Agency owners: If you’re not offering potential clients and candidates a good user experience on your website, stop what you’re doing and make that your number one priority.
Why? Because your website is a direct reflection of the quality of your firm, and a poorly designed site kills your credibility and costs you business. Conversely, improving user experience leads to a positive overall customer experience and boosts your bottom line.
Consider:
- Customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by 2020 (Walker Information)
- A properly designed user interface could bring your website’s conversion rate up by 200 percent (Forrester)
Don’t send people away from your recruiting agency due to a bad experience on your website. Clean up your act with these seven web design best practices.
1. Provide clean navigation
People have little patience for a jumbled, confusing layout or an erratic navigation. In fact, Adobe found that 38 percent of users will bounce from a website if it’s unattractive or confusing.
Make sure your navigation is clean, simple and intuitive. Best design practice is to put your navigation bar horizontally across the top or vertically down the left side. That’s what users expect, and it makes your site easier to use.
2. Optimize for mobile
Your potential clients and candidates are on mobile, and if you’re not giving them a good mobile experience, you are (at best) leaving them with a bad taste in their mouth regarding your agency or (at worst) driving them to a firm who does mobile right. A few stats to underscore these points:
- StatCounter reports that more people access the internet via their mobile devices than desktops or tablets, both worldwide and across the United States
- According to this Zenith report, 79 percent of worldwide internet users will come from mobile in 2018
- Google found that 53 percent of users will leave a site that’s taking more than three seconds to load on mobile
- If they don’t see what they need on a mobile site, 79 percent of people will go look for the information they need on another site (Google)
Google has a free tool that tests your site’s mobile speed and performance here. It’s a simple pass-fail test (if you fail, find yourself a web developer asap and fix it).
3. Reduce page load times
There are two very important reasons to makes sure your site loads quickly:
- Page load times are a ranking factor for Google. This has been the case for desktop searches since 2010, and starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches, too.
- Users hate slow-loading sites, and most of them will bounce if your site takes too long to get it together. Numerous studies have reported on the correlation between page load times and bounce rates.
Large images are the most common culprit behind slow-loading pages. Make sure the images on your site have been saved with web-specific compression. This preserves quality while keeping the file size down.
4. Have a prominent ‘contact us’ button
Make it easy on people to get in touch with you. If you don’t, you’ll frustrate them, and they might leave. In this Web Usability Report, 51 percent of website visitors said “thorough contact information” was the most important thing missing from many companies’ websites, and 44 percent said they will leave a site if there's no easy-to-find contact info.
Clean and simple is the name of the game here. You should have a “Contact us” button as part of your main navigation, and it should then open to its own page. On that page should be:
- A short submittable form
- Your agency’s main email address
- Street address and phone number
- Links to your social media accounts
5. Break up copy into easy-to-skim bites
Your web pages shouldn’t look like a research paper. People are used to skimming, and no one wants to “skim” a large wall of gray text. Break up copy with short paragraphs (one to three sentences), subheads (H2s), bulleted lists and images.
Also make sure to choose an easy-to read-font with enough text contrast. Georgia, Helvetica and Arial are three good choices that display well across all devices.
6. Go with text links (not graphical buttons)
If you’re not familiar with the basics of SEO, you might miss this one. Don’t go with graphical, button-based navigation; instead, implement text-based links. That’s because search engines can’t crawl and index the text inside a button graphic— but they can crawl and index text-based links, which enables them to index your pages and understand how your site is laid out.
7. Give every page a CTA
None of your website pages should dead-end; every page should ask the user to do something else. This “ask” is called a call to action, or CTA. What is it you want them to do next? What page do you want them to visit next?
Don’t confuse the user with too many CTAs, however. Focus on one that makes the most sense for where your user is in your sales funnel. The idea is to nurture them through your site to the desired outcome. This guide from WordStream has some excellent advice on crafting effective CTAs.
TrackerRMS: The next step for recruiter, candidate and client success
Don’t stop there. TrackerRMS is the leading cloud-based, end-to-end recruitment, applicant tracking and CRM software provider. TrackerRMS offers a full-service suite of customizable features and an unparalleled level of support. Learn how it can help your agency—request a demo today.
