For many business owners knowing where to make improvements to their website to make them perform better and generate more sales and leads can be a difficult task. To help out, we have written this blog post on making your website better with the aim of increasing the amount of traffic and visitor interaction with it.

Your Website Content MUST Reflect YOUR Passion

Make your content reflect your enthusiasm for your products or services. Make people excited by your offering. Be sure to:

  • Address the issues and needs of your target market first. What problems will they have? What solutions are they looking for?
  • Display your USPs – what makes your company different to your competitors? Why should the visitor buy from you? Your content must tell them!
  • Make the website content easy to digest, avoid large areas of text. Web users tend to skim read.
  • Use illustrations or pictures to draw the eye and add visual interest.
  • Use clear calls to action – What do you want your visitors to do? Call you? Proceed to checkout? Fill out an online form?
  • Create trust and confidence by displaying clear company details, Ts and Cs and any accreditation logos.
  • Push Sale items – shout about them with a banner on the homepage.

Encourage Interaction to increase the number of Return Visitors to your Website

People love to get involved! If they can interact with your site they will return (and Google Analytics can show you this). This is also a good way to get user generated content which the search engines like. Here are some ideas of ways you can get your audience involved and interacting with your site:

  • Enable product reviews.
  • Compare products function.
  • Allow comments on blog posts or other suitable pages.
  • Add a poll so that people can register their opinion on something.
  • Add a survey with an incentive to participate.
  • Use a voting system to enable customers to rate/like products or content.
  • Add a forum or chat area.

Keeping the Content Fresh on your Website

From a visitors perspective it is important to keep your content fresh and up to date. Why would someone return to your site if the content, products and pages remained the same for many months? Depending on what you are offering here are some ideas:

  • Create a blog and update it weekly – use photos, you don’t have to “write” blog posts to tell a story
  • Add new Q and A’s regularly. Listen to questions people ask you offline and note these on your FAQ pages.
  • Add detailed advice pages or buyers guides.
  • Add interesting informational pages that relate to your product or service e.g: ‘How to…’ & “What, Why, Where’s”
  • Tell people on your Social Media platforms that you’ve updated your content
  • Create a resources page that you can add to regularly.
  • Expert Interview – publish an interview with a guru in your industry.
  • Add an area for client case studies and/or testimonials and keep it up to date.
  • Create a news section for current industry news. Use local papers and industry journals to keep you up to date.
  • Update your galleries or images regularly.
  • Conduct your own product reviews.

Make Greater Use of Cross Selling Opportunities

This may seem obvious but many website owners miss this trick. If you don’t present related items to your customers they may not bother to search for them or even realise they need them. For example, if you sell lighting – be sure to offer the light correct bulbs to the customer as well. There are a number of ways to do this effectively:

  • On the product page – “You will also need this…’ or ‘use in conjunction with…’
  • At the checkout. – ‘‘customers who bought this, also bought this…’
  • Bundle up – offer a second related product at a discount.
  • Incentive – ‘Free postage on all orders over £30…’
  • Celebrity endorsement – Ok this is a hard one to do but as an example show a picture of a celebrity wearing your matching handbag and shoes. Illustrating that the two items MUST be bought together.

Using Google Analytics

The wonderful thing about online sales and marketing is that it is all trackable through Google Analytics. This means that your strategy can be reviewed, monitored and improved as often as necessary. You can measure any interaction with your website that you can possibly imagine!:

  • Keywords – how are people finding your pages?
  • Landing pages/ Product Pages – are they converting?
  • Time on site – does your target audience engage with your content?
  • Bounce rates – Is your messaging/art direction right?
  • Onsite search – this is a great way to see what the search function is used most for. This can indicate if a product or category is missing or hard to find.

Are your Website Users getting the Best Experience?

Functionality on a website is very important. If a user can’t find what they are looking for they will very quickly give up and go elsewhere. Here are some things to look out for:

  • Navigation needs to be intuitive and in an expected position so people don’t struggle to see where to go next – 2 clicks maximum to revenue/action point.
  • Search function – test it with as many things as you can think of to check it works properly.
  • Checkout process – many customers are lost during a long and arduous checkout process. Make sure it has quick steps with clearly defined calls to action in each section.
  • Messaging – is it clear what you are offering? Is it pitched right for the target audience with appropriate language?

Get in touch if you would like to discuss getting more from your website on 01285 50 55 50.