5 ways to win more business with a website that converts

You know your business needs a website to keep a competitive edge, but simply having a website is not enough to win over potential customers. Although it might be difficult to know where to start, there are some tried and tested ways to make sure your website stands the best chance of boosting customer conversion. Here are our top five tips for optimising your website right now.

1. Design for your customers, not just for yourself

It’s worth remembering that just because you like how your website looks doesn’t automatically mean that your customers will find it easy to navigate and use. To really find out how your website is being used – which links are clicked most, etc. – you can use the In-Page Analytics sections of your Google Analytics account. This will tell you how visitors interact with your website, and help you understand how to make it more user-friendly and engaging.

2. Magnetic content

A really good way to make your website an attractive and interesting place for visitors to stay long enough to convert is to provide good quality content. Blogs are ideal for this as they provide a way to keep adding fresh content that helps with getting your website picked up by search engines. It’s easy to create a blog with Weebly for example, but if you don’t have the resources to keep it updated, there’s still content you can provide. It might be worth your time writing/making a longer piece of content that you can offer as a free download on your website – this could be a guide of some kind, helpful information that people would like to have relating to your expertise. Videos are also an excellent thing to include as they are easy to consume and a well-made video can add a lot of esteem for your business – try offering some video tutorials, or even the story of your business in video format.

3. The importance of email addresses

Even if visitors to your website aren’t immediately converted into loyal clients, aim to at least find a way to collect their email address. There are a number of ways to do this: if you have a blog, you can have the option to sign up and receive updates by email. If you have downloadable content you can gather their email and send it to them that way. You can also simply give them the option of submitting their email to be informed about special offers and updates.

Emails are useful things to have because they are a gateway into your audience’s attention. Once you have a way to contact potential customers you have more opportunities to convert them into an actual customer by sending them offers and promotions that will draw them in, as well as carefully curated marketing (see this blog to learn how to do marketing without being dumped in the junk folder).

4. Call to action

This one is very important: your website is no use at all if it doesn’t have a clear call to action. If you’re not sure what that means, a call to action is a direct follow-on action that the visitor should be encouraged to take from any given page of your website. Seriously: every single page needs a call to action.

The idea is that someone on your website should never be left with nothing else to do, with only leaving the website as an option. Conversion is all about making it as easy as humanly possible for someone to become a customer. So, for example, the end of a blog post should offer a link to check out more blog posts, or to find out more about something in the article. Your contact page should include a way to contact you. Your list of services should provide the opportunity to book those services, which brings us nicely to our final piece of advice…

5. Online booking

The best way to convert more web traffic into real paying custom is to turn your website into a conversion machine with online booking. Offering your customers a way to use your services quickly and easily, right at the second they’re thinking about it, is far and away the most effective way to get those sales.

Just think about it – if you’re only offering a phone number to call you’re at the mercy of so many possible obstacles. Like maybe they don’t have time to call right at that moment, or maybe you’re busy and can’t answer the phone, or maybe it’s the middle of the night and by the time your working hours come around again they’ve forgotten all about it, or, even worse, booked with a competitor. When you provide online booking, you can take bookings any time of the day or night, regardless of whether you’re busy or not, and it’s fast and convenient.

For more tips on increasing website conversion, check out this blog from Siteoscope: Increase Your Website’s Conversion Rate: 25 Effective Ways to Do It. Just like that, you can start making more of your website. It’s not about how much traffic you get, it’s all about how well you convert!