Merchandising and Usability

Site Merchandising involves designing pages to minimise bounce rates whilst improving conversion rates.  One of the biggest challenges we face is the notion that generally visitors enter the site on the home page and then navigate from there. The reality however is somewhat different – over 60% of the visitors come from a link on one of the search engines. If the search engine optimisation process has been carried out thoroughly we would expect every page on the site to have been indexed by the search engines.

The tough part is to get the visitor to your site; once they arrive we must design their journey meticulously to convert them to a customer. We must therefore apply layouts and navigation consistent with page content with appropriate calls to action e.g. it would be unwise to make a visitor who searched for “Chocolate Cakes” in a search engine to start navigating from the home page. The visitor should be taken straight to the “Chocolate Cakes” category page or if they specifically targeted “Chocolate fudge cake” (long tail search term) they should land on that products page. This page would ideally outline main features, images, price, reviews etc. with a prominent "Buy" call to action.

Similarly, landing pages used for advertising and E-shots have become increasingly important – as they are optimised for the search term / advertisement and are designed to lead the visitor to enquire without distraction. There are many other elements to this part of the process but essentially it’s about making your website fit and proper for purpose of converting visitors to customers.

It is also important that we comply with accessibility standards (W3C) and statutory regulation. At Livelink we employ the best practices to achieve compliance at the outset and train website editors to ensure standards are adhered to during the content management process.