I am not a number…
When it comes to your website, a failure to treat visitors as human beings is more than a dishonour – it can be fatal.
Have you noticed how short-tempered people are lately? I have. Maybe it’s three years of pandemic fallout, or perhaps we’ve all just realised life is short and nobody wants to waste it – but either way, people are quicker than ever to make up their mind in the shortest space of time possible. Give them a bad experience on your website and they’ll not only vote with their feet, they’ll make sure the world knows about it too.
Long gone are the days when we had a “luxurious” 8 seconds to woo a would-be customer with our website. Recent studies show we barely make it to 2 seconds before they click away, with slow-loading pages or irrelevant content often cited as the major contributor. If the page they land on within your website (and remember, that may not be the homepage), doesn’t tally up with what they typed into a search engine to find you, they’ll be gone. Or worse, it vaguely represents what they were looking for, but the connection is so tenuous they feel “cheated” by landing on your site in the first place – and that could be their next “can you believe…” Facebook post to all their friends 🙁
But all is not lost! Get the balance right between good keywords and great content and not only will you have one happy visitor on your hands, you’re more likely to convert them to a paying customer and raving fan!
How do you balance content and keywords, you ask?
Well, it all starts before they even arrive on your website – with your ideal client profile. This forms the foundation of everything your website is about, namely your clients’ needs and how you can fulfil these. Knowing who they are, what challenges they have and what they need most right now is the cornerstone of our Strategy-First approach because it not only ensures your website is of service to your potential clients (i.e. filled with great content they want to read), it also gives you plenty of ideas for the sort of key words and phrases they’re most likely to type into a search engine to find you in the first place.
When those two are aligned, you have a winner!
One ecommerce site we redesigned was suffering from exactly this disconnect – and paying the price. Despite thousands of visitors to their site every week, sales were pitifully low and the owners came to us desperate for “more traffic” – thinking this would automatically mean more sales. They had previously invested heavily in paid advertising, social promotion and even some offers to “increase visitor numbers” without quantifying how or from where – all to no avail.
We took the “traffic” out of the conversation and re-focussed on the people who actually bought from them, asking:
- Where did they come from to find the site?
- What else do they look at online?
- Which social platforms are they also engaged with?
These questions drew the business owners back to the reason they started the company and the people they aimed to serve. This shift was reflected in the design, layout and wording used on the site and, within 12 weeks, sales were FOUR TIMES what they had been.
Time and again we hear new clients say things like “I just need more traffic to my site”. My (not always popular) answer is always “no, you don’t” – because even if you have single figures of happy internet visitors landing on your site, they are PEOPLE, not “traffic”. To overlook that they are human beings is a disservice to them, and to the company you created to meet their needs.
Helping ambitious business owners to re-focus on why they do what they do, is just one of the things covered in my best-selling book Website Mastery for Business Owners who Don’t Speak Tech – the non-coders guide to launching a high-performing website that boosts your numbers, conversion rates and business growth. Download a free chapter to help you get started from www.websitemasterybook.com or click here to buy your copy from Amazon.
Have you read our best-selling book: Website Mastery for Business Owners who Don’t Speak Tech?
Download a free chapter or buy your copy from http://www.websitemasterybook.com