Why Good Site Architecture Is the Only CRO You Need

When you hear the words "site architecture", the first thing that comes to mind is probably SEO.

It's not enough to search SEO best practices to learn that Google likes a site with a clearly defined architecture, easy to explore and index.

But if you stopped planning the architecture of your site with only your natural SEO, then you missed the big picture.

The architecture of the site is not just an effort to put search engines at the top of your site's rankings.

It helps SEO, but it's so much more than that.

In the end, the architecture of your site should be a strategic endeavor that allows your organic or paying visitors to easily navigate and use your site for its intended use.

This means that the site architecture is the older brother of the conversion rate optimization.

So in this post, I want to show you exactly how the site architecture replaces and allows traditional efforts to optimize the conversion rate.

And for starters, I want to dig a little deeper why so many efforts to optimize the conversion rate fail.

Why optimization of the conversion rate does not always work

When you use your conversion rate optimization, it's easy to want to focus on the more traditional efforts.

The usual efforts to optimize the conversion rate require that brands establish concurrent versions of the same page to see how they can improve them.

It's like a royal battle for web pages.

After a week or two of waiting and measurement, the top performing page wins.

One of them remains standing, while the others are thrown for eternity.

From there, more experimentation occurs depending on the performance of the winning page to see if anything else can be improved.

Sometimes brands will even become brave and perform multivariate testing to see if changing multiple items can bring improvements.

Like a traditional A / B test, the results are based on a last-man approach.

Brands may be losing, and the winner remains the subject of more experimentation.

All this is an ongoing effort to see how you can improve conversions over time.

Many blog frequently about this practice, which even has its own career field in the marketing industry.

But these types of tests are not always the most reliable for small brands that need to optimize as efficiently as possible.

And even some large companies are victims of common A / B test errors.

For example, items like sample size can dramatically skew the results of the conversion rate test.

In other words, if you do not get enough traffic, you will make changes and end up with insufficient data.

That means you could do the wrong moves and ultimately hurt your brand's performance.

Or you could also test something stupid, like colors on your website.

To put it in the words of Otto Niggulis of ConversionXL:

"There is no better universal color, what works on one site does not necessarily work on another."

And that's part of the subject too.

Many conversion rate optimization trends are increasing on the back of a brand or two saying that they have seen good results from a particular experience.

So everyone does it, and the confusion results when the improvement does not follow.

And, to make matters worse, many brands often do not spend enough time to see if their results end up sticking.

If your variable regresses to the average of your control, there is a good chance that the abandonment of your control is a bad idea.

Many brands will prematurely make a decision in the first few days, which ends up hurting them in the long run.

People call it the little win mentality. This ultimately leads to poor optimization and may compromise your results.

So with all the potential pitfalls of traditional conversion rate optimization, can the site architecture create a more foolproof way of ensuring that your website sees a lot of conversions?

To answer this question, I want to break down some of the basics of site architecture and show you how this correlates to optimizing your conversion rate.

How the site architecture creates conversions

The architecture of your site focuses on creating a platform for easy navigation for your users.

When you examine the architecture of the site, you will usually see a graph that presents a description similar to that of the genealogy of how the pages of your site interact.

Although there is a good chance that two sites are not alike, this style of hierarchy is a rather classic example.

You start from a home page, and then you go through a series of categories and subcategories until you find what you are looking for.

If this process is fluid, as in the graph above, your users will have no problem.

But if the architecture is confusing and it is difficult to find a page that should fall into a natural category, it is more and more likely that your users will go away.

In other words, the idea is to create a fluid user experience that ultimately leads to accurate and traceable conversion tests.

If you apply it correctly, you will have a site easier to improve in the long run.

But does the site's architecture really have a positive effect on your conversions?

A brand called Voicer reported a 75% increase in its conversions by correcting some "small" flaws in the user experience on its site.

If they can see this kind of improvement from small changes, imagine what would happen on a site that has significant user experience problems.

And yet another brand has reported a 112% increase in revenue by improving the usability of its site.

Thus, a good site architecture that leads to a good user experience can clearly form a solid foundation for optimizing the conversion rate.

But breaking down the user experience of your website is not a simple process.

It takes a lot of data collection and analysis to come up with a site architecture that works well for conversions.

Fortunately, there is a method called the honeycomb model that shows you how the user experience can be broken down to optimize your conversion rates.

This methodology provides a simple framework that helps brands create websites with the following characteristics:

Helpful: Serve the purpose for which they created it.
Ease of use: Simple and easy to use.
Accessible: Anyone can use it.
Desirable: Provides a positive emotion and is pleasant to use.
Findable: Navigation is intuitive, and solutions are easy to find.
Credible: Transmits in a credible or trustworthy manner.
Valuable: Makes on a promised value.

If you can meet all the requirements of the honeycomb model, you naturally optimize sales funnel conversion paths for conversions.

So, for the rest of the article, I want to show you how to draw a direct line between the user experience, the site architecture and the conversion rate optimization.

You will no doubt see that the architecture of the site is a viable path to increase your lead generation.

Reason # 1: This gives the usefulness of your site

The early stages of the honeycomb model rely on the creation of a useful and usable website.

This concerns the utility and function of your site in some easy-to-understand ideas.

But it's not because they're easy to understand that they're easy to implement.

When creating your site's architecture, you need to create an experience that helps your user find what he was looking for.

This natural flow is the first place to start when one is looking at the friendliness and utility of your website.

This ultimately determines how people interact with your website.

And how they interact with your website will, in turn, determine the number of conversions you will get in the long run.

Think of it in terms of example involving a site that sells power tools.

On a well-designed website, it would be a logical flow of thought:

Users can browse according to the type of tool they want to find. The site then presents individual products according to whether they are wireless, electric or gas.

Now, imagine if you had to change some products.

In this case, if you were trying to find a gas saw, you should naturally look under the gasoline tools.

If you lose this place in the architecture of your site, a user can access the logical page without finding a product.

This means that no matter how much the page is optimized, your organic traffic will have a hard time navigating your site and may eventually disappear.

Thus, when we link the architecture of a site to conversion rates, most brands start by creating a mockup of what users want to get.

The goal is to base the entire website design process on the actual data and the behavior of the user.

In the words of Larry Sawyer, designer of Paypal UX:

"They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but a mockup is worth more than that."

So, this design process usually follows a flow of tests, analysis, definition, ideating, prototyping, and validation.

If you follow this particular model, you will be able to create a website usable by anyone in your audience and therefore inherently useful to all parties.

So, your initial goal is to optimize your site based on what visitors are doing.

You then take this information and analyze their behavior to see what stands out.

The way they use your site defines what's essential, which also gives you ideas to test if you want to improve your conversions.

From this information, you create a prototype of your website, then you validate your results with additional tests.

If the prototype is not valid, rinse it and repeat until your site is in perfect working order.

Keep in mind that this UX design style typically involves more design than the site's architecture.

But for our purposes, we want to focus on the situation as a whole.

So, when you finally build your site's architecture model, many brands start with full markup of how the elements of each page contribute to the user's experience. .

As this professional division shows, you can draw and improve every aspect of your site.

From this exercise, you can create a basic overview of what your users should do on each page of your site.

The goal here is to take a large amount of data from your original design, and then remove them until there is only one series of actions of the same. 39; user.

This, in turn, dictates the architecture of your site as it is a direct representation of how you want your user to use your site.

From this simplified design, a more complete wire model is usually created.

Once the wire is finished, you just need to finalize your images, your copies and your incentives for action.

You can then test your new prototype site to see if your user experience is positively affected.

If this simplifies the actions of your users, then you have really aligned the architecture of your site with the intention of your audience, thus fulfilling the criteria of usability and usability .

This process can be tedious, but it's an excellent illustration of how the architecture of your site is actually data-oriented and conversion-oriented.

If you manage to do this with your site, you will get closer to creating a better overall conversion funnel that will help your brand for years to come.

Reason # 2: This creates a positive momentum

As we deepen the user experience and connection to the site's architecture, the next layer according to the honeycomb model depends on the creation of the site. 39, a positive dynamic.

This means that according to the honeycomb pattern, it must be desirable, accessible and findable.

So, once you have established a feed and created a usable site on any device, the next step is to go beyond and create a pleasant experience.

It may surprise you to learn that one in three users will leave a site because they can not find a product.

This means that the architecture of your site can interfere with conversions in a very direct way.

So your goal at this point should be to create a site that is both easy to navigate and creates a natural momentum.

If you strive to showcase your site's architecture with compelling storytelling, the natural result will be that more users are performing actions on your site.

This means finding a way to create a site whose architecture naturally lends itself to being informative, interactive and even sometimes entertaining.

Take the example of my grandmother's Lingo site.

This award-winning website helps users learn new words from one of the world's oldest languages.

The creators designed the website for purposes of use and utility, but they even pushed this effort a step further by making it compelling and engaging .

The enticing idea of learning something both old and new increases the user, and then sends him on a 10-minute journey where he learns something.

In the end, the main goal is to contribute to the dissemination of these ancient languages and provide a platform for future preservation.

How do they do that? Through a vivid narrative and a clear site architecture geared towards a positive dynamic.

But the momentum is not just about narration.

It also depends on where you are positioned, like on a mobile.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFCs5dx9LVI?feature=oembed&w=700&h=394]

More than ever, users are browsing with a mobile device.

This means that the architecture of your site must be both favorable to a desktop user and a mobile user.

If you focus only on one or the other, you are missing a significant portion of your potential audience, and you are losing conversions.

And if someone comes to your mobile site only to find that it is not optimized, then all the positive momentum is gone.

But the momentum has to start even further with your SEO.

And the site's architecture plays a vital role in bringing organic traffic to your site and provides momentum towards the front.

In one study, a brand was able to increase organic traffic from its site from 800 visits per month to over 3,600 per month focusing on the user experience that its website has given.

This is a growth of 350%.

They did this by focusing entirely on the information architecture of their site and its content.

It is therefore clear that the architecture of the site can generate more traffic.

If your traffic can access any device, your momentum continues.

Moreover, if your storytelling is engaging, you continue the momentum again.

And all this refers to the architecture of your site and how Google and your audience use it.

Reason # 3: She finally clarifies the value

The last reason that links your site's architecture to your efforts to optimize the conversion rate depends on the credibility and value of your site.

Another way of saying, "How does the architecture of your site help you keep your promise?"

If you fail to make a promise by creating a confusing and confusing site, then you will never be able to see a real improvement in an A / B test.

And according to CRO's LIFT model, the clarity and relevance of your value proposition will take your brand to new heights.

The key to remember here is that users do not always come to your website via your home page.

There is a good chance they will be able to enter at any moment, as long as they have the correct URL.

For example, how do you potentially sell – via the architecture of your site – to a visitor who has visited your blog for the first time?

If you do not have a way for them to locate and navigate your site immediately, you could potentially lose a lead even before the process begins.

Your goal then, with the architecture of your site, is to provide value at every step.

This means that when someone comes to your site, he must immediately know where he is.

Elements such as your permalink structure even play a role in helping your visitor understand where they are and what value your site offers.

If you analyze your site silos easily understandable, as in the example above, users will see your site much more credible and ultimately more useful.

Take for example the Merge and Purge case study that aimed to boost organic traffic and improve the user experience.

In this case, the focus was on making disparate content created for many years and compiling it into silos with understandable content.

When the site was simplified, they saw a 32% increase in organic traffic.

And as we have already seen, organic traffic is the part of the site architecture conversion machine.

So in this case, by clarifying the value of their site by creating a cleaner content architecture, the brand was able to achieve a big win.

Trademarks should always seek to clarify their value proposition, and in this case the answer is simple:

The architecture of your site is the best place to start.

Conclusion

The optimization of the conversion rate is a nuanced and technical field.

It takes a lot of time and effort to learn the ins and outs of what works and what does not work, and this often stumbles brands looking to experiment and develop their online presence .

A / B tests fail very often, and the resulting frustration often diverts companies from optimizing the conversion rate as a whole.

But if you focus on creating a robust site architecture, the results can be very different in the best way possible.

The site architecture is the backbone of conversions, and follow the honeycomb pattern to enhance your user experience is the best plan of action.

If you do, your site will have a lot more utility, and users of your site will be able to navigate easily.

From there, you can use your architecture to create positive momentum and build loyalty with your brand.

And finally, you will have a clearer and more attractive value proposition that users can find from any point of entry.

You will be better able to develop and convert new leads by simply creating a solid site architecture.

How has the architecture of your site helped or hurt your brand?

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