Optimizing a Webpage
Every good question usually comes with an annoying answer: Yes and No. On one hand, it is so much harder to drive organic traffic to a website than it is to change a font color or image – and doing those small things can often improve a sites usability and conversion. BUT – on the other hand, we dont have a magic crystal ball that can tell us what changes to make. So while making changes to a site is easier than driving traffic, at least we know what we need to do to drive traffic…
We all wrestle with this dilemma daily. Here is my advice and what I do with seevolution.com
1. Relax : ). You can’t really go wrong with either effort, but having a fresh, stress free mind often prevents us from making really bad decisions (like complete re-designs for no reason or thousands of dollars spent in ad words)
2. Pick one page – not the whole site, and run some basic heatmaps on that page. See what people are clicking on, where the fold lies, and what people are paying attention to. Here is an example. We recently launched a page displaying our click maps and upon running a scroll overlay on that page I noticed that only 50% of that pages visitors actually saw the sign up button on that page. Adding an additional call to action, via a button or link in the text will take me 5 minutes to deploy. That is time worth spending.
www.seevolution.com/blog/
