A B2B Website Redesign Strategy That Learns Over Time

Year after year, your competitors are sharpening their skills and getting closer to your customers. Your website redesign strategy might help set you apart, but do you change everything at once or make small changes over time?
Your web development, web design, and digital marketing teams need to work together, now more than ever, to make sure your website pulls its weight.

Start by collecting first-party data, testing everything with A/B tests, and adapting your website with your learnings from those experiments by redesigning in constant cycles.

Start Collecting First-Party Data Today

Tracking customer behavior on your website is nothing new, but pretty soon, it will change. Third-Party cookies are disappearing, so first-party data will soon become standard. Use tools like Google Analytics 4, the future of data collection on your website, and tie it into a CRM like HubSpot to track leads from website visitors to customers.

With those tools, and a healthy flow of data, tracking customer behaviors on your website means you can paint a clear picture of who your customers are, what problems they’re looking to solve, and their stage in the buyer’s journey.

Use A/B Testing to Work Smarter, Not Harder

As Google rolls out update after update, keeping pace with your website changes gets harder and harder, if not impossible. The search engine optimization strategies you’re used to are no longer as effective. Instead, SEOs are starting to take a page from the conversion rate optimization experts, using A/B testing to test how changes impact organic search traffic before applying those changes to the entire website.

Connecting your CRM with platforms like WordPress lets your website start presenting content dynamically. Plugins like If/So let you display different content to different people. Paired with an A/B testing tool like Google Optimize, your website can now be a living, breathing design.

• SEO: Test sections of your website at once to keep your experiments organized.
• CRO: Set clear intentions of what makes an event a successful conversion.
• Lead Gen: Make it easy; offer multiple signup points for visitors to become leads.

Build Out Your Digital Experience in Cycles

Now that you have a website redesign strategy that keeps learning, and content that is changing based on the person visiting your website, do you ever need to think about your website design as a whole? Well, of course. Without a website redesign roadmap, those changes might mess up your website. The last thing you want is a website turned Frankenstein.

Plan to redesign your website every year or make smaller branding shifts every quarter. Some web developers use version control to map out the changes and apply updates to production. We’ve been redesigning our site systematically over the past twenty years, and we’re excited to announce the release of version eight of our website. Now it’s time to start planning for version nine.

Keep Your Website Redesign Strategy Sharp and Effective

With the extinction of third-party cookies in the next couple of years, first-party data and a website that learns as it improves is becoming more important than ever.

Using the right tools, your teams can keep improving every quarter rather than getting stuck on the “good enough plateau.” Adapt your website with these tactics and start converting more website visitors into customers.

Ready to leverage web technology to increase leads and conversions? Start a project with 3 Media Web today.

Easy Ways to Convince Your Boss You Need a Web Redesign

We’ve compiled our six best tips on selling the case of a website redesign to your boss. Try one, or, for especially stubborn cases, try all six.

1. Get Visitor Feedback

Does your site already get at least a few thousand visitors every month?

You can use a web survey form to get firsthand opinions. This method can produce precious data because you ultimately redesign a web to improve your customer’s experience.

Asking them how to improve their experience will give you beneficial information about their likes and browsing behaviors.

Of course, to pull this off, you will need all the liberties and permissions involved in adding it to your company website or doing a social media post with a link to your survey. Aim for both if possible.

How To Write An Online Form That People Respond To

First and foremost, keep the form short. Be direct with your design-related questions. To get effective, data-driven input, ask questions like:

• On a scale of 1 to 10, what would you rate the look of our site?
• What was your first impression when you visited our site?
• What can we do to improve our website?
• Were you able to find what you were looking for?

Depending on the capabilities of the form builder you’ll use to make your web redesign survey, you can even drill down your content into specific items. Below, you can see how the Feinberg School of Medicine structured its survey:

Surveys are great ways to get feedback from the people who use your site the most.

Another great thing about running a web survey is that you can use the results in the actual redesign since you’ll know firsthand what your customers are trying to achieve on your site.

Form Builders

There’s no need to go fancy here. A Google Form will suffice in most cases. However, who doesn’t like a few options?

• Google Forms – Easy to use, readily accessible (as in free), customizable
• Microsoft Forms – A web-based survey that outputs to an Excel spreadsheet if you happen to have a boss who’s really into spreadsheets
• JotForm – A nice free option with web, iOS, and Android options
• Typeform – If you’re feeling creative and want your form to look extra-fancy
• Paperform – This makes it possible for your survey to look more like a landing page

2. Ask for Feedback on Social Media

If you’ve ever used social media before, you already know how much people love to air their opinions publically. Why not take this characteristic and use it to your advantage?

If creating a web survey proposed in the first section of this article isn’t in the cards for you, this method could prove to be a suitable alternative.

A poll will give you valuable insights into how your customers perceive your site, but that’s not all.

You’ll also build customer engagement by making them know their opinion truly matters to your business and by making them feel like their part of the decision-making process.

Be sure to include a link to your homepage so they can check it out.

How To Run A Social Media Poll Asking Whether or Not Your Sites Needs A Web Redesign

If your business’s social media page has an active following, run a poll on your social media page or pages. Ask people if they like your current website design or if they think it needs to be updated. Be sure to include a link to your homepage so they can check it out.

Many social media platforms have polling options incorporated directly into their interface, so installing plugins or additional apps is unnecessary. The process is straightforward, so post your poll across all your social media outlets.

On Facebook, you can post a poll on your company page, company group, or even in a story.

Twitter allows you to post a poll directly to your feed.

Twitter allows you to post a poll directly into your feed. Remember to pin it to the top of your feed, so it gets lost in your other tweets.

You can post a basic poll on your story using stickers for businesses with an active Instagram account.

While in beta for the polling stickers, Instagram found 9 out of 10 beta campaigns benefited from increased views on their 3-second videos. With numbers like that, it’s pretty clear people enjoy engaging with polls.

LinkedIn took away its poll option back in 2014, but you can still post a poll there using a tool like SurveyMonkey that links your poll to your LinkedIn page.

Don’t Forget To Follow Up!

As you get responses, you can reply to the more vocal followers for further feedback by sending you a direct message or email.

Once you’ve initiated contact with them, you can even ask them more specific questions, such as some of those we’ve suggested in the previous section.

Regardless, when presenting the crowd-sourced suggestions to your boss, provide screenshots referencing the opinions that come directly from your current audience.

When presenting your findings to your boss, use screengrabs of the feedback you’ve collected.

No one wants to see bad comments about their website; however, your argument will be more persuasive if the comments are generally negative.

3. Use Traffic Analysis

Do you have access to your site’s Google Analytics dashboard? If so, you’re already sitting on a treasure trove of metrics proving how well your website performs.

Below we’ll look at some important metrics on your Google Analytics dashboard for this cause. As you look through them, remember to break the data down on desktop or mobile, as each needs different design efforts.

Site Search

Does your company’s website have a search function? If not, that’s already a solid indication the site could use some improvements. Site search will provide insights into two fundamental aspects of any web design:

1. customer intent
2. how easy it is for them to find what they’re looking for

How To Access Site Search On Google Analytics

Accessing the Site Search metrics is simple and fast using the Google Analytics dashboard. In the right-hand panel, click on Behaviour, then click Site Search. Once the drop-down menu has expanded, you can browse the data using the four options provided.

You can find the site search metrics on your Google Dashboard by clicking Behavior > Site Search.

What You’re Looking For

If your company website has a search, head to your analytics dashboard and piece together the following information:

• How many people on your site are using the search feature
• What are they searching for?
• How many unique searches were there for each specific search term? What did the customer do after searching?

You can look at your site’s search exit percentage and see what percentage of people abandon your site after they perform a search. These people searched your site, saw the results list, but then left your site rather than clicking through to another page.

If that percentage is high, print the report and present it to your boss when you’re trying to get a web redesign for your business.

If You Don’t Have On-Site Search, It’s Time For A Web Redesign.

Unfortunately, Site Search analytics won’t do much for you. But don’t just completely forget about it either. If your site doesn’t have an on-site search feature, add it to your list of priorities when it’s time for your redesign.

If visitors to your company site can’t find what they’re looking for, it’s a sure sign you’re due for a web redesign.

As we mention in this post, how easy it is to navigate your website is a key part of successfully converting visitors to customers. 76 percent of people agree easy access to the right information is the most important factor in website design.

On average, 30 percent of visitors to any given website use the site search feature.

FURTHER READING: SEO for Local Search: Think Like a Customer

Additional Metrics To Check

While you’re looking at the Google Analytics dashboard, there are additional metrics you can use. Here are some we recommend printing reports on:

• Bounce rate – How many people are coming to your site, then leaving immediately? This is an addition to the bounce rate from the on-site searches we outlined above.
• Exit pages – Seeing which pages customers are leaving your site could pinpoint especially low-performing areas. For e-commerce sites, this could be extremely helpful if customers keep leaving during a specific checkout stage.
• Speed reports – If your site loads slowly, this could work to your advantage. According to Google, visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.
• Conversion rate – The average conversion rate for landing pages across all industries is 2.35 percent. The top 25 percent enjoy a 5.31 percent conversion rate. The top 10 percent bask in an incredible 11.45 percent conversion rate. Compare those figures with your site’s conversion rates.
  

  Google Analytics is a goldmine of metrics you can use to determine whether or not you need a web redesign.

4. Request Professional Teardowns

You may not realize it, but there are plenty of places to ask professionals for their opinion about your company website. One example is joining an online entrepreneur group like the popular online entrepreneur Slack group like Online Geniuses.

Many high-level professionals hold corporate marketing jobs here. Your suggestion to redesign might hold little weight, but your boss could take it more seriously if you prove that industry experts think the same.

You Can Ask Reddit If They Think You Need A Web Redesign

As an alternative to using an online group, check out a sub-Reddit that’s relevant to what your company does and/or one relating to Web design.

Look at how many subscribers are in that section to know how large of a response you will receive. You can base which subreddits to post on based on that.

Reddit can be a great resource to gather professional opinions on your company website.

Website Teardown Best Practices

First, try to ask someone who has no prior knowledge of your site. This will help eliminate any bias one way or the other. After all, you are looking for honest feedback here.

Next, the process is straightforward once you’ve found who you’ll ask to do a teardown.

All you need to do is link to the site and ask for opinions on the design. It’s in your best interest to leave out the part about how you are thinking about a web redesign to avoid guiding the answers.

Additionally, refrain from making comments such as, “I don’t like how the navigation bar functions; what do you think?” as this can also inadvertently sway their opinion.

Lastly, be sure to check with the professional you’ll be consulting to make sure they don’t have any additional requirements. For example, if your site has areas where visitors need a user account to see, they’ll likely request access to those.

6. Run Split Tests

Run A/B tests of different designs compared to your current website.

This particular option may be one of the more time-intensive routes to take, but it also happens to be effective. That said, if you haven’t compiled a compelling enough case using the options above, this is another way to go…

Make something. 

Even if you have to use a free theme, try crafting a rough version of what needs to be done. Afterward, run a small A/B test comparing the old and new versions.

Track the performance, including bounce rate, time on page, conversions, and more. If you achieve much better results, it will be easy to convince your boss that a professional web redesign will make a major difference.

Again, if you’ve already tried the steps listed above to no avail, running split tests can be what seals the deal with your boss.

Convincing Your Boss To Get A Web Redesign Doesn’t Take A Miracle.

Taking the initiative if you think the current design of your company website is affecting business is a noble cause.

Presenting your web redesign case doesn’t need to be difficult. You’ve got this.

Staying competitive on the digital front is as important as ever. The Internet evolves as fast as the latest web design trends do. Between innovations like AI software, the Internet of Things, and the Web of Apps, people are fully embracing Web 3.0.

Collect your evidence, state your case, and blow your boss away with your ideas. Remember, you don’t have to convince them you can make miracles happen. Your primary prerogative should show that a web redesign is necessary to see real growth.

When you’re ready to start a redesign project, we’ll be here to help.