Did you know that 53% of visitors will abandon your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load? And did you know that almost ‘40% of users will stop engaging if they find the content or layout of a website shabby and tatty’. While these small blunders may seem trivial, they mustn’t be overlooked as they are very well capable of killing your conversion and retention rates. The question is, how can you optimise your website in a way that completely eliminates these errors. Well, the truth is you can’t. No one can. But you can certainly make improvements! Let me introduce you to website optimisation services.
Post updated: June 2021
Website optimisation services are essential if you want to provide your visitors with a smooth and positive experience on your website. When choosing one of these services, however, there are a lot of different factors (and techniques) to keep in mind.
What is website optimisation?
Website optimisation (often used interchangeably with conversion rate optimisation) is about improving aspects of your website in order to reach your business objectives. You can decide which aspects you want to optimise based on your visitors and business goals, keeping in mind your business budget and size. Optimising your website will increase your traffic and conversions as well as point out where you are going wrong (or right!).
To give you an indication of what these services are capable of and what to look out for, let’s take a closer look at the various website optimisation strategies.
Notable Website Optimisation Strategies
There are many strategies to consider when looking to achieve website optimisation. Here are some of the most popular, heading into 2020:
- Mobile friendly: More and more people are accessing websites with their mobile and therefore it is a must to have an accessible mobile website.
- SEO: Applying the proper SEO techniques will increase your website traffic and therefore increase your chance of more conversions.
- Page speed: Webpage loading time is the first thing visitors notice when going to your website and a slow page speed can be an immediate turnoff.
- User intent: Find queries that users of your market are searching for, so that your website will be shown as high as possible on search engine.
- Content marketing: You will need to make sure that your content stands out and is clear, in order to reach and cater to your audience as well as increase your traffic.
- User experience: You will need to prevent and reduce user experience barriers which can cause your visitor to leave your website.
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With those in mind let’s take a look at Mopinion’s top 15 favourite Website Optimisation Services:
1. Hotjar
Hotjar is an intuitive all-in-one tool that helps to understand and measure user behaviour. The comprehensive heat map tool allows you to track users’ movements across a page, showing where people become disinterested and where’s grabbing their attention. It also lets you record user actions and watch them for a more comprehensive analysis. Though, it’s important to remember that UX optimisation tools like this won’t just improve user experience magically, so you will need to be constantly testing and retesting!
Pricing: $99 (500 daily sessions) / $189 (1,500) / $289 (2,500)
Website: www.hotjar.com
2. Mopinion
Mopinion is both a quantitative and qualitative feedback analytics tool with which you can collect and analyse online user feedback. Mopinion offers feedback solutions for mobile apps, websites and email. We also provide customisable dashboards and text analytics, giving you deep insights into the customer experience and of course a means to improve it! Mopinion also offers integrations with project management tools, Asana and Trello. Moreover, you can integrate Mopinion with major CRM systems such as Salesforce and MS Dynamics
Pricing: €199 (Growth) / €499 (Turbo) / Upon request (Enterprise)
Website: www.mopinion.com
3. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free website optimisation service and analytics tool with which you can analyse and track the performance of your website or app. There is also the opportunity to connect Google Analytics with other Google platforms, like Google Ads. It also offers a premium version with more details, which is designed for enterprise companies. One downside — however — is that it takes a lot of time to implement this tool, and it may be difficult to understand the data.
Pricing: Free
Website: www.marketingplatform.google.com
4. GTmetrix
With GTmetrix you can analyse the speed of your website as well as that of your competitors using Google PageSpeed and Yahoo! Yslow. GTmetrix shows you why your webpage(s) is slow and gives you recommendations to optimise the speed. You can test your webpage from different locations. Their reports summarise key performance indicators. They also offer a free version. However, you will need to change to one of the paid versions if you want to analyse your speed performance on mobile devices. In addition, they also have a free WordPress plugin for analysing WordPress websites.
Pricing: Free (basic) / $14,95 (bronze) / $49,45 (silver) / $149,95 (gold) / upon request (custom)
Website: www.gtmetrix.com
5. SEMrush
SEMrush is an SEO tool which offers many features, like keyword-research, backlink tracking, content analyser, social media tracking, on-page SEO tracker and rank checking. SEMrush also provides competitor tracking and research. They also have a mobile app for iOS and Android that lets you follow all your position tracking campaigns. Moreover, this tool has a social media poster Chrome extensionwhich allows you to schedule your social media posts. One disadvantage however is that it misses a keyword list management feature.
Pricing: $99 (pro) / $199 (guru) / $399 (business) / upon request (enterprise)
Website: www.semrush.com
6. BrightEdge
BrightEdge is an enterprise-level SEO platform that includes customisable dashboards, forecasting, and reporting. It’s great for enterprises that would like keyword visibility at a regional or national level. BrightEdge covers local, global, mobile, social and content centric SEO. You won’t be stuck dipping between two tools or, even worse, attempting to combine data manually, as this tool does most of the work by integrating web analytics data with content performance and social data. However, it may be slightly cost prohibitive due to the pricing structures.
Pricing: BrightEdge only offers bespoke plans for enterprise-level businesses
Website: www.brightedge.com
7. Optimizely
Optimizely allows you to test different website variations. This website optimisation services also offers a web and full stack platform, which can be used separately as well as together. Their web experiments platform is created for marketing teams and can be used without coding. Their full stack platform, on the other hand, is more advanced and includes open-source SDK and pluggable components. Furthermore, Optimizely is available for mobile apps, TV apps and IoT apps.
Pricing: upon request
Website: www.optimizely.com
8. CrazyEgg
CrazyEgg helps you to understand and track user behaviour on your website by giving you a visual overview. They offer heatmaps for mobile apps and websites, where you can see on which webpage your visitors are clicking most and spending the most time on. CrazyEgg also provides user recording, which allows you to see where and why users get stuck on your website. Moreover, you can create A/B tests without coding. This allows you to test your solutions from your heatmaps and user recordings. This tool also offers a 30-day free trial..
Pricing: $24 (basic) / $49 (standard) / $99 (plus) / upon request (custom)
Website: www.crazyegg.com
9. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a free keyword tool offering keyword research and guarantees to help you ‘win the SEO game’. The best parts of this tool is their keyword analysis and the integration with web analytics tools. Ubersuggest provides a good overview of SEO performance such as identifying broken links, monitoring page loading times while also being able to monitor competitors. Neil Patel Digital offers a paid version with more advanced search engine marketing and SEO capabilities. Though unlike some of its competitors, Ubersuggest does not export reports or automated reports.
Pricing: Free / €29 (Individual) / €49 (Business) / €99 (enterprise)
Website: www.neilpatel.com
10. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a very handy, industry-leading data tool which can help to accelerate the growth of organic search traffic to your website. This toolkit offers several data analysis and optimisation tools, all of which are included in the same pricing plans. This means you won’t miss out on any critical features, no matter what your budget is. Their content research tool allows you to use keywords to find out what related content has performed well in organic searches or social media. There is also a comprehensive dashboard, to help you keep track of all your projects at once.
Pricing: $99 (per month) / $7 (seven-day trial)
Website: www.ahrefs.com
11. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a well-known WordPress plugin that offers a number of great features, including keyword optimisation, readability check, page previews, duplicate content prevention, and other content insights. While this tool is very user-friendly, it does fall flat in some areas, such as its strong emphasis on suggestions / recommendations. For example, a lot of times users are notified of suggestions that aren’t always accurate, e.g., the use of passive voice. But don’t be discouraged. For beginners, this can be a great SEO tool for content optimisation
Pricing: Choose from Free package or Yoast SEO Premium (€89ex VAT) for 1 site — including 1 year free updates and support.
Website: www.yoast.com
12. Smartlook
Smartlook is a qualitative analytics service which helps you to improve your user experience. It allows you to see what visitors are doing on your website, where they click & scroll and why visitors are churning. Features of Smartlook are visitor recordings, heatmaps, tracking events and conversional funnels. This tool offers its features for mobile apps as well. One other great thing is that they offer a free plan which includes 1,500 sessions per month. This is a great option for startups and small companies
Pricing: €19 (starter), €79 (power)
Website: www.smartlook.com
13. VMO
VWO is an all-in-one software that offers five different platforms that you can use separately or together. They have a testing platform that includes A/B Testing and lets you create your own tests without coding. Additionally, their Insights platform offers session recording, heatmaps and on-page surveys. VWO Engage lets you engage (potential) customers, and VWO plan allows you to collaborate with your team. Moreover, VWO offers its Full-stack platform for enterprise companies, which offers more testing options and on more devices.
Pricing: Ranges from $99 – $999 per month based on platform(s)
Website: www.vwo.com
14. Serpstat
One of the fastest growing SEO tools on the market, Serpstat provides comprehensive search analytics data. This all-in-one platform has over 20 tools, some of which include: backlink analysis, competitor analysis, keyword research and many more. For technical users, the website audit tool is extremely in depth. This tool provides users with an extensive list of SEO metrics, analysis, and tips. On the other hand, the content marketing tools sadly don’t live up to some of their other features.
Pricing: $69 (Lite Plan) / $149 (Standard Plan) / $299 (Advanced Plan)
Website: www.serpstat.com
15. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog SEO Spider website crawler helps you improve on site SEO by extracting data and performing scheduled audits for common search engine optimisation issues. With this tool, you can schedule crawls to run at chosen intervals and export the data to any location. It also lets you analyse your results in real-time. This technical tool helps gather key on site data and essentially help you get more free website traffic. Though it may not be for you if you’re crawling a large site as the application tends to slow down.
Pricing: Free version or Paid (£149.00 Per Year)
Website: www.screamingfrog.co.uk
Which website optimisation service(s) is right for you?
We know that there are many more website optimisation services out there, but we believe that these are some of the best services!
That being said, the best way to choose which website optimisation service(s) your company wants to use is simply by giving them a whirl. Hopefully, this overview will help you make a decision about which website optimisation service(s) best fits your business!
Good luck!
Ready to see Mopinion in action?
Want to learn more about Mopinion’s all-in-1 user feedback platform? Don’t be shy and take our software for a spin! Do you prefer it a bit more personal? Just book a demo. One of our feedback pro’s will guide you through the software and answer any questions you may have.