Converting Visitors to Customers

by Admin on October 30, 2009

While SEO (search engine optimization) is the method of making your site rank for search engines, the real goal for a business website is not just to be found but to convert it’s visitors into paying customers.

What are some reasons that people who find you and visit your site, don’t become customers?

  • When they find you, you didn’t offer what they were looking for (or at least they didn’t see it). You can overcome this obstacle by creating targeted, focused landing pages. If you have several services or types of products, create a page for each one that is really focused and optimized on that one product or service. You may have fewer visitors to that particular page but, the visitors who do go to it, are going to find exactly what they are looking for. Your website will more than likely have a lot more pages when you do it this way, but, that is what you want. More pages that are targeted landing pages.
  • Call to action is not clear. Once your visitor has found what they are looking for, what is the next step? Is it to call you, emailĀ  you, order from you? You need to make it clear what action it is your visitor needs to take next. Make it really easy to contact you or order from you. If you are asking your visitor to fill out a form, don’t ask for too much information on their first contact with you. People will balk at filling out detailed forms just to do business with you. Make sure you have a good phone number listed as well as your address. Even if you work from home, people like to know you actually exist more than just on the internet.
  • Lack of trust. Building up trust for your business is very important. This is where participation in social media can play a role. Build relationships and communicate with people on Facebook and Twitter. Let people get to know you a little bit. Gather testimonials from your current clients and put them on your website. When you use social media, take part in the conversation. Don’t just broadcast what you are doing. Comment on what other people are doing. Basically, be relevant and sincere. Trust takes a little time, don’t wait, start now!
  • Fear. Some visitors to your website will not heed your call to action out of fear. They don’t know what you expect from them. This may be because they don’t know how much your product or service will cost. It may be because they don’t know enough about your product or service. It may be because, as we discussed in number the last poin above, they just don’t know if they can trust you. The more information you can provide, the more you can overcome fear.

    If your prices depend on, say, the size of the job or market fluctuations, or whatever, you can always state that your price starts at whatever your lowest price is. This lets your visitor know what the starting point is and will help their comfort level. We have found that some businesses do not like to post prices because they may want to change their prices. Talk to your web designer about a content management system that allows you to make changes to your site without fear of losing information or messing up the design. If your website designer insists on making all of your changes and charging you for them, you may want to find another designer. However, if you prefer that the designer make the changes, it is not unreasonable for them to expect to be paid for the time it takes to make them.

Look at your website and see what you are doing, or not doing to get your visitors to covert to customers. Getting them there, is not enough!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

116,661 Spam Comments Blocked so far by Spam Free Wordpress

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Previous post:

Next post: