There is nothing more painful than having invested a great deal of money on developing a website, to have then spent a small fortune on pay per click advertising as well as investing in search engine optimisation only to discover you have a website that does not convert very well.
So what we are going to talk about now is about methods to improve your conversion rate. What you need is an effective website design that will tell people that they are in the right place. Most website visitors for some reason automatically think that they are in the wrong place and therefore just hit the back button.
It will be a bit boring but you need to use certain web conventions. There will be agencies that will say they will create award winning web designs with lots of bells and whistles, but you should not be interested in a website that will win you an award for how it looks. The only award that you are interested in is how much money your website is able to generate for you.
You logo of your company goes in the top left. Not in the middle not and not at the bottom of the page. This is the moment where your visitor will identify what website they are on. You should also include a strap line consisting of two to three words what you exactly do.
It is also important that you are gaining the trust of your visitor as well as confidence. Trust can come with the design of the site itself. Do you have broken images? Do you still have the same website that you had five years ago? You need to be investing time to keep your website updated and fresh otherwise your visitor is just going to compare you to your various competitors and with an effective design, there should not have to be any comparison.
Another way to build trust is to add your address, your contact number and if you hold a professional qualification such as that of Insolvency Practitioner, then show your certificate, your license number or if you are part of an organisation, then include this. Do everything that you can to show that you are a real person and a real company.
Where possible you should include case studies of projects that you have worked and/or actual client testimonials from clients that have bought from you. Most testimonials that I see on websites are rubbish. They simply say “Company ABC did a really great job for me”. But what does that mean? Get your clients to discuss how you actually solved their problems.
Your website needs and must include a call to action that you want visitors to do. Do you want them to add a product to their shopping basket or to enter their email address to subscribe to your weekly newsletter? Whatever this might be, your call to action must be specific and clear. But do not give several choices as this can be overwhelming for some and they will just leave your site.
Optimizing content for mobile devices
Designing for mobile is not just about creating websites that look good on small screens; it's about carefully stripping down a site to just the content that's most important to a mobile user.
Using and heading section headings
When you visit a site using a normal browser, it's usually easy to understand where and what the different sections are because of the layout and design of the site.
Writing new content for users and search engines
When SEOing a website, most will need new keyword rich content added to pages. It doesn't necessarily have to be a lot of content, but there should always be some information that tells the user and the search engines exactly what this page is all about.
