This article will give you a solid understanding of what user experience (UX) is, and how it can benefit your business. You’ll learn what it is, how it affects your website, marketing and lead generation and in the end, help your company sell more effectively. Article contents: What is UX and why should I care? Designing the user journey UX and your search engine position How UX affects marketing How UX affects company sales How to design the perfect user experience What is UX? UX means ‘User Experience’ – or how users experience their journey on your website, email campaign or app. It is one of the fastest growing functions within online marketing. User Experience Design is where specialist UX designer creates an experience to ensure the target audience for a company is researched, measured and planned out. The website or app is designed around that experience, and all communication (email, telephone, live chat) with the user is considered. Every business owner should understand who they sell to. Let’s call these your target users. The role of a UX designer is to understand who these users are, what they like, what they dislike and how to present an interesting and meaningful experience for them. A specialist UX designer should design experiences to match the needs of their target users. Why? So they you can get more orders and for larger sums! What is a User Experience agency? Designing the all important user experience journey When people interact and move through your website, this is referred to as the user journey. It is important for a business to understand that a bad user journey is the main reason why a user will leave the website quickly. Pointing out this obvious, this is because the user didn’t find what they came for. and this directly affects the business Google search position.
UX and search engine position
Let’s say you have a page about ‘double glazing windows’ and the content is not up to date. Your team has all the up to date knowledge but this is not available for users to read on the page, or the range you offer isn’t obvious. This creates a disconnect with the user as they didn’t find something useful. Bad UX = high bounce rate When people click a link on Google, the click tells Google they are interested in that website. Bounce rate measures if a user clicks a link, scrolls down, uses a gallery, searches for products or clicks to read information. If a user loses interest quickly due to a bad experience and leaves the site – this registers as a bounce rate. Bad UX is detrimental to Google rankings A recent Google algorithm BERT (article written December 2019) resulted in web pages being penalised for having a high bounce rate. So web pages that have a high bounce rate that previously generated traffic to your website from keywords are losing position because the content isn’t useful or the page loads slowly. Reasons to optimise your website for Google
How UX affects digital marketing
Here’s a scenario – You have a keyword you want to advertise on Google and that keyword costs £5 per click. 100 clicks costs you £500. With a bad user experience your bounce rate will usually be around 80% (if you are lucky). So from your 100 clicks, only 20 actually scroll or navigate your website to find out more. Why user experience matters in online advertising Bad UX strategy = 80% Bounce Rate 100 clicks = 20 people staying on your website By improving the UX you will lower bounce rate which means that users will spend more time on your site. This gives more chances of users becoming an actual customer. With better UX you should achieve around 30-40% bounce rate. That means from the 100 people, 70 stay on your website and read more about your service offerings. Good UX strategy = 30% Bounce Rate 100 clicks = 70 people staying on your website
Now we need to talk about Conversion Rate Optimisation
Most businesses should achieve around 10% of visits convert to users either making direct contact or making a purchase. Bad UX strategy = 80% Bounce Rate 100 clicks = 20 staying on your website 20 people / 10% conversion rate = 2 leads or becoming an actual customer. Good UX strategy = 30% Bounce Rate 100 clicks = 70 staying on your website 70 people / 10% conversion rate = 7 leads or becoming an actual customer. Read more about conversion rate optimisation Conversion rate optimisation – Top tips
How UX affects company sales
Conversion rates are key to this whole process and Digital Marketing is all about creating a footfall of people interested in your service or product. Optimising conversion rates helps you as a business, get more leads from the users visiting your website – remember a poor bounce equals poor conversion rates and less leads into the business. Now the good news…. How to make the positive user experience The role of a UX designer is to create interesting and valuable user journeys. This can only be achieved when UX designers research and understand who your target users are and what they want to achieve. Understanding what your users want to achieve is the beating heart of website design. UX designers will devise buying personas and design experiences to make sure users find what they are looking for. Remember, this also means your bounce rate will be lower as more people stay on your site to go on journeys that the UX designer has designed for them. At the end of the journey should always be a conversion point. This might be to sign up for a newsletter, download a guide or white paper, call a telephone number, or try a demo of your services. UX designers will also set measurement points at this stage so they can track how many visitors have ‘converted’. For more information about designing the best user experience visit https://www.ground.co.uk/user-experience/user-experience user experience specialists.
