Website Conversion Goals
Provide adequate CTA (Calls To Action) on each page in the form of CTC (Click to Call) buttons, Inquiry forms and CTA hook sections giving visitors an easy way to contact you for the services offered.
CTC buttons are imperative throughout the website for the quickest form of contacting you and getting further information about your products or services. These should be strategically placed on each relevant page in order to generate an action by the visitor.
Inquiry Forms are necessary for a couple reasons: 1. Collect data from visitors; 2. Allow for a secondary form of contact if the visitor is apprehensive about calling and speaking to someone right then and there. They technically make the first move, but in their eyes, you are reaching out to them for initial contact. These should also be placed strategically throughout the website and on relevant pages.
CTA Hooks are a third Call to Action that can be used to get the visitors attention and semi-force their attention to a particular action you want them to make. A hook would be a bar that spans the width of the page and is a contrasting color that catches the reader’s eye and forces them to read and act on whatever action you have inserted into that hook. An example would be to have a donate button, or a click to call button, or in rare circumstances, you could have a form inside the hook. The point of it is to stand out from the rest of the page, be extremely noticeable and get the visitor to interact with that section of the page.
Goals for a Great Website
The primary goal of any website is to get a visitor to be able to easily find information they are looking for and always answer the question, “I want to…”. If your site doesn’t answer this question and the visitor has to hunt around your site, they will leave and find the answer with someone else, most likely your competitor, and that is not conducive to a properly written and designed website.
People are not readers. People are scanners. So you may ask, why do I need so much content? Why not just have minimal content and bullet lists everywhere? The answer to these questions is simple: You are not only catering to the needs of your visitors, but you are also catering to Google and getting Google to read your site, decide what it is about and determine if you are an authoritative source for the information you are providing. If you are, Google rewards your site with higher ranking on the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages). If not, then your competitors who did it right the first time dominate the front page and walk away with your customers. Not cool!
One of the biggest arguments that we have conflict with a client is about content. If you opt out of having well written content containing targeted keywords throughout that content, then you have what we call a digital business card and not a functional website. A website should rank well, deliver the information that visitors are seeking and prompt them to make a decision and contact you in some form.
A general practice around having a boring website that reads like an encyclopedia or the Wall St. Journal is to break up the content in short manageable paragraphs and utilize headlines and imagery throughout. However, the front page of a website should have no less than 1000 words of content and no more than say 2000. Somewhere between 1500 – 2000 words it gets monotonous and the reader loses interest. Another way to break up content is to use, as we discussed prior, bullet points and summarized versions of your message. These bullet points can have links in them giving the reader to click on a button and learn more about a topic in deeper depth on another page on your site. You do not need to tell a visitor everything about your company on the front page.
Keep it simple and engaging and you will reap the benefits of that tactic for years to come.
CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT
Content being the key to any successful website, it MUST be written correctly or you are wasting your time. Content must be written to speak to your reader on their level. Avoid using industry related jargon that no one knows except for those in your industry. We suggest all content be written on an 8th grade reading level. You are not dumbing down your readers by doing this. What you are doing is making your site easy to understand and allowing the visitor to be able to comprehend your message and contact you. It really is that simple.
KEYWORDS EVERYWHERE
In writing your content, you want to do ample keyword research, meaning you want to see what relevant keywords specific to your product/service, etc. are actually being used in Google Searches. If you choose to use your own keyword choices that no one is searching for, guess what? No one sees your site because you aren’t showing up in the SERP’s when they seek you out on Google. So keyword research is the key to good content.
Why am I only focusing on Google? Because, like it or not, Google is the largest search engine in the world, PERIOD, with Youtube being the second largest in the world (and is owned by Google, BTW). Statistically, there are over 3.5 BILLION searches done on Google daily and 1.2 TRILLION yearly. So focusing on appeasing Google is paramount to every other search engine out there no matter what your personal feelings are on the matter. Make Google happy, you win, avoid it, you lose.
Proper Use of Images
As mentioned before, using images on your site serves a few purposes. First it adds depth to your site and breaks up the text so you can keep your readers engaged. What you may not be aware of and this is a mistake 99% of Do-it-yourself website people do is renaming your images with keywords you are trying to rank for. If you take a picture with a camera it will most likely designate that image with a file name like “DSC_2011” or whatever. BEFORE you put that image on your website, you should look through your targeted keyword list and use one of the keywords that maybe you did nto use in your content, but is still relevant to your sites topic.
In addition, most websites have options for what is called an “ALT“ tag. This is a tag used by Google and say maybe blind users that have a tablet that reads a website to them. Having a different keyword in the alt tag is a good practice and allows for yet another keyword for your website without looking stuffy. Google knows that there is an image on your page, it just doesn’t know what it is an image of, so by adding an alt tag with a keyword, it further shows authority by your site on the topic you are discussing on that page.
If you were a plumbing company in New York City, your alt tag could be a number of things. An example would be “plumber near me” or “plumber new York” or “plumber new York city”. There is a term known as LSI Keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing). They are basically keywords that are semantically related to your primary keyword. Contrary to popular belief, they are NOT just synonym or keywords that are similar in meaning. Using LSI keywords are also a good practice. Google’s artificial intelligence is smart enough to recognize a similarity between certain keywords, in most cases probably better than we do. Use these tactics when designing your site and you will see great benefits from these practices.
The Bottom Line
Unlike a decade ago where you could just throw up a website and get traffic and ranking and everything was peachy, now you have competition, rules set by search engines on what they like and don’t like and over 1 BILLION websites on the internet today. In your industry alone there are literally thousands of websites that you now have to compete with. Your site needs to stand out, be authoritative and be designed correctly if you are going to beat your competition.
If you are lazy in your approach and disregard what is being taught here, you will eventually lose. However, if you embrace these practices your site will do what websites are designed to do and attract customers giving you the golden opportunity to close the sale before your competitor gets that same opportunity.
This information is not meant to be the final solution to your web problems. There is a ton more that has to be done to maintain a website and attract customers, but this is definitely a foundation that will put you ahead of 90% of your competitors who have no clue what they are doing.
