Web Optimisation

Optimising Website Performance for Engaging User Experiences

Enhance Site Architecture, Design, and Responsiveness for an Optimal User Experience.

Unlock Your Website's Potential

Web optimisation is about harnessing the full potential of your website to enhance its performance, user experience, and ultimately achieve your business goals. Through strategic improvements in site architecture, design, responsiveness, and other critical factors, we unlock the hidden potential of your website, ensuring it engages and converts visitors effectively.

Our team of experts leverages best-in-class technology and practices to optimise your website for search engines, user experience, and conversion, resulting in a website that truly works for your business.

Optimise for success: why Web Optimisation matters

Improved user experience

Optimising your website can improve user experience, leading to increased satisfaction, longer visits, and higher conversions.

Enhanced search engine visibility

Website optimisation can improve search rankings, driving more organic traffic and increasing online visibility for better customer engagement and conversions.

Better conversion rates

Optimising your website for compelling calls-to-action, clear messaging, and easy navigation can drive higher conversion rates, resulting in increased sales, leads, and desired actions.

Maximise website potential: our Web Optimisation path

At Clear Click, we understand the importance of unlocking your website's full potential. Our Web Optimisation Path is a comprehensive and strategic approach that encompasses various techniques and strategies to maximise your website's performance.

From analysing user behaviour and optimising site architecture to improving website speed and enhancing user experience, our Web Optimisation Path is designed to help you achieve higher search rankings, engage visitors, and drive more conversions.

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Full site audit

Architecture and navigation enhancements

A/B testing

Regular website content and structure review

Discover our latest Web Optimisation articles

By
Amelia Aston
Prosperity Over Profit – Social Responsibility at Clear Click
February 2, 2023
• 4 min read
Website Optimisation

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is something that many companies regard as a nice-to-have, a way to virtue signal, or a way to limit the harm their business causes in terms of things like emissions. This is not how we see social responsibility at Clear Click. Today, we’re taking a closer look at what the term means to us and what our goals are in terms of giving back.

Why we invest in corporate social responsibility as an SME

The website Investopedia has this to say about corporate social responsibility:

 “Companies that adopt CSR programs have often grown their business to the point where they can give back to society. Thus, CSR is typically a strategy that's implemented by large corporations. After all, the more visible and successful a corporation is, the more responsibility it has to set standards of ethical behaviour for its peers, competition, and industry.”

We don’t think this is enough. Social responsibility shouldn’t be regarded as something that companies have to do in order to appease stakeholders and appeal to the wider public. It’s also not something that should be left only to large corporations with similarly large budgets. 

We all inhabit the same communities and the same planet, so caring for them is on all of us. Businesses of all sizes can find corporate social responsibility initiatives they can get involved in and excited about – and the benefits of this spread wider than you may think.

The three Ps of social responsibility

The author and entrepreneur John Elkington came up with the term “triple bottom line” in 1994. It’s a framework often represented as a Venn diagram comprising of what are called the three Ps: people, planet and profit. Where these three meet is where you can find sustainability.

However, in 2019, he announced in the Harvard Business Review that he’d like to recall the term. Why?

The reason was certainly not that the need for corporate responsibility had diminished in any way. If anything, it’s needed now more than ever. Instead, Elkington argues that the true meaning of the so-called three Ps has been lost or misinterpreted.

The triple bottom line is often described as an accounting tool, but it was meant to be much more than that – it was meant to make us all think about the future of capitalism and bring forth innovation and disruption. Too often, the focus of the people and planet part of the equation focuses only on limiting harm, while pursuing profit – simple revenue – remains the most important part.

People and planet

In terms of the triple bottom line model, “people” refers to:

  • Your employees
  • Their families
  • Customers
  • Community
  • Suppliers

People-centric social responsibility schemes may involve different philanthropic projects such as employee wellness programmes and donations and volunteer days at things like cancer charities or food banks.

Meanwhile, “planet” encapsulates the impact the business has on the environment, including limiting its carbon footprint as well as its use of natural resources and toxic materials (limiting harm). It also entails proactive initiatives around things like the removal of waste, reforestation and other restoration projects (making progress).

Profit vs prosperity

Profit is where many organisations fundamentally misinterpret the triple bottom line. Profit is too often reduced to simple financial profit when John Elkington meant the word in a much broader sense, including wider economic impact such as:

  • Creating employment
  • Generating innovation
  • Paying taxes
  • Creating wealth

This definition of profit has much wider implications that can positively impact people and the planet. It has more focus on social than financial profit. For this reason, it might make more sense to think about this part of the triple bottom line equation as prosperity rather than profit. This word is closer to the kind of economic impact originally implicated in the framework.

Clear Click’s CSR commitments

We subscribe to the idea that corporate social responsibility should entail not just limiting harm, but actively making progress in terms of people and the planet. We also believe that doing good business means much more than simple financial profit. For this reason, we want to put our money where our mouth is.

This means creating an organisation that’s not only a great place to work and do business with, but that also gives back – not as a way to simply reduce harm or as a PR trick, but as a way to make a genuine positive difference.

At present, Clear Click is signed up for Ecologi’s Climate Positive Workforce® initiative. Ecologi is a UK-based social enterprise aimed at offsetting business carbon emissions by investing in carbon avoidance projects and planting trees to help combat rising temperatures. The Climate Positive Workforce® initiative plants ten trees a month and reduces nine tonnes of carbon emissions annually for each employee.

We see this as only the beginning of Clear Click’s social responsibility journey. As we go forward, we want to identify and invest in worthy causes that support people and the planet. Have any ideas for where we could make a difference? Drop us an email and let us know!

By
Amelia Aston
The SME Guide to Conversion Rate Optimisation
September 20, 2022
• 4 min read
Website Optimisation

In order to grow your business online, you need to know a thing or two about conversion rate optimisation, also known as CRO. In a nutshell, conversion rate optimisation helps you offer a better experience to your website visitors, making them more likely to become customers. 

In this guide, we’ll give you a broad overview of all things conversion rate optimisation. We’ll go over what some of your conversion goals might be, how to calculate your conversion rate, and some ways to improve it. Without further ado, let’s get to learning.

What is a conversion?

In order to get started with CRO, you first have to define the desired action you’ll count as a conversion. This will depend on your specific goals. You might, for example, want to track the number of people who contact you with questions about your product or who purchase from you. Some typical conversion goals include:

  • Add to carts
  • Completed purchases
  • Social shares
  • Leads generated
  • Newsletter signups
  • Page views
  • Leads closed

As you can see, the range of what counts as a conversion is pretty broad. You’ll likely have several different conversions you can track throughout your website, and your niche will also have an impact on what the most relevant conversions to track are for you.

What is the conversion rate?

Your conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors. For example, if an e-commerce site receives 500 users per month and has 50 sales, the conversion rate would be 50 divided by 500, or 10%. 

How to calculate conversion rate
How to calculate conversion rate

Tracking conversion rates allows you to evaluate the performance of your business online. Having awareness of what percentage of users are completing the goals that have a positive impact on your business allows you to measure the success of your website and identify areas for improvement.

What’s conversion rate optimisation?

Conversion rate optimisation refers to the actions you can take to improve your conversion rate. By optimising your website and improving the user experience it provides, you make your website visitors more likely to complete the conversion goal you’ve set. 

Conversion rate optimisation helps bring in more business, but it also enables you to lower your cost per acquisition, driving more value from the website traffic you’re already getting.

Conversion rate optimisation involves putting yourself into the shoes of your website visitors in order to understand their needs and wants. Then, you’ll come up with hypotheses of ways to entice them to convert. Finally, you should run tests to prove or disprove your hypothesis in order to make changes to your website based on data.

You might want to start your conversion optimisation efforts by focusing on your highest-value web pages first. For an e-commerce website, these will likely be your product pages, while for a B2B company it might be your pricing page or your services pages which include a contact form. Your homepage is another great place to start, as it serves as the first impression of your company to a large number of potential customers.

Conversion rate optimisation is an ongoing effort - there are always things that can be improved. Your goal should be to always be thinking of ways to offer your leads and customers a better experience, leading to increased conversions.

How to optimise your conversion rate

There are a number of things you can do to optimise your conversion rate, but it’s important to note that what’s worked for someone else may not work for you and your business. That’s why it’s important that you get to know your own audience in order to better serve them. 

That being said, some of the tips below will help you get started with conversion rate optimisation for your website.

  • Make sure you have Google Analytics or something similar set up to analyse your website traffic.
  • Talk to your customers. Data is absolutely key. But hearing things directly from your customers offers insights that numbers simply can’t. Make sure to also keep up with your online reviews for valuable insights.
  • Run a customer survey. This is essentially the same point as above, but offering an anonymous survey, perhaps with an incentive like a gift card raffle, can help you get more (honest) feedback.
  • Add reviews and testimonials to your website for social proof.
  • Use a form analytics tool to easily analyse the data from your customer survey submissions and contact forms.
  • Test both call-to-action (CTA) buttons and text-based CTAs to see what works better for your website. A colourful CTA button can be eye-catching, but banner blindness is also a very real phenomenon.
  • Use a heat mapping tool like Hotjar to find out how your website visitors are interacting with your most valuable pages.
  • Implement marketing automation to help drive conversions. You might, for example, set up an automatic reminder email to go out to people who’ve added products to their cart but didn’t complete checkout.
  • Improve things like website load times and check your website for broken links and forms to make the user experience of your website as smooth as possible.
  • Consider adding chat software to your website to answer visitor questions. This can help convert people who are on the fence about your offering.
  • Revisit your website copy. Is it compelling and to the point? Are you using accurate headings and subheadings? Is your copy SEO-friendly?
  • Set up retargeting PPC campaigns to bring website visitors back to convert them.
  • Run A/B tests (more on A/B testing below).

Running A/B tests for CRO

A/B testing is one of the best digital marketing tools at your disposal for CRO, and something any and every business would benefit from. A/B testing essentially involves testing the performance of different variations of your website to see what works and what doesn’t. 

It’s easy enough to assume you know what your audience wants to see. And that may be the case, but without hard data to back up your hypotheses, you’re ultimately just guessing. 

For example, you might have a product landing page that you want to optimise. You have a theory that moving the “add to cart” button from the bottom of the product description to the top of the page, just under the product name, could improve conversions. So, you create a separate version of the product page where you’ve moved the “add to cart” button and show that version to people for a limited time in order to test its performance against your existing product page. 

Running tests like this one by one helps you pinpoint what works and doesn’t work for your specific audience and make incremental changes to your website.

There are a number of great A/B testing tools out there, but you can get started for free with Google Analytics and Google Optimize.

How Clear Click can help

Getting started with conversion rate optimisation can be intimidating for small business owners. It can be hard to decide where to start, what conversions to track, and what tools to use to gather and analyse data. This is especially true if you aren’t lucky enough to have a large in-house digital marketing team at your disposal. Luckily, there’s help. 

At Clear Click, we specialise in helping small to medium-sized businesses grow with data-driven insights and strategic consulting. We’re experts in PPC, data analytics and SEO. We can help you hone in on where your website optimisation can be improved and make suggestions for changes based on robust data. 

Want to learn more? Book a free consultation with us.

By
Nicolaas Kerkmeester
Website Optimisation: A Beginners Guide
March 17, 2021
• 4 min read
Website Optimisation

Website Optimisation

Website optimisation is an area of digital marketing often overlooked and underestimated. In this guide we will go over the importance and best practices for website optimisation. This guide is designed as a beginners introduction to set the foundation for your website optimisation project or foundational learn objectives.


What is Website Optimisation?

Website optimisation is the process involving advanced strategies, industry tools and experimental testing to overall improve the performance of a website. The objective is to drive more traffic, increasing conversion rates and overall revenue. 

A large proportion of website optimisation involves Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). We recommend reading our SEO Basics blog if you are unsure of the fundamentals. In short, SEO provides your website and specific web pages to rank higher in SERPs (search engine results pages) allowing your target audience to find your website as easily as possible. But the other critical aspect is on-page optimisation, ensuring the on-page content is relevant to the user search intent and provides a positive user experience. 

By optimising your website you are tapping into a target market in the most efficient and effective way.  Turning on the tap to more conversions and revenue. All of this without having to pay for advertisement.


Although SEO is a large part of website optimisation, be sure not to get caught up on this alone. It’s important to ensure your website is designed and optimised with the target audience in mind. 

A holistic approach to website optimisation encompasses a variety of techniques. These include;

  • SEO
  • Copywriting
  • Analytics
  • UX Design (Frontend) 
  • Web Development (Backend) 
  • CRO/Landing page Optimisation

All of the above should be working together in harmony to reach a websites full potential. 


Why Is Website Optimisation Important?

In 2020 global eCommerce sales grew 27.6% compared to the previous year, this amounted to $4.280 trillion in sales [1]

The internet today is a powerful place for users to make a buying decision and purchase products or services. In fact, there were 2.5 billion online shoppers in 2020 and this is expected to grow to 2.14 billion by the end of 2021 [2]


Why Is Website Optimisation Important?
Online Shopping Growth Chart

The internet has become the best destination to find information about local services providers, in fact, 46% of Google searches have local intent [3] and 78% of mobile searches convert to offline purchases[4]

This said it won’t matter how many people search for keywords relevant to your business if you don’t optimise your website and on-page content, your website won’t get any traffic. 

By fine-tuning your SEO, you will guarantee high intent search traffic specific to your websites. 

But it’s not enough to just optimise for search. Growing the volume of traffic to your site doesn’t guarantee conversions, if your website content and user experience doesn’t appeal you will have a high bounce rate. To maximise your website traffic you must ensure your traffic converts. 

Mastering Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), will maximise the number of leads from both paid and organic sources into conversions. We will dive into some key CRO tactics a little later on. 


How Does Website Optimisation Work? 

The objective of website optimisation is to create a website that is appealing to both search engines and real people. But how should you get started? 

We always recommend undertaking a series of tests to identify the issues your site currently has. Running these tests to identify issues with SEO, Page Speed, Mobile Usability and more, is a great way to identify areas of your website that need optimisation and back any findings with data.

There are a number of website optimisation tools that will help you with this process, but we always recommend getting an agency onboard like Clear Click to help as this can be a complicated process to implement improvements.

Hereunder we have put together a list of key website optimisation areas, tools and benchmark standards to aim for. 

website optimisation tools & benchmarks
Website Optimisation Tools


The results of the website optimisation testing will provide a roadmap of how you should start to improve the overall website optimisation process. The next step is to delegate and initiate tasks with your team. 

Content writers to improve website content, website developers to improve the site structure and on-page SEO issues and a user experience (UX) designer to improve the look and feel of the website.  It sounds like quite a lot of work that’s why it’s often smarter to hire a digital marketing agency to create and execute the roadmap.


Key Website Optimisation Strategies

There are a number of ways to improve your website. A simple google search for “Website Optimisation Strategies”  brings up 1.25 billion results. So where are you meant to get started?

Website Optimisation Stratagies
Google Search for Website Optimisation Strategies

Hereunder, we have put together 6 basic website optimisation strategies that are key for kicking off your website optimisation process. 


1. Optimise for Mobile Experience 

Since 2015, Google made mobile-friendliness a key ranking signal for websites [4]. It’s not enough to have just a great performing website on desktop, it must also be optimised for mobile. 

Today mobile accounts for approximately half of the web traffic worldwide and this growth is continuously increasing [5]. In Q4 of 2019,  61% of google searches took place on mobile [6]. As a result, Google has switched to mobile-first indexing. 

So the first thing you want to ensure is that your website is 100% mobile-friendly. Run the standard, “Mobile-Friendly Test” provided by Google and this will tell you immediately what your status is. 


Googles mobile friendly test
Google Mobile Friendly Test


Fix any issues this test reveals and ensure to test this on all your popular phone models. It’s so important to fix all issues as this will have a big impact on your domain ranking and user experience. 

Make sure of the following; 

  • You don’t have any pop ups showing up on mobile. 
  • The website loads quickly & correctly.
  • Text is easy to read. 
  • All content is visible. 
  • Any scaled-down images are still readable. 
  • The site is easy to navigate. 

Covering the basic mobile-friendly test will give your website a favourable advantage when it comes to search engine ranking. 


2. Improved Page Speed

How many times have you left a website because it’s just taking too long to load? People are not patient and don’t like to wait, so ensuring your website loads quickly is one of the best things you can do to minimise your website bounce rates. 

Google's research uncovered that there is a 32% chance of a bounce if your website takes 3 seconds to load and a 90% chance if it takes 5 seconds to load [7]. Having an ultra-quick website is a contributing factor to a great user experience. 

Website speed is also a Google ranking signal and will have a direct correlation and impact on your SEO.

To check and identify page speed issues we recommend using three tools; Pingdom, GTmetrix, Page Speed Insights by Google.


PageSpeed Insights
Google's Page Speed Insights


Use Page Speed Insights as the foundation tool and Pingdom & GTmetrics to provide two comparative sources of reliable insights to improve your overall score on Page Speed Insights. You need to aim for a score of 90 or more in Page Speed Insights, on both mobile and desktop. 

Page speed optimisation can be a time-consuming and expensive task, but it’s well worth the effort to have a website working at lightning speed, every millisecond counts. 

3. Search Engine Optimisation 

Optimising your website for search is one of the most effective marketing strategies you can implement to increase organic search traffic to your website. In fact 70% of marketers prefer SEO over PPC to increase sales in the long term [8]

SEO is not just an effective method to drive high intent traffic to your website but people also trust results that rank high on Google’s search engine results page (SERP’s). Google validates that you have relevant and high-quality content to answer the search query entered. 

The first thing you must ensure for SEO to start taking any effect at all is correctly indexing your website with Google. This essentially means your website can be crawled by search bots and pages can be found correctly.

You will want to register your website with Google Search Console, run a check to take action on any issues detected with your site indexing. 


Google Search Console
Google Search Console


Once you have set up this basic foundation, you will want to use a 3rd party tool like SEMrush, Moz or Ahrefs to start tackling the more technical SEO issues and optimise your websites overall SEO. 


4. Tweak Website Copy to Drive Conversions

The words on your website have a big influence on the messaging you are delivering to your visitors. Website design, images, usability and page speed are all contributing factors, but the words you use control the message. 

One case study showed how a simple text change in the Call To Action (CTA) had a 139% increase in a product demo conversion [9]. The power of words and messaging is something not to be underestimated. 

It’s important not to rush into our website text, have a thought out and methodical approach to your on-page text. Put yourself in your ideal customer position. Identify your target audience's problems, desires and doubts they might have. From there put together a user journey to guide them to the desired action you would like them to take action on. 

Analysing your website visitors journey with heatmaps will provide insight into your customer journey, and how you can optimise it. Another great tactic is to ask existing customers what made them convert.

Once key areas of weakness are identified in your on-page text, you can then ideate and test different variations to work towards the best performing copy!

5. A/B Testing

Identifying a problematic area of your website is one thing, but how do you fix it with the best solution? This is where A/B testing is introduced, it’s the best way to provide a solution backed by statistical data, an analytical method of decision making. 

Let’s say you have a landing page that is not getting a high conversion rate, you can test alternative text, headlines and CTA’s to determine the right combination that provides the best results. If one element you are testing like the headline text gets a statistically higher conversion than the original headline text, you know that this is the best headline to use.

You should only A/B test one element (headline text, body text, CTA, design) at a time. You can still test multiple variations of that element known as “multivariate testing”. If you involve more than one test element at a time you won’t know what resulted in the change.

A/B testing needs to be done methodically and can take multiple tests to find the best performing result. We recommend multivariate testing if possible to speed up the process and collect as much data as possible. The more data you have the better informed your decision will be. It’s also important to give your A/B tests enough time to populate sufficient data.

You will often find that A/B testing results can be applied to multiple pages on your website, so it’s definitely a worthwhile process to optimise your websites overall.  


6. Optimise for User Experience (UX)

Business owners often spend a lot of time focussing on SEO and CRO, but overlook one technique that influences both of these and that is the user experience of a website.

In fact, research has shown that every $1 invested in UX brings $100 in return. That's a massive RIO of 9,900% [10].

Creating a friendly, intuitive and smooth user experience will help retain visitors. They are more likely to come back to your website and naturally follow the flow of your conversion funnel. Not to mention SEO is also going to thank you too, decreasing the dwell time (the time Google Search bots spend on your website before returning).

To improve your UX analyse your user session behaviour with heatmaps, session recordings and exit pages. These will help identify UX issues where solutions can be ideated into a roadmap of improvements. Once you have created a new website page, benchmark it against the original by A/B testing or doing a usability test with a group of test users. This will quickly highlight what UX is performing best, backed by statistical data. 


How can Clear Click help? 

We often find that clients are motivated to drive traffic to their website to increase conversion. But often underestimate their websites ability to convert, as the website is going to be the main mechanism for conversion. If your website does not convert your traffic then what's the point in the traffic in the first place.

We often find that before we initiate any inbound marketing it is essential ensure a website's performance is optimised. Our website optimisation team will run tests and provide an audit of your website to create a structured strategy moving forward into execution.

If you are interested in having one of our specialists audit your website, book a free consultation with us to get a deep understanding of websites growth potential. 


Sources:


[1] - eMarketer

[2] - Oberlo

[3] - Search Engine Table

[4] - Sistrix

[5] - Statista

[6] - Statista

[7] - Think With Google

[8] - Data Box

[9] - Go Card Less

[10] - Intechnic