Do you have a conversion focused website?
Taking your website from basic information site to lead conversion machine is a process that won’t happen in 5 minutes but now is a good time to take the first step and lay the foundations. Here’s 5 simple things you can do right now to move toward ensuring that you have a conversion focused website and are making the most of incoming traffic.
1. Check all links
Nothing screams ghost town like broken links on your website. Regardless of how successful your business is in reality, the perception will be that no one has been into the office in 6 months and everything is falling apart. Nothing turns prospects off quicker than the appearance that business is failing.
Oh and by the way google strongly agrees – broken links negatively affect your search engine ranking.
2. Make sure visitors are able to contact you quickly?
If you’re going to put in a heap of work to generate leads and bring them to the point of sale, don’t deny them the chance to contact you. If visitors can’t find your details quickly they are likely to leave never to return. Millennials will want an email address, anyone other than millennials will be looking for a phone number so you need to display both prominently. We have our phone number displayed in the menu bar which is always visible and our email is displayed as a clickable link in the header and at various other significant spots on our website.
3. Make sure visitors know immediately what products or services you offer?
Make it simple, make it sharp, make it clear what you offer to customers in the top screen of your home page and in your menu. Any level of confusion and you will lose the interest of your visitors. And by the way you don’t have to say it a million times; in fact don’t do that – google penalises websites for what is called keyword stuffing. E.g. I do websites websites websites on the Gold Coast Gold Coast Gold Coast.. It worked in the 90s apparently but Google is getting smarter.
4. Optimise your website’s load time
There’s nothing more annoying than this screen. 40% of people agree and will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Give customers the content they are looking for as soon as they click on that link. Too many videos or animations, although really cool once loaded, can cost you at this point.
You can test your page speed easily by punching your website’s URL into Google’s PageSpeed Insights tools. As well as giving you an indication of how your page measures up when it comes to load time, the tool also offers advice on how you can improve. So many great free tools if you know where to look.
5. Check the layout and functionality of your site on mobile.
It’s the buzz word in web development at the minute – responsive web design. It’s actually really simple to get right, just a little time consuming. There is an ocean of statistics telling us why it’s so important to pay attention to the performance of your site on mobile so I guess we all should pay attention. One stat I read said 90% of facebook users access the site on mobile. Are you running a fb marketing campaign? I don’t have to spell this out for you. Go now. Check that your website looks just as good on mobile as it does on desktop.
So there you go, a bit of time and discipline now to get these things right will pay dividends in the long run. Stay tuned for more tips on building a conversion focused website.