A visitor to your website only becomes valuable when they take the action you want them too. It’s easy to spend too much time driving traffic to your site and not enough time on converting that traffic. Discover 7 steps to improved conversion.
1. Grab Attention With A Powerful Headline. 35% of visitors to one of my websites visit only one page and spend less than 10 seconds on the site. And this is for a specific niche business; self storage. A year ago 60% left in under 10 seconds. Simply changing the headline to one that powerfully states what the site is about made a huge difference. Immediately following up with bullet points that gave visitors reasons to remain on the site and find out more helped too.
2. Focus On The Buyers, Not The Surfers. Visitors use hundreds and even thousands of different keywords to get to your website. The nearer a visitor is to buying, the more specific their keywords get. For example, someone thinking about buying self storage might start by searching for “self storage”. They’re surfing. Soon they may refine their search to “furniture storage”, before finally searching for “furniture storage in Glasgow”. The visitor searching for “furniture storage in Glasgow” is a buyer. The visitor who searched for “self storage” is a surfer. Who do you want? If the purpose of your website is to get sales, you need to know and focus on the keywords people use when they are about to buy. These are the words to use in your headlines and bullet points.
3. Don’t Use A One-Size-Fits-All Landing Page. Internet surfers have the attention span of a hyper-active 5 year old with acute Attention Deficit Disorder, who’s just had a bar of chocolate, a mug of strong coffee and has 20 gifts to open. You need to immediately grab their attention. You do this by sending them to the most relevant page for their search. A huge mistake many websites make is to have a one-size-fits-all landing page for each and every type of customer who visits the site. Usually it’s the websites home page. That might work for some visitors, but it won’t work for many and they’ll immediately leave your website. An opportunity lost before you had a chance. Taking a camera example, if someone has searched for a Canon Digital 980 IS and they land on a Digital Camera home page and then have to click on Compact Digital Cameras, then Canon Compact Digital Cameras and finally on Canon Digital 980 IS you’ll lose them way before they get there. If they’ve searched for Canon Digital 980 IS then they will be much more likely to buy if they land on the page with the details about the Canon Digital 980 IS. Drive your buying keywords to specific landing pages. These are the pages to optimise in the search engines.
4. Write Your Website From Your Customer’s Perspective. You must immediately engage with your visitors. That means writing from their perspective. Tell them what your website will do for them. Give them reasons to stay. Don’t fall into the trap of writing about your company. Your visitor wants to quickly know how they will benefit from investing their time on your site.
5. Don’t Lose Visitors By Making Them Click. Web designers love short web pages. Many hate the idea of visitors having to scroll down a page. They’d much rather visitors clicked for more information. The trouble is that with every click you lose engagement and you lose visitors. Longer copy works. My conversions leapt when I put more, relevant information on the page.
6. Make It Easy To Buy. The second your visitor is ready to buy make sure it’s really easy for them to do so. Have your telephone number on every page. If you’ve got long copy, repeat it several times on every page. If they need to complete an order form have that on the page or link through to it several times on every page. Keep any order forms short and just get the minimum information; the harder your visitor has to work the more likely they are to abandon the purchase and leave.
7. Test and Learn. No one can know for certain which headline, photograph, testimonial, guarantee etc will convert the best. The only way to know for sure is to test each version. Fortunately Google provides a free tool which does this for you. Check out their Website Optimiser tool. I always have a few tests running and I suggest you do too. The results will often surprise you and sometimes cause amazement!
Related Story:
