Within today’s internet marketing industry, it is the easiest it’s ever been to find expert tips and best practices for web marketing. For website owners, it’s easy to visit a few expert internet marketing blogs, read up on some tips, and go implement them on their own site, hoping to achieve the same results that others have achieved. However, that’s not always the wisest approach.
Don’t Rely On Someone Else’s Best Practices Or Guesswork
Here’s some advice to you – don’t go down that route. Figure out what works on your site yourself, and don’t rely on someone else’s best practices, or even worse, on pure guesswork.
That might come as a bit of a shocker, especially the part about not relying on “best practices”. And best practices can be valuable at times, but you should never implement best practices on your site and expect to be done optimizing. Here’s why.
What works on someone else’s website will only work on yours if you have similar sites, traffic, and objectives. After all, when you have a different site, with different traffic, and different goals, you can’t automatically expect the “best practices” they used to be best practices for your site.
Implement Some Analytics and Test, Test, Test… and Test
Here’s what you need to do. You’ve got to find out what’s right with your site and keep doing it and improving it. Implement some analytics and testing and find out what parts of your site are working well to drive conversions, and make sure you keep that there. If you want to change those elements, do it only after careful testing, when you are absolutely sure that your changes are improvements.
The other thing you have to do is to find out what’s wrong with your site and correct it. Figure out those things that are hurting conversion rates, and, again after careful testing, implement improvements.
As part of figuring out what works well for your site, test everything. Test your headlines, your copy, your call to actions, your links, your design, and everything else on your site. Figure out which of these are doing well, and which aren’t, and make changes accordingly. Don’t get me wrong, testing all of this will be time consuming and a lot of work. But it’s the best way to really optimize your site for your users.
Now it is all right to look at others findings from their own sites, and their best practices, but the key is to not rely on their work or assume that what they found to be helpful on their site will transfer over. Do your own work, figure it out yourself, and you will be well on your way to having a site that works well for your visitors. Although it may take a while, and be a lot of work, it will be well worth your time in the end!
Tip: Google key phrases such as “Conversion rate optimization” or “CRO” and get insights from articles written by experts on that CRO arena
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