportunities, not only to communuicate with your audience but also to build good SEO into your page by working with the ALT (alternative tag), which allows you to place your core page keywords inside this tag. Search engines read these tags and uses these (as well as other factors) to decide what your web page or blog post is about.
4. 63% tested the copy (the words that make up the web page).
5. 49% tested offers and promotions, this could be testing banner design, colour, size, orientation and placement.
6. 43% tested the product selection process, (stepping through the order process from the perspective of the customer).
7. 49% tested the checkout page (one of the most important pages on your website that has a massive exit rate).

There’s a whole lot more info in the graphic below.

Original inspiration article.

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