Conversion Optimization Archives - Page 2 of 3

Actionable Insights for Your Website's Performance

Estimated Read Time: 4 minutes

Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners, Microsoft Partners, SaaS-Based Organizations

Google is on a quest to improve the user experience of surfing the internet by optimizing search engine results. Now, optimization is no longer focusing only on creating quality, informative and reliable content; it’s also about delivering a great user experience. To clearly define what a great user experience refers to, Google announced Core Web Vitals that help measure the performance of your website.

Google first announced these performance measures in June 2021. By adding these quantifiable measures, Google is trying to help businesses or website owners know where they stand regarding website ranking.

If you own a B2B tech website, then this new update is extremely useful for you as it will help fine-tune your current SEO strategy and take necessary actions to improve overall website performance and organic search results, leading to higher clicks and engagement.

What are Google Core Web Vitals?

Under the user experience umbrella, Google has set the following metrics for measuring Core Web Vitals. Read ahead to learn if your website’s core web vital scores are in the green:

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Isn’t it annoying to wait for a webpage to load? The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measure is set to capture and evaluate your webpage’s load speed. According to Google, if your web page takes more than 4.0 seconds to load, your website’s performance is poor and will most likely lead to a higher bounce rate. The aim should be to stay under 2.5 seconds to deliver an optimal user experience.

2. First Input Delay (FID)

When a user clicks on an interactive element on your webpage, and it takes too long for that action to trigger, your website’s overall user experience is impacted. With the help of the First Input Delay (FID) measure, you are able to track the performance of your website. According to Google, performance at or below 100 milliseconds (0.1 seconds) is considered good, and anything taking longer than that implies that there’s a noticeable lag and needs improvement.

3. Cumulative Layout Shifts (CLS)

When an interactive element is clicked upon, nobody enjoys it when shifts its position or redirects them to an unrelated page. Thus, websites need to be responsive and load elements faster to reduce bounce rates and increase user sessions. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) helps you monitor such visual shifts in the website’s layout. To stay in the green and keep your customers happy, aim to achieve a score of 0.1 seconds or less in this metric.

Tools to Measure and Analyze Core Web Vital Scores

Before you invest in any tool, make sure to understand how the Core Web Vitals are measured so that you can compare the results and make informed decisions. The most powerful tool is the Chrome User Experience Tool, which reports directly on each of the vitals. Other tools such as Chrome DevTools, Google Search Console, Lighthouse, DeepCrawl, PageSpeed Insights, Web Vitals Chrome extensions, etc. are also excellent. To start, these tools will help you breakdown the web vitals into measured elements. But just understanding the factors involved is not enough, make sure to test and compare the results with alternate tools to ensure that the numbers are accurate before you act on the results.

How Do Core Web Vitals Impact SEO Performance?

Core Web Vitals are a critical component of your technical SEO. However, to improve performance scores you need to do more than just send your developer a list of metrics to fix. Without any context of the elements that need fixing, you will not be able to see any web performance improvements. Instead, make a list of all measured Core Web Vital elements to provide your developer with granular recommendations to improve your scores.

Why Should B2B Tech Organizations Care About Core Web Vitals?

Every B2B tech business aims to improve its website search rankings. With Google’s latest update, it’s imperative to pay closer attention to the user interface and enhance the website’s user experience. Solely focusing on optimizing content won’t be enough to reach a greater audience and achieve those desired search results’ improvements.

Also, it’s challenging to improve the organic search ranking of the website overnight. Consistency is the key, and it’s equally important to constantly experiment to optimize and improve the overall experience of your website. The sooner you adapt and improve upon the measurements recommended by Google, the better it will be for you to evaluate where your website stands and plan for improvements. It will also help you gain a competitive edge in the oversaturated software services industry.

Improve Website Design Based on Web Vital Measurements

Here are some simple best practices to keep in mind while measuring the Core Web Vitals for your website and making educated judgments to improve website design:

Internet Speed or Server Issues: This is one thing that you cannot control. While testing the speed of your website, make sure that you are monitoring the speed of your internet as well to observe how the performance is impacted. Your website’s performance can be severely penalized due to server issues. Therefore, it’s necessary to monitor the performance over time to make the required adjustments.
Optimizing Website Content: Content such as text, images, videos, icons, etc. need to be formatted to render properly on different devices and browsers.
Cut Out Unnecessary Code: Only keep the code that is empirical to load the website and track insights. Additional or less important JavaScripts can impact the performance adversely. By cleaning up your code, you can improve website speed significantly.
Be Mindful of Lazy Loads & Preload Key Elements: Move all the lesser important images and videos below the fold. By using the lazy load method, you can make less important visuals load at a regular speed, thus not directly impacting the user experience. You can also ensure that elements such as the webpage font and hero images are preloaded on the browser to improve your Largest Contentful Paint score. HOT TIP: Remember to design and categorize your webpage according to the hierarchy of content to achieve a seamless flow.

For More Web Performance Tips Talk To A Maven

With the help of these tips, you can consciously take action to improve the performance of your website and provide an excellent user experience for every client and prospective customer. That, paired with a robust SEO strategy will help your website rank higher on Google’s search and maintain that position.

If you want to get professional assistance to evaluate your B2B website’s ranking and optimize its performance, make sure to reach out to the seasoned marketing experts at Maven Collective Marketing. Our skilled team of marketing mavens will set you in the right direction to build and grow your B2B business with a captivating website that delivers a seamless experience. Reach out for a free consultation today!

Powerful User Behavior Analytics Tool: Microsoft Clarity

Estimated Read Time: 5 minutes

Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners, Business Strategists, Microsoft Partner Organizations

The current business scenario has forced a lot of enterprises to move away from the brick-and-mortar approach and embrace online means. Businesses need a firm marketing strategy and a healthy website to ensure the success of their products and services. Taking cognizance of these challenges, Microsoft has been addressing the woes of remote work with its many tools. Likewise, Microsoft recently launched Clarity to make website management a breeze for developers and non-developers alike.

What is Microsoft Clarity?

An analytics tool that empowers website managers to make educated decisions on website modifications. It is a FREE platform that keeps decision-makers notified of their website’s performance and engagement. The platform acts as a set of tools that point at areas of improvement and changes that need to be made to improve website performance.

Microsoft Clarity observes website visitors and tracks user behavior across your website. You can access all this information through a dashboard that allows website managers to view behavioral patterns of various audience segments.

The tool comes with some remarkable capabilities that can help you improve your website performance with powerful insights.

HOW TO LEVERAGE MICROSOFT CLARITY FOR YOUR WEBSITE

Use Session Playbacks to Track User Behavior

You can view session activity for each website visitor and track their engagement throughout the website. From mouse movements to scrolling to clicks, everything is recorded. So no more guesswork and anticipating how your users are behaving on the website, you can now see for yourself.

There are extraordinary filtering capabilities that come with session playbacks. Microsoft has implemented machine learning to discover novel patterns in session recordings like “rage clicks”, “dead clicks”, and “excessive scrolling”. These patterns can be used as classifications to filter out what you want to see. This is extremely useful for determining the user interface performance.

How to Best Utilize Session Playbacks

Session Playbacks are of use to website operators, webmasters, and User Experience (UX) consultants to identify and repair design shortcomings. You get to see which part of your website runs smoothly and which bits are causing issues for your visitors. Moreover, developers can utilize it during the development and testing phase of the website too. Therefore, this feature enables you to redesign your website based on visitor interactions.

Get a Performance Overview with Clarity’s Dashboard

Analyzing website usage is a common practice for understanding your web traffic. Microsoft Clarity dashboard provides data such as session counts, total users, page view details, bounce rate, scroll depth, etc. You can even view javascript errors and monitor the popular pages across the website.

These insights help understand user scrolling patterns like they may be doing so in search of particular information or if they are clicking on areas they expect to be hyperlinked.

What does the Microsoft Clarity Dashboard offer?

The dashboard is a quick way to glance over the performance of your website. Decision-makers can make the most of it by getting a comprehensive summary. It is an efficient tool to track and report developments across the website and ensure that any efforts being made on your part are giving the desired results. Based on this, you can make informed changes to your website and boost its engagement with the target audience.

Learn How Users Interact with Your Content

Tracking user interaction is one of the best ways to identify areas of improvement for your website. Microsoft brings the heatmap feature to Clarity that follows visitor movement, empowering you to see where users scrolled and clicked, and monitor the entire navigation lifecycle. This capability is extremely useful for visual people as they can see what content is important to users and make note of whether or not users are getting desired information.

Click-maps and scroll-maps are easy to use and showcase frequently interacted areas on a webpage. While playbacks show the journey of a single user, heatmaps give you insight into aggregated interaction.

Structure Your Website with Heatmap Insights

The Microsoft Clarity Heatmaps allow you to see if the areas of interaction depict the information you want to be accessed most by users, if that’s not the case, then you need to rethink and modify the layout of the page so that visitors are aligned with the portions you want them to. For example, if not enough people are scrolling to the bottom of the page, then maybe you could shorten the length of the page or move more valuable information to the top. Heatmaps also help analyze call-to-action placement on your website and observe if the kind of language and layout you use is conducive to conversions. Therefore, data-driven inputs can be provided to make any necessary design changes to the website that facilitates better user experience and drives conversion.

Does Microsoft Clarity Replace Other Website Analytics Tools?

Microsoft Clarity is not just about the three core capabilities, there is so much more to this tool through its filtering and custom tag capabilities. You can filter down data and analyze specific criteria. For example, taking a look at heatmaps for pages that have excessive scrolling or high rage clicks, to identify pain points that can be improved upon. Since Google Analytics discontinued Heatmaps in 2017, Clarity is here to fill the gap along with some other overlapping metrics. But, Google Analytics has a vast expanse of metrics on acquisition and conversion, that cannot be replaced by Clarity.

Microsoft Clarity features overlap with several other tools as well that come at a monthly fee. Although software like Crazy Egg, HotJar, and Lucky Orange, offer similar insights at a cost, they provide additional features too. Crazy Egg covers referral source tracking, keyword tracking, and several A/B testing capabilities. HotJar on the other hand has extensive customer experience and feedback features that Clarity lacks. So far, Luck Orange is somewhat closest to Microsoft Clarity’s areas of expertise.

However, Microsoft Clarity has its advantages, even though the above-named tools offer free trials, you can get a lot of those powerful insights on Microsoft Clarity for free! Moreover, it has the ability to combine different filters allowing you to narrow down on user behavior and in turn suggest modifications to simplify user experience across the website. You can even custom code tags and fire them across pages to get specific metrics.

*BONUS* Microsoft Clarity can be used by anyone, irrespective of the size of their website and traffic since there are no caps on traffic. Microsoft Clarity can support the largest of websites and can process large amounts of data without getting in the way of your website’s performance.

Which Analytics Software is Best for You?

Analytics is vital for monitoring a website’s performance, to make sure that you are taking all actionable steps to drive traffic and conversion, make use of a combination of software. In this manner, you not only cover all your bases but also make data-driven decisions. For example, a combination of Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity gives both valuable audience metrics and user experience insights, allowing you to make informed decisions about online marketing efforts and design.At Maven Collective Marketing, we promise measurable results and would love to help you in your marketing initiatives. If you would like to know more about using analytics tools to boost the marketing strategy for your business, get in touch with us!

Tag: Conversion Optimization

Improve Your Tech Website’s Ranking with Google Core Web Vitals