Ensure website success with a prototype you can test:
- First, build your prototype. Use any tool that you like.
- Test it with 3–6 people. Having more than 6 people isn’t worth it.
- We are trying to establish, do people understand what you’re offering, can they find the stuff on it.
- Use anyone outside the company for testing. If the prototype is related to old people or children then use older people/children for testing.
- Run the testing for 40 mins, write the notes for 20 mins, and take a break for 60 mins.
- Tell them that you aren’t directly involved with the prototype. This makes the other person comfortable to criticize the product If they see flaws in it.
- Run the experiments a few times to understand and fully solve the previous problems and the problems that emerged.
Testing your website at scale with unfacilitated usability testing:
Unfacilitated remote testing:
- Assign a task to the user and record their screen and then through a web camera.
- Its benefits are:- Testing could be done on the scale as one doesn’t have to physically sit with every user. The users also prefer this as they don’t have to leave their homes.
- For this use tools like- Lookback, Useroom, or Maze.
How to refine your campaigns post-launch:
Once the website is ready or when we have launched a campaign the following things should be addressed.
- How can we optimize our conversion rate?
- Understanding where on the site are users leaving?
- Tools like hotjar can be useful to understand the exact problem. But it can’t solve the real problem.
- A/B testing can be used to solve the problems.
- In low traffic, websites do one or two variations of A/B testing and bigger changes to have higher impacts.
- In high traffic, websites make small incremental changes to see what works the best and do lot’s of variation because the traffic justifies the variation.
Identifying and Amplifying growth channels
Major Growth Channels:
- SEM ( Search Engine Marketing )
- SEO ( Search Engine Marketing )
- Social and display ads
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
Paid search requires constant optimization to look at keyword traffic, search trends, and fluctuation in PPC cost.
Identifying, testing, and measuring growth channels:
It’s important to identify 1–3 channels that are working for you. This is how to pick your first channel:
- Is your audience active there?
- Are they engaging on those channels?
- SEO can be a very good first channel to start with.
How do we measure the results of the channel:
- It depends on what metric decides success.
- Channels should have higher ROI and high scalability.
- High ROI with no/less scalability is not a good option.
- It’s all about getting qualified leads. Are they the ones most likely to buy? Are they the ones that are purchasing?
Emerging channels:
- If you are a small company, take a look at the underutilized channels like Quora, Reddit.
- Take a look at what our competitors are doing, take a look at what their keywords are, and take a look at the articles that they are writing, the blog post, the content marketing.
- Testing emerging channels is also very important, like mobile, AR/VR
Myths about social media marketing:
- SMM ROI is difficult to track:- Google analytics allows you to see where your traffic is coming from and what the users are doing on your site and including if visitors are coming from social media as well. One can track the response of different social campaigns and see which are more successful at moving users to and throughout your site as well as tracking specific conversations.
- Social media fluffy impressions and branding and that it’s not used for sales or conversions or acquisition. For e-com, social media is the biggest growth driver. People track misleading metrics like- Likes, loves, shares, downloads, followers. Actual metrics are defined as what metrics are tied to your business objectives.
Developing a coherent message strategy on social media:
It’s important to develop a coherent messaging strategy, taking a look at your brand and the specific channels. See how you would as a brand, speak to your customers on FB, in an email, or write a blog post, being an influencer in that space.
Test the following things:-
- Time of uploading pictures.
- Test: Pictures / text / videos / gifs / memes / other assets
- Test CTA
- Long URL vs short URL
- Test your offer
Google will crawl your website faster if:-
- Domain authority: How your site compares to peers.
- Page authority: How well your site is set up for success.
- Content schedule: The frequency at which you publish new content.
- Popularity: A combination of site traffic, CTR, and time on site.
KPIs and Goals for SEO
Developing and prioritizing KPIs and goals for your business in terms of SEO differs. For some, it could be getting more traffic to the site, for others, it could be reducing the bounce rate. So find what success metric you want to go after.
Look at these segments to prioritize:-
- Awareness
- Engagement
- Conversion
Some of the KPIs and goals that are available for SEO are:-
- How many unique visits?
- Where the traffic is coming from?
- How many return visits?
- How much traffic is coming from SEO?
Another KPI is goal competitions:-
- Watching a demo
- Filling out a form
- Downloading an asset
- Purchasing on your e-commerce site
- Total no of conversions
Keyword research and content gap analysis:
The keyword research is essentially being able to see what your keywords are for your product and service on your website and this could be done by:-
- Take a look at your competitions.
- Looking at your content and seeing what the search volume is, looking at the higher search volumes to prioritize the keywords for your product.
Some keyword research tools are: google Adwords keyword research, Moz keyword explorer, Ahrefs and Brightedge
Link Building:
It’s the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own.
- Sites like CNN, Forbes, the large media outlets will have more value in backlinks.
- .edu and .gov will also give higher authority.
That was all that I learned this week, see you there in the next post.
Till then, take care:)
