Enhancing your product searching ability is one of the important steps to improve your conversion rate. You have a lot of products and therefore, you definitely should have multiple landing pages. Your visitors will not always land on your homepage. They may be landed within many levels deep on your website. Providing good navigation facilities can help them surface so that they can explore your website to the full. The primary aim for providing a good website navigation is to get your visitors stick to your website and help them move through easily. Here are some of the guidelines for enhancing your product searching ability:
A. Organized Links:
Make sure your links are well organized to help your readers. Create distinct product categories and user centric labels. Users always want organized websites. They don’t like to be confused. Give proper names to your links and, more importantly proper places to those links. This is very crucial for e-commerce websites which sells a number of products. Provide related links as users may be interested in finding more information under the same topic.
B. Enhancing visibility of links:
How can a user click on a link when he/she is not able to see it properly? Therefore, enhance the visibility of links through website navigation. By enhancing, I refer to placement as well as visual enhancement. Design your navigation on the top or on the left of the page. These are the places which are more prone to get users’ eye. Avoid putting them at the bottom of the page, since a user will have to scroll down to click on it. The links should be clearly visible to your readers. A good combination of blending, complementing and contrasting is required. Take time to think a name for menus and links. Naming is important as users lend their trust by clicking on to a link. You surely would not want to lose it.
C. Breadcrumbs:
Breadcrumbs are the easiest way to help your readers to find their way back to any higher level in the website. Breadcrumbs are a horizontal series of text links, normally provided at the top of a webpage. The provide links to each previous page through which you have reached the current page. It helps the readers to identify their present location in a website. The use of breadcrumbs comes in very handy if you managed to stick readers in your website. They can easily explore all the pages that they visited previously.
D. Consistency:
If you are providing breadcrumbs, then place it on every page. Place important links consistently throughout the website for product searching. It should be on every page, in the same location and in the same sequence. Do not confuse your visitors by providing links at different places. Don’t be mysterious with your website. Do not think that users will find their way automatically. It is your website and it is your task to help them flow.
E. Search Box:
Use and place search box consistently throughout the website. Users prefer searching to browsing. Why one should browse when he/she can find answer by a simple search. Be sure that your search box provides faster and relevant answers. Provide predictive-type-ahead options (as provided in Google (www.google.com ) to aid users to enter the appropriate term before running a search. E-commerce websites should provide the options to refine, filter, compare and sort results on various criteria. They can also display a summary of key product information in search results to quicken the process of identification and selection of product searching.
F. Always remember the 3-click rule:
The 3-click rule states that a user should find his/her desired product searching within 3 clicks. 3 is the maximum number of times a user clicks to find the product. The user bounces off the website if he is not availed the facility. Hence, web designers should keep this fact in mind that a user should be able to reach different parts of the website from a given page within 3 clicks.
You make it easier for the user to find the product and the user will do the same to buy your product. It’s a symbiotic process for both. Hence, website navigation is very important.
If you are looking for a step by step process to optimize the conversion rate of your website, you can visit our Conversion Rate Optimization Guide to turn your visitors into customers. Please feel free to leave any comment you have in your mind.
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Well explained..learnt few things today