Your website is one of the most essential marketing tools in your toolbox. It is the advocate of your business that never sleeps, giving your customers and potential customers information they need to convert. While at one time just having a website was enough, the digital world has greatly shifted.
To succeed online, your website needs to be built to be conversion-friendly. This means reducing as much of the friction as possible for site visitors before they take action and convert. Take a look at your website today. If you are unhappy with your current site, before investing in a new site, consider making these five changes to improve conversions and bring in more customers.
Assess What is Most Important
What is the primary goal of your website? If doesn’t line up with the primary goals of your business, reassess the website messaging. For a beauty school, it could be enrolling more students, while for a plumbing company it may be obtaining return customers.
For every business and website, there are likely secondary goals as well. Taking the beauty school example, secondary goals may include getting salon visitors, promoting blogs that educate your potential students and showcasing student work. While all of these are important and have their place on the website, it’s critical to not let these secondary goals interfere with the primary objective of your website.
Look at the calls to action, content and overall messaging of the website. Is your primary goal clear? If not, consider rewriting and rearranging, especially on the homepage, to serve the primary purpose of your business.
Write Specific Content That Speaks to Your Audience
Have you ever been in a conversation where you just aren’t being heard? The person you’re talking to talks all about themselves without ever letting you engage in the conversation and everything you say is a segue for them to one-up you with a bigger and better story? Don’t let your website visitors leave feeling like this. They need to be represented in the conversation.
Talk about the advantages your visitors will have from investing in you and your product. Speak more about them and their achievement potential with the help of your business rather than speaking solely of the business’s achievements. While these achievements still have their place on your website, and should be talked about, they should not overshadow speaking to your customers.
Write headlines to your customers that are clear. Vague headlines can confuse website visitors on what exactly you offer. If you aren’t a household name, the first thing your visitors read on your site should clearly tell them who you are.
In the case of the previously mentioned beauty school, “Start a rewarding career in the beauty industry, apply to beauty school” is a far more powerful call to action than “your life, your future starts here,” While both are customer-centric, one very clearly states that you are investing in yourself through beauty school while the other ambiguously suggests investing in yourself.
Proof From Actual Customers
When you see a new restaurant, you likely don’t visit without first doing research. You ask around to see if anyone you know has been there and read reviews online. If people are this dedicated to reviewing and researching to avoid disappointment for one evening eating out, you can guarantee they are doing this with larger investments as well. If you’re asking users to spend more than $10 over their lifetime at your company, they’ll be doing their research before committing.
It is estimated that about 73 percent of consumers are more likely to trust a local business after reading a positive review. Add authentic reviews from real customers to your website. Encourage happy customers to leave real reviews on trusted review platforms as well. Seeing the proof that your business is trusted by real customers will help potential customers do the same.
In addition to third-party review sites, feature reviews from real customers on your site. Customers know that businesses manage their own website, and that a bad business could write fake reviews on its site. Because of this, it is imperative that you only use real, authentic reviews.
If you have the permission and the resources, include a photo of the reviewer or use video testimonials on your site. This will increase credibility with potential customers.
Make Pages Easier To Read
It’s daunting to land on a website with one big paragraph of text to read through. Many users will see a page like that and bounce immediately. Break up the page in a way that makes sense for your business goals, but also keeps users engaged in the content you are providing.
For good digital content structure, it’s important to break things up into smaller paragraphs, bulleted lists, an appropriate amount of white space and relevant images whenever possible. Balance out the pages of your website with the right amount and formatting of text and images.
Avoid using fonts, text colors and background colors that make the text difficult to read. Paragraph text on the page should be at least 16 pixels. Make information easily consumed on your website to gain more customers. With mobile traffic often accounting for most of the website traffic, make sure your mobile site is easy for users to navigate and consume information.
Keep It Simple
Simplicity is key. When there’s too much happening on a page, visitors get overwhelmed and bounce. Walking the line between delivering enough information without overwhelming can be difficult but is critical. There are multiple places where simplicity will help turn website visitors into customers.
The main navigation is where visitors can easily navigate to the most important pages of the site. If the navigation is either too confusing or too crowded, visitors won’t know where they should go. Reserve the main navigation for the most important pages you want visited.
Simplicity throughout your website will help reduce points of friction with your visitors, turning them into customers.
Your website should be the biggest advocate for your business, and when doing marketing, it should be the destination for all traffic. Following these five steps will help make sure that when visitors get there, your business is accurately represented while still encouraging your visitors to turn into customers.
Cassie Costner is the website project manager and conversion rate manager at Oozle Media in Sandy, a company specializing in digital marketing and website development for small to medium-sized businesses.