Are you struggling to convert visitors into clients on your website? If your website is just sitting there looking pretty, gathering dust on a virtual internet shelf then try these 10 strategies on how to improve your website.
Improve Your Website, Make more Sales!
Why having a website is important – Your website needs to be part of your overall business strategy, it needs to be working for you building relationships and making sales. These simple tweaks can make the difference between someone clicking off your website or choosing to work with you.
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10 Simple Strategies You Can Implement Today:
You may already have some of these improvements in place so go through the list and mentally tick off what you have and implement what you don’t.
When it comes to a website strategy the basics are often overlooked in favour of visuals and aesthetics. Creating a website isn’t all about how it looks but how it speaks to your ideal clients and turns potential clients into paid customers so implementing these 10 strategies on how to improve your website will help you to get those extra sales:
1. Website strategy
This is the first thing I always ask clients if they have. As if you don’t know what you want people to do on your website then how would you expect them to know? Where does a website fit into your overall business strategy? Is it to build relationships by letting visitors know more about you or signing up to your mailing list? Is it getting them to book a call or make an appointment with you? Or is it simply getting them to buy a product from your online shop?
Think about how people currently buy from you, if no one ever just purchases a product or service without having a call with you first then you know your website mission is to get them on that call so you can find out what they need and how you can help them.
2. Clear calls to action
Now you know what your website marketing strategy is, you want your visitors to do it!
Have clear calls to action throughout your site, where appropriate, such as when people first land on your website and once you’ve given them some more information that would naturally lead them to completing your website mission.
My daughter was on various websites recently that kept saying contact us to buy, she suffers from social anxiety and the last thing in the world she would want to do is contact someone so her first reaction was to click off the website and look for another site, so make your calls to action something you want them to do and they can do EASILY!
Don’t make visitors go round in circles trying to do what you want them to do.
3. The customer journey
A lot of your visitors may come from social media, where you have already built up a relationship with them and they may be visiting your website with completing your website mission in mind and nothing else. So for example, if they are ready to book a call with you to chat over their options after following you on social media for some time, make that your most important call to action when they land on your website.
If they’ve only just come across you and want to know more, what do they need to know before they click that button? This could be more about you, your services, social proof, case studies, a gallery or portfolio of your work etc.
Lead them naturally through your website, consuming this information until they are ready to book a call. Or maybe they won’t be ready on this first visit, so have a secondary mission such as signing up to your mailing list – only you know your clients and how you can build those relationships with them before they buy.
4. A user friendly website
So what makes a website user friendly? By treating people who visit your website as if they have never visited a website before.
So easy to follow navigation, obvious calls to action with descriptions people can understand. Google hates ‘find out more’ and ‘read more’ on links and buttons and if you are registered with Google Search Console you will get emails telling you to make your links more descriptive, so make it obvious what they are clicking on.
Easy to read and jargon free text (unless your ideal clients would expect jargon) and break up long parts of texts with images and headings, as lots of people scan read until something jumps out at them.
Make sure the colours you use for text are easy to read and that your text isn’t on a colourful background or image that makes it difficult to read.
Also I have so many people come to me on support calls where they or someone else has built the site and they say that people tell them they can’t find their home page.
To them it’s obvious they need to click a logo but to so many others they are looking for a home page in your menu bar!
The same goes for drop down menus, the number of people that hover over the top level menu item and a drop down appears and they don’t think to click the main menu item amazes me, so unless your ideal client is used to technology and websites, treat them like they have no knowledge of using a website so simplify everything – they will thank you for it!
5. An about us page
This is an often overlooked page but the about us page is one of the most important (and most viewed) pages on your website. Now if you are Amazon you probably don’t need one as everyone knows who they are, but people buy from people and for them to trust you they want to know who you are, why you do what you do and most importantly how you can help them and why they should choose you over someone else. Make it more about them than you and this is your perfect chance to show everyone how amazing you are and how what you do can transform their lives.
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6. Contact information
Whether this is a contact form, an email, a phone number or a live chat. If people don’t want to book a call or buy from you just yet they may have further questions so have a way they can ask! An FAQ page is great for covering the most asked questions but there may be something that you haven’t covered or they may want to get in touch about a purchase – as I keep saying, make it easy!
7. Social proof
Everyone loves social proof and with the online world being such a crowded place it helps massively in getting potential clients to trust you, when your past clients are telling them about how much their lives have changed since working with you. Text testimonials are great but case studies and video testimonials are even better!
8. Speak to your ideal client
This may seem really obvious but I generally sign up to things that speak to me – you know what I mean, those sales pages you read and everything they are saying you are nodding along going “yup, that’s me!’ then end up signing up as they’ve got right inside your head and know exactly what you want and are giving you a solution to solve it. It also doesn’t mean other people won’t want to work with you or you will put them off as my website is aimed at women, it’s all magical and sparkly but the last client I worked with was a farmer on a tractor website!
9. SSL Certificate
I teach my kids (and friends) not to buy anything from sites that come up as not secure (or don’t have the little lock in the address bar). Since lockdown online crimes have soared and if a website says not secure would you trust it with your personal information? Google has also been saying for a while now they are going to start de-listing sites without security certificates so this is a non negotiable for any website. If you don’t have an SSL certificate these are usually free or paid for through your hosting company, so get in touch with them to help.
10. Site Speed
This one is often overlooked but it’s also a major factor in Google deciding where to put you in their listings.
Have you ever been on a website and it took so long to load that you just clicked off? Clicking off a website is bad news in Google’s book as it means the result they gave you in your search wasn’t really for you and then this in turn makes Google feel a bit more negative towards your website, moving it further down the search rankings.
You can check your site speed with gtmetrix.com or Google page speed checker and the number one reason for a slow site is usually incorrectly sized or high quality images, which the website then has to resize before it can load which slows it down considerably so make sure they are optimised and correctly sized.
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How to Improve Your Website Summary
Hopefully, implementing these simple 10 strategies on how to improve your website will not only help to get your website working for you as part of your overall business strategy but also help you turn more visitors into clients and get them completing your website mission – because, as I said, that’s what your website is there for so make it easy for visitors to achieve that!
About the Author
Lisa Rees is a Website Wonder Woman, who teaches women how to create and improve their WordPress websites in a simple and fun way.
Based in South Wales she runs a group Website Success Academy and tech membership as well as doing one to one and company based training to help create and manage websites that not only look good but convert clients.
> More blog posts by Lisa Rees, Website Wonder Woman
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