A key part to sales in offline and online is to know your audience. Speak their language. Let them know you understand them and can help solve their problems.
Introducing 7 tips to boost website sales and leads that can be implemented on your existing website. I hope you find to be a great starting point for ensuring your website is performing.
CTA above the fold
Ensure your CTA (call to action) button is positioned above the fold (in the viewable screen area when the page first loads) and over to the right. CTA should be the last element on the right. If you want people to call you on the phone then use your phone number as the CTA. If you want people to email you then have a contact form over on the right and above the fold.
Why – because people read from right to left. This is the natural direction the eye follows. The eyes are drawn to the right side of the page. If the CTA is above the fold, The user should have no trouble with the conversion.
Social Proof
Integrate social proof like google ratings and testimonials to a position of prominence on the website page. This is proven to be a trusted conversion feature. People trust strangers reviews just as much as people they know.
You can pull these directly from google reviews on your google my business page and with a few tweaks you can filter out any bad ones.
Key message for each page above the fold
Put your key message for each page above the fold and make it clear as day. For example, you might sell wedding cakes, the main message / H1 (the most important heading for people and search engines) on the homepage will be “Special Wedding cakes for Special Weddings”. Then on the wedding cake category page, the heading will be “Special Vegan Wedding Cakes for Special Vegan Weddings”. People don’t want to think, they just want to know their in the right place to solve their problem. If they need more info, they will scroll down and start scanning for further headlines, text and imagery to help them make a decision to engage your wedding cakes or not.
CTA’s and Social sharing on blog content
A blog is an important part of declaring your company as an industry authority. Ensure you have sharing buttons and “call to actions” on your articles. The sharing aspect is pretty self explanatory. If people start sharing your content you will be considered to be an authority in the your industry and with this sort of respect sales come easily. Ensure you have call to actions on the articles. This could be “Join the newsletter list”, “take this quiz” or “contact us for a quote”. Ideally you want to have a strategy for following up the people who have engaged you through the articles.
Audit Branded Search
What do your branded search results look like? Type your brand into google and see what the results look like. Is the messaging clear? the meta description clear and engaging? Would you click on it?
Discover friction points and distraction
Discover friction points and distractions. Put Hotjar on your site and collect as much data as you can. View heatmaps and see what your audience is wanting to click. If they are clicking headings and images that go no where consider making it a link. Hotjar will tell you what device your customers like to use. You can view recordings of people using your site which can offer incredible insights into user experience.
What are people doing on the site? reading? searching? scanning?
Most people scan for headlines that are related to their problem. Once their interest has been captured, they then have a little read. They are looking to solve a problem. Ensure your content solves that problem.
Use large buttons. A large obvious button is key for conversions. Make it painfully obvious to the user that if they are ready to convert – all they have to do is click this large bright button.
Use at least 16px body text. Black text on white background with around 22px line height. This will ensure all your body text is easy to read. If you have good copy and you want people to read it without distraction, ensure its not too small, has high contrast and nice line-height.
Load Speed
Nothing kills focus like idle time staring at blank screens. This allows the user time to think about other problems they should be solving. Or other competitor companies that may off a faster less pain-full experience. Load speed is crucial for conversions. The websites job is to keep the user consistently engaged by offering relevant information the user can benefit from.
Try google page speed test or gmetrix for information on load speed.
Remember, if you can’t measure it you can’t improve it. We use https://analytics.google.com https://www.hotjar.com/ religiously for measuring website performance.
Bonus tip
Structure your navigation in a way that brings prominence to the conversion points. Utilities navigations (secondary top bar navigations) or footer navigations are a good place to store non-conversion related items allowing you to separate menu items based on your users concerns. For instance, you might have your main menu exclusively dedicated to your product categories then use a utility navigation for “about us”, “blog articles” and “news”, “careers” etc. This gives the user easy access to the product category their looking for.
