Make your site better than your competitors? Easily! 10 tricks that really work

There are no hopeless projects, and any site can be made better by reviewing its strengths and weaknesses in detail and working on the mistakes.

Search engines will favor your site only if it offers valuable information or valuable opportunities to the target audience, if it is useful, interesting, structured and, finally, convenient. In the search results, those resources that are most useful to visitors rise to the top first of all, and not those sites that have better optimized meta tags, cumbersome texts on the pages, but there is no focus on user needs.

This article brings together 10 valuable practical tips and tricks to help you achieve this.

Add interactive

Engagement is just as important a metric as traffic, and it is this metric that has the greatest impact on behavioral factors and conversion rates, as well as directly or indirectly on many other metrics.

Traffic convertibility depends on the ease of use and the level of user involvement in interacting with the site.

The implementation of interactive elements can be carried out both by the simplest methods, such as creating questionnaires for articles, and by involving more complex solutions. So, it would be a good idea to introduce thematic tests that will interest the target audience. You can also order game development.

Many people reject such options. Someone is too lazy to waste time, someone does not see the point in it, while others try to avoid additional costs, so interactivity allows you to stand out from competitors and make the project more memorable.

Introduce calls to action

This advice is especially relevant for commercial projects. Indeed, when going to the site, the user often does not know what he should do next. That is why it is necessary to introduce CTA elements that call to action and direct potential customers to quickly place an order, to register for a free study of materials of interest, etc.

And don't wait for your visitors to take the actions you need. We must offer! Is it efficient? Of course: those who are not interested in this ignore calls to action, but for potential customers who are interested, the conversion rate, on the contrary, will increase.

Introducing calls to action actually allows you to get more sales. Tracking the effectiveness of such techniques is not difficult at all. By experimenting, you can come up with the best solution for a particular case.

Adaptive layout or mobile version? Need for optimization

The share of mobile traffic is steadily growing: about 65% of users access the Web from mobile devices. Therefore, optimization of resources, whether it be a mobile version or adaptive layout, is an objective necessity.

About 60% of users, according to Google statistics, prefer not to visit the site if they see that site navigation is inconvenient, and 40% are unlikely to return to it again, preferring the optimized resources of competitors.

An important disclaimer: the mobile version of the site and the adaptive layout are different things, but this is a topic for another discussion. Briefly about the differences: adaptive layout is a more universal option, while creating a mobile version is a simpler approach, but, alas, less progressive and optimal for those who follow the path of least resistance.

The lack of an adaptive version should be a cause for concern for the site owner. You can check for errors using services for monitoring and testing sites for adaptability.

It will be useful to open the site yourself on your smartphone and see what shortcomings catch your eye and what inconveniences there may be for users.

Find out why users leave your site

Retaining users is no less important than attracting them, otherwise what’s the point of spending a budget on promotion if sales don’t grow due to factors that force potential customers to return to the search results in search of another resource.

To figure out why users leave a site, you need to sort through bounce rates, how long users stay, and find out which pages are the weakest in this regard.

Next, you should look at them from the user's point of view: what you would like to see on the page, whether the text is capacious, whether the questions for which they are optimized are well covered. Attention is also drawn to the convenience of presenting content, the general appearance of the pages. And again, you need to compare with the resources of competitors in the top ten issuance. This will provide food for thought about what can be changed, what can be improved, and what can be left as is.

You can activate Webvisor in Yandex.Metrica. This will allow you to see the records of visits to the most significant pages, identify the problem - perhaps it's not about usability, but about a technical error that has crept in.

Personalization is the key to trust

Another way to stand out from other corporate sites is to add personalization. The same principle works as in offline business: people want to interact with real people, and not with monotonous impersonal corporate sites. This is especially true for commercial sites - adding personalization will increase the loyalty of potential customers.

How to implement this? You can make an extended "About us" page, which contains the history of the company, goals and plans. You will be able to stand out from the competition by introducing a potential client to your brand philosophy, to your employees, to how workdays and corporate events go. Perhaps you will even tell about the personal qualities of employees, interests and aspirations. Such projects are well remembered.

Thanks to simple actions, the resource turns into a lively atmospheric site, which makes it attractive to visitors.

Convince potential customers that you understand their needs and are ready to find a customized solution just for them.

To do this, say less "we", but more "you". A common mistake is to focus on one's own merits (“We are the best in the industry...”, “Our specialists are undergoing training...”). It shouldn't be done that way.

Potential customers expect understanding of their desires, expectations, needs, so you need to show them that you are ready to hear them. When talking about your services, you should be customer-oriented so that he understands that his individual problem, his issues are solvable.

You can create a blog where interested potential customers can watch how you solve the problems of your customers in practice. People will begin to perceive your business differently.

Seek inspiration from leaders in other industries and don't let yourself get stuck in a swamp.

In pursuit of the strongest competitors, many set themselves the task of doing exactly as they do. The results may be mediocre. A great technique that allows you to be one step ahead of the rest is the analysis of top resources of the best representatives of other areas. A fresh breath of inspiration comes in handy more than ever if a crisis of ideas has come and nothing works but copying. Interesting tricks and solutions that worked for them can be adapted to your project.

Many sites even look like twins. And if you want to be remembered and recognized, stand out from the crowd with creative solutions, be inspired by successful ones and create your own.

Do you think design matters? But in vain!

Maybe design really doesn't matter? But where have you seen a good product packed in cheap paper, and, most importantly, could you sell such a product, convincing the buyer how good it is? Hardly. People really judge by the clothes - by the quality of the design, and if it does not attract them, they may not be interested in the content.

Not all unsuccessful examples require a large-scale redesign, however, making small but significant changes can significantly change the attitude of users to the site.

1. Update photos, illustrations, diagrams where necessary. Old, irrelevant, ugly images are subject to replacement.
2. Look for optimal color solutions, dilute with bright accents, change fonts.
3. Introduce visual elements that can be calls to action.

The issue of design is very individual, and much depends on the specific case. It happens that you can get away with minor edits, although there are often situations when experts recommend redoing everything from scratch, which will be much cheaper than sculpting patches.

Website usability analysis

There is no need to apply to an agency if the budget does not yet allow it. You can also get the expected feedback with the help of all available services.

1. AskUsers.ru . The service allows you to receive feedback from real people in the form of a description of the experience of interacting with the resource. Moreover, you can select people according to parameters that are more relevant to your target audience.
2. usabilityhub.com . Various testing options are available, you can read about each of them in detail. The results of such tests should be of interest to the owners of any resources and help make the site really better.

Don't be afraid to implement complex things

Many hope to take the easiest path and soon get the maximum profit. On the one hand, you can make a website with many pages of the same type, and on the other hand, you can create a full-fledged resource, for example, about travel, visas, interesting places, life hacks for tourists, cuisines of other countries, etc.

You can download the template for free, or you can order website development from a web studio with high-quality implementation of adaptive design and optimization for mobile phones.

Quality is collected bit by bit, it is in the details. There are many methods to improve the site that require the investment of a considerable amount of time and money, but the more work you invest, the more significant you will be ahead of your competitors. The main thing is to find the right point of application of force. The implementation of complex ideas brings great benefits in the long run.

Analyze your competitors' strategies

Select several categories for which you want to compare sites, and create a sign.

The results obtained must be analyzed and conclusions drawn about which direction to move in, what to correct, what to leave as it was, which requires big changes.

1. Design does not always play a key role, but with its help we can stand out from the competition.
2. Potential customers may be interested in the list of our advantages.
3. Not everyone has a photo, and none of the competitors have videos and reviews, so we should put special emphasis on this.
4. Not everyone has a decent portfolio.
5. Competitors, except for the "Callback" button, do not have interactive elements, so you should pay attention to this as well. Even a simple cost calculator will give a good response.

Embed additional elements on pages should be deliberate. Make sure that there is no information overload, active elements on the page.

So, investing in the development of the site, you should throw them not only on optimizing the resource for search engines, but also on improving it in the eyes of users. Why? The answer is simple: the success of your business depends on your customers.