The Best Training Provider Websites put User Experience First

You don’t get a second chance at making a first impression, so how easy is it for people to find what they are looking for on your website? From visit to conversion, transform your training provider website into a user-friendly experience with these some tips:

1. Get Users from your Homepage to Training Catalogue, FAST

Speed is of the essence — the faster users can find a relevant course, the more likely they are to purchase. Make it easy for people to navigate around your website by positioning a catalogue gateway on your homepage. Safety ’N Action have hit the nail on the head with the below homepage widget. Clearly displayed on their homepage, users can discover courses relevant to them via a search box and filter functions. Alternatively, if visitors aren’t sure what they’re looking for, they can browse the full range of courses by clicking on a direct link to the course catalogue. It’s clear, simple and in prime website real estate: right at the top of their homepage. Similar to the Safety N’ Action example above, the topic-based ‘promote your courses’ widget below gives users multiple entry points into this training company’s catalogue gateway. Not only does it clearly outline the breadth of training topics they offer, it also helps users drill a layer deep into the website’s training catalogue. Advertising your products’ delivery method on your homepage is another useful way to invite website visitors to engage with your courses. It helps users personalize their experience of your website — for example, if someone is based in a remote location, they can choose to only look at courses that are available online.

2. Use Filters and Search Functions to Help Users Drill Deep into your Website’s Training Catalogue

Sifting through pages of irrelevant information is never fun — don’t give your users an excuse to abandon your website before they’ve even scratched the surface. Sort your courses into logical categories. This will help potential customers progress further along their purchasing journey.

3. Reduce Friction in your Checkout

We’ve highlighted the crucial role that first impressions play in capturing your target audience’s attention, but how your visitors interact with your checkout page is the real make-or-break moment when it comes to running a training provider e-commerce website. A complicated checkout process is a big turn-off for potential customers.

4. Eliminate Admin: Connect your Training Provider Website to your Back-End Systems

Do you manually manage your website content? Cut out this unnecessary chore by connecting your training management system (TMS) to your website back-end. Making the change now will save you time and effort in the future, whilst also helping safeguard your content against human error. The benefits? Every time you make an edit on your TMS it will automatically be pulled through to your website, so your customers will always have access to the most up-to-date information. If a course gets canceled or becomes full, a waiting list will be switched on in real-time.

5. Create An Excuse to Capture Leads on your Training Provider Website

Do you collect data from people who are not ready to buy? The majority of users won’t convert to sales straight away, and that’s why it’s crucial to capture leads early on. All visitors are valuable, so explore multiple avenues when gathering emails and forming relationships. Email data also gives you the chance to check-in with visitors if they decide to abandon their checkout. In return for personal data, emphasize a value exchange with your website visitors. People will be more willing to give you their email if they feel like they’re getting something worthwhile in return.

6. Use Google’s Structured Data Mark-Up

A first page ranking on Google doesn’t always translate to website click-throughs. The information in your listing needs to be clearly laid out so that people can judge, at a glance, whether your services will be of value to them. Unfortunately, Google isn’t a mind reader — to avoid unhelpful snippets from your website being previewed as a description, you need to tell Google about your course pages: “Hey Google, what you’re looking at on this page is a list of courses and each of those courses are run on a specific date, at a specific location”. The good news is that Google has clearly outlined how they want to be told about event data. They call it, structured event data. Here you can see a training provider website that has not been set up correctly for structured event data. Their pages just look like standard webpages in Google. Here you can see how the search results display for some of Brainsmiths Labs’s customers. Behind the scenes, course dates, names and locations use this structured data mark-up so are given this hero treatment in Google. You can use this Google mark-up on any website using any content management system.

7. Align Course Names and Descriptions with SEO Keywords

Below we’ve included two examples of a Microsoft Excel course description to demonstrate best practice for keyword and key phrase usage. The first example wouldn’t rank high on a search due to missing out part of the key phrase — ‘Microsoft’. Although the majority of people automatically understand what ‘Excel’ alone stands for, this cannot be taken for granted when it comes to SEO. Make sure your keywords align with your course names and descriptions because Google will always bring up pages that directly match key phrase searches versus those that only partially do. This highlights the importance of researching and reviewing the keywords you choose to use in your course titles and content.

8. Make Your Training Provider Website Mobile-Friendly

If your training website isn’t mobile-friendly, your Google rankings across the board will suffer. Google’s algorithm doesn’t discriminate — a desktop search will still be put below other, more mobile-responsive websites, regardless of the type of device used to make that search. Providing a great mobile experience isn’t just about the ranking though. People are actually using their phones to access your website. In the last two years, mobile phones have surpassed desktops as the device of choice for Google searches, and this browsing behaviour should ultimately inform how you build and update your training company website. Google mobile searches graph. A rise in mobile searches has also changed the way people purchase. Forrester’s ‘2018 Retail Best Practices: Mobile Web’ report predicted that mobile devices would account for more than one third of retail sales in 2018. If your training e-commerce website isn’t mobile friendly, you’re not only missing out on Google rankings, but sales too.