The world wide web has become a tough playground – with your competition just a click away, what does it take to create an online presence that really stands out?
Well, the first step is looking at your website as what it really is: a 24×7 sales machine for your business – it’s not just there to look pretty.. It’s meant to generate new customers for your business.
Your website should convert at least 10% of the traffic that lands on it.
So how do you go about creating a website that actually converts?
Do the 5 second test
The average time to capture a visitors attention is 5 seconds – after this, most people will leave the page. So it’s important to determine what you are saying in those first 5 seconds. Your website should make an immediate statement of what you do, how you do it, and what your unique selling point is.
In 5 seconds.
Guide your visitor
Once you have answered the first few questions your visitor may have about your website & business, it’s important to make it absolutely apparent what they should do next. Tell them how they should proceed & guide them to the next step. The best way to do this is to determine the steps that they would need to take in order to get to the final purchase page, and direct them to go through each of those steps.
Example: for a fashion site, the first call out should guide the visitor to “View more collections”, after which they would slowly be guided through to the final call of “Add to card” & “Checkout”. (this is, of course, a simplified example)
Don’t make a mess
Do you know those websites that have multiple things calling for your attention at one time? They generally don’t tend to convert very well. When optimising a page for a specific action, it’s important to keep the page clean & focused. This allows the visitor to actually complete the action you want them to take, instead of getting distracted by something else they found interesting. While it can work to some advantage for ecommerce sites, websites that offer services should definitely steer clear of distracting visitors with other elements during a conversion process.
It’s time to take a good hard look at your website & determine if it is generating business for you. Because, quite frankly.. it should be.