It is common for people to wonder why the websites they visit are not intuitive.
“Why is it so hard to find what I want on this website?”
“Maybe I’ll have better luck on another website.”
These are two common thoughts in the heads of your website visitors.
People don’t want to think about what they are doing on a website. They want to get what they need and solve a problem, quickly. When this does not happen, they become frustrated and leave the website to find a solution from a more intuitive website that does meet their needs and desires. An intuitive website leaves the user satisfied. Its content and design were developed in a way that speaks directly to the target market, it serves up helpful solutions, and it opens the door for every visitor to become a loyal customer.
While the backend code of a website might be complex, the elements that make a website intuitive are simple. When you hide the value of your website beneath hard-to-understand content and a difficult-to-use layout, you will lose out on a chance to turn a visitor into a customer.
An Intuitive Website is Critical to your Marketing
Your key digital marketing goal must be to design and develop an intuitive website for your company that people love and that drives value for your target market. An intuitive website must be at the core of your company’s marketing strategy and deliver value to your target market, key referral sources, and influencers.
Here are 10 things that make a website intuitive.
- Doesn’t make visitors think.
- Makes a great first impression.
- Engages visitors to explore the website.
- Satisfies the visitor’s research with benefit-focused content.
- Uses scannable content.
- Moves a visitor through the sales funnel.
- Anticipates visitor needs and desires with intuitive navigation menus.
- Gets brands found in Google.
- Provides a return on investment (ROI).
- Is improved based on data and user feedback.
1. An intuitive website doesn’t make visitors think.
People don’t want to think or work when visiting a website, they want to get value and solve a problem. This is called user intent. You may have heard the phrase, content is king. It’s time for a new phrase; user intent is king. Content works best when it meets user needs. This is a core element of an intuitive website. Your website exists for visitors and their intent must drive the website content, design, functionality, and usability. This is true for every page of your website.
Intuitive websites consist of easy-to-follow content, common sense navigation, a visually appealing design, and are logically structured for a user’s experience (UX). When someone visits an intuitive website, they can quickly locate the information they want, understand the company’s offerings, and easily take action.
The end result of not meeting user intent is people leaving your website and moving on to another option and the other option may be your competitor!
Check out Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think” to better understand these concepts.
2. An intuitive website makes a great first impression.
Actually creating a truly intuitive website is easier said than done and most websites fall short. While the statistics vary by source and industry, according to CrazyEgg, the average time a user spends on a website is 15 seconds. If you don’t capture attention early, you will most likely lose the visitor to another website.
A clear and direct tagline at the top of your web page is a great starting point to keep visitors engaged. It must entice people to move forward, keep scanning, and continue reading the rest of the page; or better yet, go deeper into your website. This is important because most website visitors start their visit on your homepage.
It is for this reason that your homepage tagline is your company’s most important marketing copy.
Your homepage tagline must clearly explain your company’s offerings in a few words. This is key to solving a user’s problem fast by letting them know they are on the right website page. Intuitive websites have great homepage taglines that make a great first impression resulting in highly engaged visitors.
3. An intuitive website engages the visitor to explore the website.
When website visitors can effortlessly find what they need and navigate content without hitting obstacles, they are more likely to spend more time exploring your offerings, which often leads to them making contact with your company.
Engage your visitors with a website that does the following:
- Uses clear and easy-to-understand content headers
- Makes use of a simple, clear, and direct navigation structure
- Is designed responsively for each device – mobile, desktop, tablet, and more
- Has a fast page load time on the user’s browser and device of choice
- Is organized and with a thoughtful layout and content that avoids insider speak
- Uses forms or chat features that are easy to use and tested to insure they are working and going to the right person at your company
- Is comprised of clear, direct, and compelling calls-to-action (CTAs)
Make your website a success by keeping it simple and engaging visitors.
4. An intuitive website satisfies the visitor’s research with benefit-focused content.
Most buyers prefer to research before they engage with a salesperson or make a purchase. Google, social media, and a variety of digital resources are most commonly used to direct your target market to your website. Knowledge is power and with the limitless information available online, it makes sense to research before you buy.
A Power Review 2023 Survey on consumer purchasing behavior revealed that consumers are increasingly spending more time on pre-purchase research such as ratings, reviews, and product and service website pages.
The challenge for your company is to get your website found in these research efforts. Intuitive websites do a better job of getting found and matching the content to user needs providing them with valuable answers in their research.
Ask your customers why they buy from your company. Use those findings to write benefit-focused website content and make your website more intuitive.
5. An intuitive website has scannable content, short blocks of text, image captions, clear headlines, and direct taglines.
People scan website pages and rarely read large blocks of text. They look at photos and will not always know why photos are on your web pages unless you use a caption.
Content on an intuitive website must:
- Be easy to scan and understood by readers
- Use great taglines and content headers
- Have captions on all photos and images for context
- Use bullet points and a few words to convey a message
- Have a well-written homepage that clearly states your company’s offering
Check out this blog post on best practices for writing great website taglines and headers that are scannable and capture the attention of website users.
6. An intuitive website methodically moves a visitor through your sales funnel.
Successful websites move people from a visitor to a sales prospect or customer. An intuitive website does its part by serving up opportunities for people to take action and make contact with your company. These call-to-actions, or CTAs, are critical steps in the buyer’s journey and an intuitive website will convert visitors to contacts at a rate of 5% or more.
CTAs include contact forms, eBooks, webinar sign-ups, phone numbers, and email addresses, along with other methods enabling a website visitor to make contact. Getting a visitor’s email address to build a strong database of contacts is very important. Here is a blog post to get you started.
Intuitive websites lead the anonymous website researcher to a path where they are no longer anonymous and reach out to your company for a solution. This is a key digital sales funnel for your company.
7. An intuitive website anticipates visitor desires and needs with intuitive navigation menus.
Don’t underestimate the value of an intuitive navigation and menu system for your website. Navigation menus are a central part of website usability and are used to engage visitors.
Visitors to your website are looking to visit four key sections of content. They want to research your services and products, read about your company, get access to resources, and visit a contact page.
An intuitive website provides easy access to these key areas and anticipates what people want to read about. Anticipating the desires of your website visitors is at the core of digital marketing. This results in a highly valued website visitor who will most likely become a sales lead or buyer.
When your website is built around your users, it shows your customers where your priorities lie. Websites that are hard to navigate can feel like you are banging your head against a wall. This can not only damage your brand reputation but set the stage for them to never return.
Because intuitive websites better meet user intent with great content and easy-to-use navigation, they convert at higher levels. Website conversions move people through your sales funnel toward a purchase.
8. An intuitive website helps your company’s brand get found.
Great website content is key to getting visitors from Google. Google’s key objective is to provide excellent search results and avoid spam websites. Google works to send people to websites they want to visit, websites that drive value – that meet user needs and have many pages of value-added content.
Google wants your website to be intuitive. They want your website to earn high placement because you are a thought leader and an expert in your marketplace.
In addition, a high volume of value-added web pages gives your website a greater chance of ranking high in Google search results. Search engines look at the number of web pages as a key factor when determining a website’s ranking. Here is a recent blog on optimizing your website to get found in Google.
Websites with more value-added content and pages than their competitors get more visitors and also convert more people to customers at higher conversion rates. Larger companies know the value of a robust website and how it grows the sales funnel.
This creates a direct relationship between a company’s size and the number of value-added pages on its website. However, it’s important to note that adding pages to your website won’t always help rank better unless the content is valuable to your target audience. Valuable, benefits-focused content is also key to getting your company found within AI-generated content, which will continue to grow and play a significant role in the research efforts of your target market.
9. An intuitive website provides a solid return on investment (ROI).
Intuitive websites enhance user engagement and increase the likelihood of conversions, leading to a higher ROI from your digital marketing budgets.
By speaking directly to users’ needs and desires, an intuitive website has the power to inspire action, whether it’s making a purchase, submitting a contact form, attending a webinar, signing up for a newsletter, getting your eBook or other key milestones in the sales funnel.
ROI is best tracked using focused digital campaigns where you can measure the results directly based on traffic sources, the impact of ad copy, or other factors such as:
- Where people are clicking (Measured with HeatMaps)
- What pages they are visiting
- How long users stay on a page
- How they are getting to your website
- Whether or not they are filling out your forms, or converting in another way
- Questions they are asking when they make an inquiry
- Engagement with your blog content and social media (likes, shares)
- Downloading offers
- Subscribing to your email newsletter
- Opening emails and clicking on links
Website and digital campaign data can be measured in great detail using tools like HubSpot or Google Analytics
Read a case study here to see how Intuitive Websites measured ROI and helped a leading Atlanta law firm get results.
10. Use data and user feedback to improve your website as your website instincts may be wrong.
What you think makes an intuitive website for your company may be mostly wrong. Marketers are notorious for seeing the world from their internal perspective and not the perspective of their target market. They get stuck in thinking how they use a website is how everyone uses a website. These marketers are too close to their company and have lost sight of how they are perceived by their target market. It is hard when you live and breathe the same company each day to be able to see it from an outside perspective.
Intuitive websites rely on data and user feedback to constantly improve. This blog was written based on our analysis of thousands of websites over a 20-year period.
This is where our digital marketing agency, Intuitive Websites, can add value. We use our experience and the ability to see your website from the perspective of your target market to make your website intuitive to users.
Avoid a “sample-size-of-one” approach where a strong opinion drives the layout and content of your company website. Talk to your website users, conduct surveys, and do user testing. Designing an intuitive website requires you to get outside of your head and into the head of your website users and your target market.
Many marketers get stuck and continue to do what they have always done. This leads to the same results or worse. A highly intuitive website is one way to break out of this rut and really grow your brand and grow sales.
Get Started on an Intuitive Website Today
Intuitive Websites is in the business of guiding our clients to meet the needs of their target market; getting them heard and found. The team at Intuitive Websites has created a winning process for designing intuitive websites. It’s our brand promise and it is in our company name, so we better deliver!
Are you curious to see how your website measures up?
Reach out for a complimentary 30-minutes consultation to review your website and find out how intuitive your website is to users.
Bonus Section – Best Practices for an Intuitive Website
Websites are unique as there is nothing else like them in sales or marketing. Your company website has a big role to play in the success of your company. Here are a few website best practices that make for an intuitive website.
- A clear and direct tagline in your webpage banners, especially the homepage!
- Simple top navigation that is understandable by your prospective customers.
- Professional design that matches your target market’s expectations and style.
- Easy-to-find CTAs that give visitors an option to get started right away or consider an offer to do more research before making contact.
- Prioritized and engaging CTA buttons leading to action.
- Website content with a clear focus on benefits and risks.
- Easily scannable content without long blocks of text.
- Use of text links that clearly stand out.
- Well-organized and easy-to-follow site navigation.
- Resources library and/or case studies for deeper understanding.
- All main navigation items are clickable and lead to relevant pages.
- Relevant, original photography and images with captions (where appropriate) for clarity and context.
- Consistent footer on each page with a newsletter sign-up CTA.
- Social media icons in the footer or header of every website page.
- Easy-to-find products and services with targeted keyword content.
