Does the thought of improving your website fill you with dread? If so, you’re not alone.
The vast majority of business owners are so consumed by delivering a product or a service, problem-solving the latest crisis, managing their workforce, making sales calls or writing proposals that websites are often put up in a hurry and rarely address afterwards.
Add to that anxiety around expenses involved in tasking a workforce, in-house or outsourced, to make the improvements to a website, web development work is often last among the list of valued activities.
But what if your website could be analyzed quickly and small problems with disproportionately large positive impacts could be identified and queued for improvement?
The good news is that they can be. Through the magic of a heuristics analysis, a business owner can have a sense of clarity and an action plan to address errors quickly and improve the customer experience with little effort.
Heuristic Definition
What is this fancy-shmancy word? Merriam-Webster defines the word “heuristic” (pronounced /hyo͞oˈristik/) thusly:
“Involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods.”
As they apply to your website performance, a specialist will use heuristics principles which are universally and eternally applicable to creating a great user experience and compare these principles to the current state of your website to identify where your website conforms to the principles and, most importantly, where it deviates.
A caveat with this principles: not all sites conform to them. Graphic designer portfolio sites often break conventions to demonstrate why their services are unique.
Famous brands may also flaunt the guidelines because breaking conventions may be part of the brand’s personality. However, most websites should conform to heuristic principles.
One key thing to remember about heuristic reports is that are not about figuring out solutions; they’re focused on identifying problem areas that are impacting conversion and which can either be fixed quickly or put in a queue to test later.
In an industry that is always trying to sell you the piece of software that will seamlessly (they promise) fit into your current martech stack, heuristics are a relief because they are clear guidelines that, when followed, generally lead to improved usability and performance and the results of which can be implemented quickly without much added cost.
Whether your business is B2C or B2B, a heuristics report can help you greatly improve the customer experience on your website.
Some aspects of a heuristics report include an analysis of a website’s speed, clarity, consistency, communication and credibility.
The goal is to discover quick wins with disproportionately large impacts that make your website a better tool for lead generation.
So let’s get into the reasons for running this report.
1. Identity Problems that Can Be Addressed
Few things can impede progress more than knowing something needs to change but not knowing exactly what. Especially when it comes to websites.
What heuristics can help you do, and do quickly, is to create a list of real problems impacting the customer experience prioritized by ease of fixing. It helps businesses owners move from the no-man’s-land of “I know my website needs to be better” to “I have a list of ten things I need to fix, sorted from easy to most difficult.”
One example might be a broken link leading to a key page or an important call-to-action button that differs in color from the rest of the buttons on the site. These can cause serious problems on your site, but fixing these issues may only take a few minutes.
Deeper problems may surface as well, but knowing they exist is and can be solved through testing is much better than remaining in a malaise that results from a lack of clarity.
2. Discover Small Changes That Make a Huge Impact
Since websites often begin in an imperfect state, improvement is necessary. A heuristics analysis helps you leveraging the 80/20 principle against the amorphous obstacle of improving the website experience to drive results quickly.
According to Richard Koch in his book The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success By Achieveing More with Less, “The 80/20 Principle asserts that a minority of causes, inputs or effort usually lead to a majority of the results, outputs or rewards.”
In the case of website performance improvements, using heuristics to quickly identifying problems like a broken link to a key page, color inconsistencies, or moving a testimonial section to a more prominent location can have a disproportionately large impact on your customer experience.
3. Implement Changes to Get Your Flywheel Turning Faster
Once you have identified the areas of the site that need improving, implementing much of what was found is quick and relatively painless. And that’s not even the best part.
Jeff Bezos is well-known for using concept of the flywheel concept to demonstrate why Amazon continues to grow. A flywheel is heavy and takes effort to turn, but once it begins to turn, it generates its own momentum. Implementing changes on your website gets the flywheel of your company turning.
Here’s what that looks like:
- The heuristics report discovers problems that are easy to fix but have a disproportionately positive impact on your customer experience.
- Your team fixes problems identified by the report.
- More customers start taking the actions you want (purchase, phone calls, lead form submissions).
- Your paid traffic converts at a higher rate without an increase in ad spend. In some cases, this will lead to a decrease in ad spend since Google rewards accounts for providing a better landing page experience.
- Your organic traffic becomes more valuable.
- If you’re a B2C business, you scale more quickly.
- If you’re a B2B business, your sales team receives more qualified leads, spends less time talking with leads that don’t convert and their sales window shortens as more qualified leads convert at a higher rate.
- Your profit increases faster than your fixed costs, leading to and increase profitability.
- You and your employees do more great work, increasing testimonials and word of mouth, which leads to more traffic to your newly improved site.
Conclusion
If you want to increase the number and quality of leads to your company through your web presence, a heuristics report on your website is a great place to start.
Even if you can’t implement the changes immediately, it’s great to have a list of needed fixes so that when you have a moment to address the issues, the time spent against fixing the site will be focused on improvements that will have the highest impact for your business.
Brand IQ provides free heuristic reports. Contact us today to get started on improving your website experience.
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