So what does a best practice website look like for driving an ideal customer journey? The Cloudcast team answers this question with their guest, Andy Crestodina, the co-founder and strategic director of Orbit Media and a major expert in the field of website design and strategy.

Here are six tips you’ll take away from the podcast:

1. See your website through your customer’s eyes.

It is important to put yourself in your customer’s shoes when appraising your website. Ask yourself questions like “what is it that we are saying to our customers?” and “are we answering their most requested questions quickly and easily when they land on our website?” If you can make a website that meets these requirements and makes an immediate positive impact then you will stand out from the crowd.

2. Consider the most prominent visuals.

Too many marketers see their website from the inside out rather from the outside in, says Crestodina. They are too busy looking for consistency with their marketing strategy and messaging, that they fail to see the obvious things that will jump out at customers including slow page loading times, the power of which colours to use and where and the importance of white space. Beyond that, marketers often forget how the website will jump out to search engines, and their navigation rarely explains itself well to the likes of Google and Bing.

3. Think SEO

The single most important little tweak that marketers can make is to get the title tag The single most important little tweak that marketers can make, says Crestodina right. For SEO success the title tag is like the cover of a book, he says, and so whatever you chose for that front page title tag, don’t chose “home”.

4. Have testimonials on every page.

The classic approach to website design layout is to have a testimonial page but analytics prove that visitors rarely visit these pages. Andy’s advice is to ditch these pages entirely and instead weave these testimonials into every aspect of your site.

But beyond this Andy stresses that in thinking about website content, it’s important to underpin every claim you make with strong evidence. Testimonials are great for this but not the only way. If you have produced ROI (Return on Investment) studies, for instance, this can be a powerful way to validate your value proposition. If not, generic industry studies - albeit less powerful - can also achieve this. This - he says - will do wonders for your conversion rate.

5. Overhaul your first three pages

The best way to approach overhauling your first three pages is to bury yourself in the analytics and get an idea of what are the pages most visited and what information is most searched for on the site. This is where you you are getting it right and you need to double down on this. Look at the mobile experience for these pages, strip out jargon from the language and tighten up the headlines.

6. Align with the sales team

Andy Crestodina shares a very valuable formula with the Cloud Cast team:

Traffic X Conversion Rate = Leads

Moving past that, he recommends making sure every page first and foremost answers customers’ questions and then underlines that answer with evidence. This is the most successful approach to achieving high conversion rates. This is why it is so important to collaborate closely with sales as this process is core to what they do - solving customer problems and backing up marketing claims with sound evidence.

To hear more about these techniques for better websites, as well as many others, listen to this episode of the Cloudcast here, and why not subscribe so you can tune in every week.