How Card Sorting Can Increase Your Website Visitors and Generate New Leads

A website must be designed in a way that appeals to the users and provides THEM the best experience—not to you. However, not everyone ensures this. That’s why 53% of consumers feel brands fall short of their experience expectations.

That’s a huge gap. Almost 50% of the customers are not satisfied by the brands they buy, and they’ll switch whenever their experience expectations are met by any other brand. Do you see something here? An opportunity–yes. Match it with your internal strengths and exploit it before someone else does.

From the statistics that just opened your eyes, it can also be inferred how important the user experience (UX) is. It makes or breaks your online business. It doesn’t only help you retain your current customers. Rather it works like a magnet and attracts the new ones as well. 

If not done correctly, however, it repels your current customers. So, you need to be very careful in what you’re doing. 

To ensure you’re providing the right user experience, you have to conduct user research. 

There are many ways to do so, but we are going to explore “Card Sorting” in detail throughout this article. We are going to see how card sorting increases your website visitors and generates new leads. 

Excited much? Let’s dive right into it. 

What’s card sorting in UX research?

Card sorting is a technique used to conduct UX research. It gives you useful user insights that you can then use to improve your website’s or application’s UX. 

Essentially, it helps you create or improve the way your website or application is structured, and the way users navigate through it. 

To understand card sorting in UX research, an interesting and easy way is to recall the “cards matching” game that you used to play in your childhood. You used to click and match a pair of the same cards, right? This ‘card sorting’ technique is also similar. 

From your perspective as a researcher, you present the items (for instance, all the products you offer on your website) in front of the research participants and ask them to categorize or group them in any way they naturally want. 

Or, in some cases, you provide the categories as well (for example, summer collection and winter collection) and ask the participants to group the items in the category they think the item belongs to. 

This way, you get useful insights that help you structure your website or application in a user-centric way. Hence, you provide them the experience they want. 

Who does card sorting—you, software, or seo agencies?

By now you know what card sorting is (in case you didn’t know about it earlier). Now you might be wondering who does card sorting or how to do it. 

To conduct UX research by card sorting technique, you have more than a couple of options. 

You can do it by yourself, utilize a software tool, or hire an SEO agency. 

To do it by yourself, you have to interview or survey the research participants either physically or remotely. 

The other way is to employ a software tool. As brands are realizing the benefits and importance of UX, new software tools are being pushed out into the market by developers to help brands in improving UX. So, you can find a lot of tools that help you conduct card sorting.

The third way is to hire an experienced SEO agency. Improving UX is one of the ranking factors, so SEO agencies who really know their job conduct UX research. However, it is better to ask the SEO agency before hiring if they conduct UX research or not. 

Create content tailored to your users 

A well-planned UX design has the potential to increase conversion rates by up to 400%. How so? 

Let’s see what we mean by a well-planned UX design first. In a well-planned UX design, any element of the interface has a reason for being there. 

Where do the UX designers get that reason from? 

From the users who will use the website. 

They conduct the UX research and understand them. try to analyze the way their customers think and incorporate it in their site’s UX. 

So, when you have conducted the card sorting research, you have some useful insights. You can use them to create customer-tailored content as well. 

You can create more effective content by leveraging keywords and phrases that are related to the categories that users sorted cards into. This will help your content to rank higher in search engine results, resulting in more website visitors and leads. 

By analyzing the data from the card sorting sessions, you can also identify any content that is popular with users and create content that is similar in style and content. 

Overall, there are a lot of opportunities you can exploit with the data you’ve collected by card sorting. This is how a well-planned UX design can elevate your site’s conversion rates by up to 400%—you’re creating the experience that your users actually want. 

Improve site’s navigation 

Bad navigation is one of the top reasons for a visitor to leave a website. If they don’t know where to find the item they’re looking for, they will leave your website and go to your competitors. 

That’s a nightmare for you, right? You don’t want the visitors to leave before they purchase. For that, you’ve to improve your site’s structure and navigation. 

Card sorting is primarily used for improving navigation and structure. So, once you’ve the data from card sorting, incorporate it into your site’s user experience. 

Group the items on your website the way most of your customers sorted the cards into. Don’t assume what category a product belongs to, see what your users think from the results of card sorting. 

Doing this will not only help retain your current customers, but it will also increase your website visitors and generate new leads. How? By improving the UX. 

By incorporating the card sorting results, you’ve improved the site’s navigation by now, which means a better UX ultimately. A good user experience is a ranking factor, so now your website is likely to rank higher. 

It improves your search engine visibility, so you’re more likely to achieve new visitors and leads. 

Another way an improved navigation generates new leads is through word of mouth. 

Once you’ve delighted your current customers with the best UX, they’ll talk about you in their communities. They’ll spread your word; hence, you’ll get new visitors and leads. 

Optimize sitemap

A sitemap helps search engines find pages on your website. In a sitemap, you categorize all the pages you have on your website. 

For instance, you’ve a ‘clothing’ category and there are multiple other pages under it such as shirts, trousers, jackets, etc. 

While creating a sitemap, you have two options. Either to categorize the pages on your own, or categorize them the way your users would categorize them. 

This is where card sorting helps you. The data you’ve collected through card sorting tells you what your users think and how they would want your website to be structured. 

If they categorize a summer shirt under a category of formal shirts, you can’t assume that ‘summer shirts’ is really the right classification for this item. 

You should better listen to the customers and categorize it under the ‘formal shirts’ category. That is where your customers will look for it, and that’s where you can close the sale. 

So, utilize the data you’ve just collected to your advantage, and structure your website accordingly. 

Once you’re done structuring it in a user-centric way, that’s the sitemap you’ll want to submit for search engines to crawl.  

A good sitemap helps the search engines index your site better, increasing your search engine visibility ultimately. As you’re more visible, you’re more likely to increase website visitors and generate new leads. 

Achieve new leads and website visitors 

So, now you know what card sorting is, and how to do it for your business. This UX research technique helps you gather the thought processes of your users, helping you structure your website in a user-centric way. 

The ultimate benefits that you enjoy after doing card sorting are being able to create a better content generation strategy, improving your website’s or application’s navigation, and optimizing your sitemap. 

All of this improves your website’s user experience and search engine visibility, helping you increase your website visitors and generate new leads.