Maintain Your Trusted Expert Status – The Importance of Testing and Where to Start
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Every single page of you website has elements in it which affect how people view your website. And each of those elements came to be there because of a decision you made.
But was it the right decision?
You’ll never know how much better you could be doing unless you test.
While it may seem like a daunting prospect with all of the potential testing situations available to you, you need to start somewhere. Any testing is better than no testing at all. But if you go off testing willy-nilly, you may be getting skewed results because of other factors that are influencing the results.
Here’s what you should be looking at when you’re starting to test, in this order:
Function – I know, duh, but you’d be surprised at how many people ignore basic functionality for testing brighter, shinier, more interesting things, and then don’t understand why they don’t see results. If half of your pages lead to nowhere, and you’ve got a ton of broken links, and your shopping carts keep emptying, or there is an error in your opt-in form, then how can you expect to see good results when you’re testing the picture on the front page?
Make sure everything works on your site first. The worst impression you can make is that your site is not properly run; it will undermine the trust level with your users so profoundly that the best content in the world will not save you.
Accessibility – The basics of accessibility is making sure that all kinds of browsers can load your website, and that it looks like it should on all of them. You can test this out at a site like http://browsershots.org/ which will test how your site looks in all the browsers you can think of, including Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.
Other aspects of accessibility that you may not have considered, but are equally important are thinks like:
- font size
- language issues
- script (java, php, asp, flash) errors
- problems with things loading properly.
This is when it is very useful to have developed your buyer personas before addressing these concerns. For example, if your personas consist mainly of an older demographic, then size on font and clarity may be an important accessibility issue for you to consider.
Usability – Now that your site is functional and accessible, you have to start thinking about how people use your site. This is another opportunity for you to customize your site for your buyer personas.
- What kind of font or layout to they prefer?
- How do they move through the buying process?
- What kind of navigation are they looking for?
It could even be something as simple as whether they prefer a blue button or a red one. A lot of the A/B tests you’ll do will have to do with usability (we’ll go through that whole process a little later – don’t worry.) There are a lot of things that you can find out about your buyers and your website through usability testing, and the improvements you can see from a few small changes is huge.
Intuition – The intuitive feel of your site is a little more subjective and can be harder to pin down. It as a lot in common with usability, but the intuitive level of your site is more about the entire user experience than about any one specific element. Through testing of intuitive elements, you can find the things that are preventing your users from completing the desired action you want from them.
These elements can include specific things like:
- point-of-action assurances
- customer reviews
- color scheme
- graphic design of the site itself.
Intuitive elements are the things that evoke a certain emotional response from our buyers. By testing these elements you can make sure that the emotional elements of your site are hitting the right notes with your buyer personas and further establishing yourself as a Trusted Expert in their eyes.
Persuasion – The persuasion elements of your site can be some of the trickiest to identify and tie down. These are the elements that actually persuade your buyers to perform the desired action. You only deal with persuasion issues after you’ve resolved all the other problems with your site.
Where to Start?
It’s important to focus your efforts on the things that will effect the most positive change with the least possible expenditure of time, effort, and money. Once you’ve addressed the basic concerns (functionality, accessibility, usability) then you can move on to the more emotional aspects (intuitive and persuasive elements). That still leaves a whole lot of testing to do.
Here’s how you can narrow those choices down:
1) Take a look at your site’s metrics.
This will tell you where you need to start testing. **Note – if you don’t have a site yet, make sure to address all of the concerns in order and build your site to meet your buyer personas needs and you’ll save yourself a lot of testing and you can go right to testing the emotional elements of your site to get a better response rate. Everybody else, keep reading.
2) Identify the following:
- Pages with the highest bounce rate
- Pages with the highest exit rates
- Pages with the lowest time spent
- The 5 most important pages on your site
3) Rank & Prioritize
Once you’ve identified these pages, you need to rank them in order of importance to you and (which really means in order of importance to your buyer personas, since it’s all about them, remember?) and where they fit along the functionality to persuasive scale, starting at the bottom.
You now have your list of things to test, and in what order to test them.
Also, in these areas, you can identify where your site has been lacking in thought leadership. Take this opportunity to change these areas so that it reinforces the idea of You the “Trusted Expert” in your niche.
Now you have a game plan to start testing with. Too bad you don’t know anything about actually running tests…
You didn’t think I’d leave you hanging, did you? That’s the next part!
(This post is a contination of the series of Becoming a Trusted Expert. You can read the previous posts at http://www.johncow.com/how-to-become-a-trusted-expert-online/)
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Wow!
Tons of useful information that I’m bookmarking and trying out.
Thanks.
JOb Pursuer.
one thing, on the internet, we can be an expert instantly
(anonym)
One of the best post ever read on the topic. Really impressive. Thanks for sharing. Keep it up…..
[...] 7 Steps for a Successful Split Testing – Kinda Science-y Stuff Written by John Cow on November 10th, 2009 ShareThis is a continuation of the Trusted Expert posts on testing… [...]
I’m running some tests Jason at the monement on my gogvo hosting page, still earl days the page is only a week of so old, need more traffic to really get into the nitty gritty!
I should run tests some time.
hey this is the one of the best articles i have ever read on this topic. thanks for breaking down everything.
This is a very detailed post. Thanks. You could have just said “Test Fools” and be done with it, lol. But really appreciate the details and bringing it down for us. I actually need to test more. Thanks for the reminder.
I don’t think robots.txt has any significance in Google SERPS. it is used to restrict crawlers to access any specific page. If it has any significance, i am willing to hear about it.
You are correct that it will not affect a specific pages ranking however i have seen first hand that my sites with a robot.txt get indexed faster and the stats are much cleaner because i block a lot of bots.
If you are not using a robots.txt and see how many 404 errors you have for the bots looking for a robots.txt and (this is my own opinion) Google wants to see you use one and gives your site a much more legit appearance in their eyes.