Win more business by optimising your website

7 ways to improve your website to make you more money

How successful is your website in bringing in new enquiries or sales?

Websites should be as thought about, and tended to, as physical stores. But all too often this isn’t the case. If you don’t look after your website it can have a real negative effect for your brand. It can put people off. They assume if your website isn’t professional, then neither are you.

Here’s our top tips for optimising your website to win people over and gain more sales:

1) State the problem you solve from the outset

You have seconds to capture someone’s attention on your website.

Visitors land on your website because they are in search of solutions to problems. If it is not clear from the outset what your company solves, the visitor will dismiss the website as irrelevant and leave in search of a website which is.

Task: write down your top performing products/ranges or services. Now note down what problems (or opportunities) do they solve?

Examples of customer problems:

“I’m looking for a birthday gift for a toddler”
“I can’t sleep and I’m exhausted”
“My old phone is slow and doesn’t have the latest camera technology.”
“I’ve earnt a great bonus but I’m not sure where best to invest it to keep it safe but also let it grow”

Once you’ve identified the motivator behind purchasing your product, make sure you state the key words in your opening text. “Quality toys and gifts for toddlers”, “Sleep aids for insomnia”, etc.

This task may give you ideas for new landing pages which solve particular problems. Your product range may fit a range of problems and some may have seasonal relevance such as ideas for Christmas presents for a particular family member or type of person. 

2) Highlight the benefits of your product, not nitty gritty features

Many of those I’ve worked with have great passion and knowledge of their field. It seems the more expertise they have, the harder they find it to see past the detail of their product. They want to share all the clever little features. It seems sensible to them to tell you about everything they think makes the product (or service) amazing to them.

But customers primarily want to know how the product solves their need/issue or gives them a benefit. They don’t want to be blinded with the mechanics of a product.

So what benefits will your customers get from what you sell?

Benefits can be physical or more intangible. There can be layers of benefit one gets from a product. Some of which you can’t spell out but need to indicate.

Example: a watch, for instance, tells us the time. It might be a fancy watch which does a bit more than just tells the time. But often watches are a person brand moment to people too. They are worn every day and can feel almost a part of your body. What does your watch say about you? You’ll notice that luxury watch brands don’t use their advertising space to list out all the features. Instead they put an image of an affluent, good looking person who acts as inspiration for customers. “This is who I want to be”.

3) Design for user experience

Fact: 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive (source: Adobe). Design shouldn’t just be pleasing on the eye. You can add parallax, video backgrounds and on trend colours all you want but it isn’t the be all and end all. The design of your website should…

1) Reflect your brand
2) Help the user navigate the content easily

That’s it in my opinion.

Bad design classics:
· Too wordy
· Too cramped
· Colours clash or make text hard to read
· Glitches which should have been picked up in testing

· Not mobile responsive

4) Make buying from you easy

Don’t make them hunt for the info they need to make a purchase. Visit your website as if you were a customer. How many steps do you make them go through to make a purchase?

5) Spell out why they should buy from you

Why you and not the other guys? Spell out what makes your service or product unique. What makes you better than the competition.

6) Run a healthy site

It’s not just about what your website looks like or what you say on it. Your website needs to be built in such a way that the coding is concise, page load speed, mobile friendly responsive design etc. You can check your website for free using various tools. We like Hubspot’s Website Grader as a good starting point.

7) Optimise your calls to action

Calls to action (CTAs) are short messages to the visitor about what they should be doing next. You are giving them an option to do something. Often these are in the form of a button. CTAs should be clear and short, they should stand out through use of contrasting colour, or outline or font weight, use of capitals, white space etc. Calls to action really should exist on every page, as you want to give the visitor options for what to do next to deepen their relationship with you. Task: focus on what client wants out of the transaction on each page. Where does your content sit in their buying journey? Are they information gathering, comparing competitors or have they refined which product/service/solution they want and are now wanting to make a purchase? Your calls to action should help them to take the next steps in their journey. Best practice for CTAs:

Short
Bold (with colour pallet, size, positioning, etc)
Easy tap-target for mobile
Descriptive (avoid using ‘click here’ – instead, use ‘buy now’, ‘book your first appointment’ or ‘download the guide’.)

Are you struggling with your website?

Perhaps you aren’t getting enough visitors? Or too many leave without making a purchase or making contact with your brand. Speak to us to find out how we can help make a big difference in your online marketing, today.

“ I absolutely cannot thank you enough. The website plan and call really simplified everything for me. I have just printed and bonded the website assessment and the SEO report. I am ever so grateful to you for making this dummy friendly for me. There would have been no way I would have got through this otherwise. ”

Seema Barua

A Gentle Night's Sleep