A great website is like having a great sales person who knows how to “close the deal.”
Do your visitors stay and EXPLORE or bolt?
Do you get lots of traffic but nobody calls?
Do you know which statistic to check in your Google Analytics report that actually tells you how many people are coming to your homepage and leaving without exploring your site?
If you answered “I have NO idea” to those questions, you’re not alone. Many website owners don’t know about these important things but don’t worry: after reading my blog today, you’ll know how to check your website to see if it’s converting visitors into HOT leads and what to do if it’s not.
How does a website “close the deal”?
1. It gives and gives a lot of information to your visitors so they know trust you because you’re providing great value to them already.
2. It calls you to take action on doing something, such as subscribing to your email list or to download a free ebook.
3. It cleverly uses empty space.
Your Website Visitor Wants You to Answer This Question: “WIIFM”
Your website visitor has one certain question when she lands on your homepage:
What’s In It For Me?
Give her the solution to her problem within the top “fold” of your homepage. She’s been looking at a LOT of websites. Will yours be the one to solve her problem?
Call To Action (CTA)
On this homepage, there are 3 calls to action.Celine Walker will probably capture your information in one of these 3 ways. Each call-to-action will result in you, the website visitor, giving your first name and email address to Celine. Once you have your visitors’ email address and first name, you’ve got your foot in the door. Give them free & GREAT information. Don’t Pitch! They must “know you, like you, trust you” and THEN they’ll pay you, as Web Guru Joel Comm preaches.
Empty Space a.k.a.Visual Paths
Your eye is drawn to the thing Celine wants you to do…click that button….
Now that you know about these important things, take a look at your own website. Is it SMART enough to convert your visitors into HOT leads? If not, it’s time to seek the help of a professional web designer who knows marketing, usability and some psychology, too. Let me know what you think about these tips. Leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.
Oops! I almost forgot to tell you how you can see how many visitors are landing on your homepage but leaving without exploring any other pages! Here it is: it’s called the Bounce Rate statistic. Review your bounce rate with your Google Analytics dashboard. You can set up a weekly report to automatically email to you or ask your webmaster to set that up. If the bounce rate is 5% – 20%, you’re doing pretty good–depending on how many visitors you’re getting per day. If it’s above 20%, there’s work to be done. You can check your download time (is your homepage taking more than three seconds to download?) and if it’s a long time, fix it. There are many other things to review when you want to lower your bounce rate but I’ll save that for another post. Be sure to come back and feel free to leave a comment and suggest topics for future posts. I’d love to hear from you.
