Spring cleaning! This is a good time to take stock of your website and consider making some tweaks to fine-tune for a number of considerations, and the one I’d like to look at more closely this week is conversion.
Search brings clients to your website, but how do you close the sale? Get them to buy your book, your freelance services?
All the usual SEO recommendations come into play here: make sure that the site is easily navigable, that all your internal (and external) links work, that the call to action is clear and present on every page. But conversion—getting visitors to become clients/customers—really is, mostly, about content.
What creates content that converts? How do you listen to your prospect, meet or exceed her expectations, and get her to do what you want her to do, all on a single web page? Here are some tips:
- Make sure that keywords link to the correct landing page for that keyword, and not to the site’s main page. Let’s take an example from the world of commerce: if a prospective customer keys in “boots,” he doesn’t want to be taken to a shoestore’s main page and left to find his way to the boots section by himself. Too much work. Your goal is to make what you want the customer to do … the easiest thing for him to do. You can extrapolate this to your own website content.
- “Click here” is so 90s, and it’s not even effective. “Buy now” or “sign up now” is better.
- Be sure that you include incentives in your copy. Give people a good reason to buy, and a better reason to buy now. Remember the TV commercials where they used to say, “call in the next fifteen minutes and we’ll throw in an extra set of steak knives”? Make the purchase something they feel compelled to do now by offering something extra — free shipping, an extra two months’ subscription, an added-on element.
- Revise your copy as often as you can, but keep your product names the same. This way you’ll get both name recognition for the product along with fresh copy that catches the eye and makes the customer feel there’s something different (i.e., better) being offered.
- People who use search to find something have a goal in mind. They are looking for something specific. Relevancy is the keyword here: offer what they want, but make sure that you can. The bait-and-switch some companies use for search is nothing but legal false advertising: don’t do it.
- Take advantage of local search if you have a brick-and-mortar venue, even if it’s just your local independent bookstore; update what is in stock and make it easy for shoppers to reserve their item online, pay online, and pick up locally if they prefer.
- Take a moment to review your website. Does it look professional? Do the pages load quickly and easily? Is navigation easy? Is it updated regularly? Remember that your website is your handshake, and there’s never a second chance to make a first impression.
And there you have it. It’s not difficult to create and maintain a website that gets results. Use these tips, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
