These days having a website is pretty much mandatory if you want to get your business noticed. Many consumers expect it and it is the first place they go when they are doing research on goods or services. But, just having a website is only half the battle. You also need to build a site that captures people’s interest and converts visitors into buyers. The steps below will help you turn your website into a silent sales person that is working for you all day long.
Optimize Your Site for Mobile Devices
These days, more and more of us are surfing the web on the go – via smartphones, tablets and laptops. And if you want a piece of this traffic, you need to make your design responsive to all mobile devices.
To give your visitors an enjoyable mobile experience, make sure your design adjusts to fit the screen of any device. Additionally, all elements of your website – pages, resources, actions, and so on – should be easily accessible. If they’re not, visitors will quickly become frustrated and click away to a competitor. And really, who can blame them? You’d probably do the same.
Make it easy for customers to contact you
That means displaying your phone number in the upper-right corner of every page, and providing a simple, easy-to-find contact form. While some people prefer not to list an email address for fear it will be picked off by spam robots, it can serve as another contact option for those who hate web forms. Whatever you choose, the two main ideas are options and ease. Give your visitors a choice, make it easy, and they will come.
Keep the Site Basic
Have you started to notice a theme here? If you haven’t, it can be summed up in one word: easy. In today’s fast-paced world, people are busy. They don’t have time to navigate a complicated website, dig through dozens of pages to find a contact number, or try and figure out what it is that you’re selling because your mobile site doesn’t display content properly.
So when it comes to design, simplicity just makes sense. To produce the content of a simple website, every page, word, and image you create must have a singular purpose: to get visitors to contact you. Don’t waste time distracting them with excessive information, stupid games, or flashy animations. Instead, have a nice clean layout so they can understand what you’re offering quickly and can contact you with a click.
Put Your Personal Touch on the Site
Say you have to choose between services offered by two different websites. They both sell the exact same thing, and the sites look virtually the same. The key difference is that one uses real photos of the owner and his or her staff, while the other uses generic stock images of business people. Assuming images from both sites are of the same quality, which one are you more likely to choose? Undoubtedly, you chose the real people.
So next time you have to choose between stock images and shooting real photos of you and your staff, invest some time and money in quality pictures taken at a studio – it’ll be worth every penny.
Use Social Media, but Don’t Make it Center Stage
Everyone loves throwing social media icons on their websites, and it’s not a bad idea to show your credibility. However, if you put these at the top of the page, your visitor is more likely to click on them immediately. Sounds cool, right? Wrong. When this happens, you just created an exit for them to leave your site and never return – we all know how easy it is to get distracted on social media. Instead, place your social media icons at the bottom of the page in the footer. Remember the goal of your website is to convert. If your visitor leaves before they get a chance to explore your services, content and offering, you’ve lost them before you ever even had them.