3 Things to Improve Your website
Your website is (or should be) the hub of your marketing strategy as a small business. When it’s working properly, its and engaging your ideal clients, converting them into leads, and in the case of an eCommerce site, turning browsers into buyers.
So it’s important you do what you can to make it work hard for you. But a website is also a lot of work, requiring constant monitoring and tweaking sometimes you just don’t have the time or resources to really put into it.
Tell me if you’ve ever said or thought this: “the leads I get from my website are never any good so I don’t put too much effort into it.”
Anytime I hear that, I know the sentence is backwards. What they should have said was, “I don’t put too much effort into my website so the leads I get from it are never any good.”
But if you have limited time and resources and can’t take on a major website overhaul, I want to give you three things you can do right now, today, to improve your website. Make these small changes and I guarantee you your website will bring you more leads.
3 Tips to Improve Your Website
1) Stop talking about yourself
So many websites I see read like a corporate bio. “We do this, we excel at that, we’ve been in business 100 years.”
I’ll let you in on a secret: nobody cares.
You might think that when someone visits your website they want to learn about you. They don’t. They want to hear about themselves. They want to see you reflect their problem back at them and show them that you understand what they’re going through.
Change the language and write about your ideal customer, their struggles, what it will feel like if they solve their problem, how you can help them on that journey.
2) Improve Your Lead Capture
If the only way your website has to capture a lead is that someone fills out a contact us form, or calls you on the number listed, you’re losing out on potentially a ton of leads.
Think about your ideal customer and the problem they are trying to solve by being on your website. Now, can you think of something you could provide to them that would help them out?
Maybe a checklist, or a short video, or a tips sheet?
Great, now create it, or dust it off if you already have it, and put it on your website as a free download when they enter their email address.
You can keep your contact us form, but give the majority of people who aren’t ready to have you calling them a reason to give you an email address so that you can market to them.
Based on what they download, create a follow-up sequence that nudges them to the next logical step after checking you out. Maybe that’s a phone call, a quote, or a purchase. Don’t lose the lead because they aren’t ready to buy the moment they are on your website.
3) Get some video on the site
Videos make your site more interactive, and they encourage people to stay around longer. Even a 30-second video can keep people on your site longer, which is a signal to Google that people find value on your site, increasing the chance of you showing up in search.
Videos also provide another channel to deliver your message to your ideal client for those who may not like reading.
It doesn’t have to be fancy. You can shoot it with a smartphone, upload it to YouTube and post a link.
Most of these simple fixes can be done by someone with little to no website development experience. Especially if you’re using a tool like Wix, SquareSpace, or Duda.
If you follow them, you’ll see a noticeable change in your website’s performance as a sales tool.
For more tips to improve your website you can also download our Website Essentials Pack and get a complete set of planning tools, checklists, and templates to design a successful website.
