Do your customers know what to do when they visit your website?

Turning website visitors into customers…

Can you answer the question above about your website? Are you able to define and understand what you website visitors are supposed to do or do you just have a website because you ‘should’ have one? ‘Should’s’ do not work very well when it comes to enhancing and optimising your online business. Your website can be the most powerful piece of marketing material that you possess, if you use it in the right way?

Regardless if your site is an online brochure or a fully-fledged e-commerce website, you have to think about the end user and how they will use your site. Will they go onto your site looking for your contact details (please make sure these are prominently displayed if this is the case), or will they go on looking to buy something that you are selling. Either way you need to get your site visitors the information / sales item that they are looking for with the least amount of clicks and in a way that is appealing to your site visitor. Your ideal site visitor is someone who will use your business consistently over time and they will only do this if you treat them right first time and every time.

Ok, someone has arrived at your flower pot website having used the search term ‘Flower Pots’ in Google. Great, or is it? It is only great if you can convince the visitor that you are the flower pot company that they are looking for and that you offer the finest flower pots around at the best prices. Not so good if you fail to convince them and they go to your competitor’s website who secures a large order. So how do you go about turning your site visitors into customers?

The 3 step process is simple:

1) Get the user onto your site
Employ good search engine optimisation to rank consistently high for the keywords that you want to be found with. Ensure that your site is designed to load as quickly as possible so that the visitor does not have to wait over a few seconds for the site to load.

2) Give the site visitor clear instructions
Let your visitors know that you are reputable business and you can fulfil their needs. Make your design visually appealing and user friendly. Most importantly give your visitors clear and prominent call to action buttons to prompt them to trade with you, contact you etc. A call to action button is a well-positioned web button or prominent link that prompts the site visitor to click on it. An Example call to action button is below:

3) Convert the sale
This is where the hard work from the first 2 stages comes to fruition and you can convert the website visitor into a fully-fledged customer. The call to action button has led the visitor successfully to your sales page and then what? Well of course, you make sure that this page is optimised to convert the sale. You may have another well positioned call to action button that the user can see to complete the sale or another prompt to the user that you are the right business for them to trade with. Bingo, sale completed, happy customer.

A good indicator of your effectiveness of your 3 step process above is from the bounce rate of your website in Google Analytics. If you haven’t got Google Analytics installed already then I highly recommendit, if you need help with this as we are Google Analytics experts). A low bounce rate indicates that the site visitors are finding the information they want on your website and are staying on your site, fantastic. A high bounce rate on the other hand indicates that visitors are clicking onto your website and are then clicking off without visiting your site further, not so good.

Conclusion

You must optimise your site to move your website visitors through the 3 steps if you want to achieve the maximum amount out of your website. Employ a good web developer who understands the 3 important steps and delivers a site that is designed to optimise your business, rather than one that is just sitting there on the web doing very little.