Feng Shui might not be real but your customer conversion definitely is. As with a cluttered house, it will stress you out, make you unproductive and visitors will feel uncomfortable. Your website can evoke the same feelings.
As a digital advertiser, my number 1 issue is website design and content. It doesn’t matter how good my ads are, if they lead to a website that is not compelling to the customer, advertising can be more harmful to the business than doing nothing at all. Whether you are designing a site for yourself or a client, there are some key steps you can take to avoid confusion and drive leads.
OVERVIEW
Clear path
Call to action
Nobody cares what you want
You mum
Clear Path
The goal of any site is to convert visitors to leads. The key here is simplicity. Reducing the number of clicks needed to go from landing page to conversion will help you close more sales. It can be as simple as using the product or service as the landing page instead of your home page when you drive traffic.
If you are using ads to drive visitors to your site, create a cohesive campaign where everything has a clear next step. Begin with a landing page about the service or product you want to advertise and make it the main event. Explain what value the product brings to your customer and then build the advertising campaign off of that. So when the customer clicks on your ad they go straight to the thing advertised instead of them having to search for it, which will lead to dropouts.
The easier you make it for them to buy, the more likely it is that they will. That’s why PayPal is a success, you login in one step and buy securely. No need to retype your entire card details every time to a sketchy looking website.
Call to action
Always have a clear call to action. Do you want the customer to buy a specific item or contact you to book an appointment? Then give them the option of doing so in a very clear button in a visible location on your website. Somewhere that it stands out and they won’t have to necessarily read all the text on the page to find it. I know it sounds like a very silly and an obvious thing to point out, but you would be surprised how many websites forget this part.
Nobody cares what you want
When you visit a website, your goal is to find the thing that you were looking for. You don’t necessarily care about all the other products or services they offer. It’s very likely that if you don’t see it in the first minute of your search, you will simply just try another website. You, like everyone else, don’t care about the life story of the founder which usually goes as follows “As a child I always loved puppies so I designed this dog toy for dogs to play with”.
What you want to see instead is the price, if it's good for your dog, if it’s going to survive a day in your flat and how to buy it.
Keep any supporting information short and sweet, and if you can, move it to the about section instead.
Your Mum
A great way to know if your website is simple to use is get your mum to try it out. If she can navigate through the website and understand what it is for, you dear reader, got yourself a great website. If she gets confused, lost and scared then you might need to rethink your layout and text.
If you need more detailed feedback from your target audience, there are a number of great user testing sites. Prices and how much you can narrow down your audience varies so have a look at some different options before deciding.
Websites take a lot of work to build from scratch and it’s difficult to be objective about your own creation. Try to keep it focused to the product or service. Take out any unnecessary steps and have clear call to action for what you want the customer to do
on your site. This is the first step to a great ad website and more leads.
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