The design of your website is very crucial to attract visitors and maintain those visitors. Your home page needs to be appealing to the eyes and easily manageable. If your website isn’t appealing you could be losing a lot of business. Don’t let that happen. You want these potential clients to like your website and give them that “wow” feeling right away. Otherwise these clients will use the back button faster than they clicked to go to your website. I see it too many times from former clients of mine. They wonder why their bounce rate is so high or the time of visitors is so low. It’s mainly because of your home page lacking some of those “wow” features. Here are some tips of mine to capture more visitors and turn them into clients.
1. Almighty 5 Second Rule
All this means is basically your visitors knows within 5 seconds if they’re going to stay or leave your website. Give them a reason to stay and look around. The more they search around your website the more likely they are to use your services or buy your product. If you don’t answer the user’s wants and needs right away they’ll leave your site as fast as they got there. So make sure your website has that “wow” to it the minute they visit your site.
2. Call to Action’s
Call to actions can be many different things, mainly just offer the user something. This can be a free eBook, a pdf, sending them to a contact form, or something to grab their attention and make them wanting whatever it is you’re offering. Use terms such as “Buy Now,” “Request a Quote,” “Free Consultation.” I’m sure you get the point here. These are very beneficial if they CTA is in the first fold of the website (fold means – the portion of the website you see right away without scrolling down). It is a good idea to offer a CTA at the bottom of your website as well, depending on how long the home page is.
3. Trust
Build trust with the users. Users want to know they can rely on your company for any reason or you’re selling a legit product. Offer free shipping or customer service 24/7 or something valuable for the users. Provide testimonials on your website somewhere so users can read other people’s stories. This will help build that trust and keep users coming back. There are plenty of features you can add to value your product or company, so take advantage of as many as you can.
4. Short Forms
Keep your forms short. Too many companies want all of the user’s info right away. You will be surprised how many users don’t fill out long forms. One reason is because they don’t want to give out all of that info before talking to someone. I suggest you use 2 or 3 at max fields on your forms. Name and Email are the two most important fields you want, so stick with those 2. You can always get more info from there after they’ve filled out the form. You will have better conversions with a smaller form on your website. Keep that in mind when building your contact forms.
5. Implement SEO in your coding
SEO starts with your coding. Make sure your code is optimized for SEO. This means only one H1 tag per page, creating a few links to other pages of your website, and many other coding techniques. Make sure to review Google’s SEO coding standards to keep your website optimized properly.
6. Responsive Design
This goes without saying your website should be responsive. It needs to look amazing on all devices. It’s 2015 and all websites should be mobile and tablet friendly. If not, you better get redesigning your site immediately. Your website is your best marketing tool so don’t let it work against you.
7. Monitor Site Performance
So many attackers are out there today so make sure you have the necessary tools in place. If you’re using WordPress for your CMS I suggest you use Wordfence for your security plugin. This is one of the best plugins out there to help stop attackers. If your site gets hacked you will have too many problems to deal with. I’ve seen some clients have to start fresh because of how badly the attacks were on their site. If users visit your site and get malware or trojans they won’t be coming back at all and immediately lose trust with your company. So make sure you’re on top of this otherwise it could be bad news bears very quickly.
I hope you learned something by reading these or just helped inforce your knowledge. There are plenty of good tips you can use to make sure your website is designed properly. It’s all about the user’s experience and if they’re not liking it, you lose them. Keep all of these in mind when building your website. Check out more of my blogs for other good tips and advice. Please check back daily or weekly as I’ll be posting plenty of more blogs as time goes on.