In this episode, I talk about getting ready to launch or overhaul your small business website so that you get the outcome you want- more leads, more sales, more customers.
Podcast Transcription:
DESIGNING A SMALL BUSINESS WEBSITE THAT SELLS
You’re listening to the Clickable Marketing Podcast, where we help fired-up small business owners turn clicks into clients. Join us to discover how you can make more money online in less time. Now here’s your host, Mr. Web Marketing, Brad Hauck.
Good day, and welcome to the Clickable Marketing Podcast. I’m Brad Hauck, and this is episode 2. Today we’re going to look at getting a site that sells or building a site that sells. Having a website that sells you a business is super, super important. It’s all very well to say that we need a point of presence online or we need a place where people can go and check us out. In the end, I like to look at website as a member of staff.
Its job, sitting there, is to sell your business, in other words, to get people to come to your website to take a particular action. People come to your website; they judge you by what they see. In fact, I’ve had numerous occasions where people have mentioned to me that when they are searching for a new provider where they pay for a service or a product, they’ll go and check out their website. They’re making judgments about you every time they look at you online. It is well and truly worth spending the money and the time to make sure that your website is clean, fast, and encourages people to take the action that you want.
MEMBER OF STAFF – JOB OF THE WEBSITE
If you look at your website as being a member of staff, like every other member of staff that has a function to perform – and that is to sell your business. When you’re looking at the existing website you’ve got, look at whether it is actually doing that or not.
The first thing about any website is that it should be laid down in a way that helps promote the most popular option or the one that you want people to take. The most popular option might be the most popular products that people buy or might be your famous product, whatever it is, or alternatively, it might be to get people to fill out a form so that they come to your website, they fill out a form for a contact, or for a quote, or to get you to come out and see them. It depends on whether you’re selling, obviously, services or products.
It’s up to you what that is. In most cases, I suggest that that option is the first thing that they see on the page.
SECTIONS OF A WEBSITE – LEVERAGING THEM
When you’re having a look at a website, the top section of the page is quite often the menu. The next section, which is quite often a large picture, is known as the slider area. Under that, we come down into the main section of the website.
On your home page, that slider is one of the areas that are often wasted – meaning that people just put some pictures in there and put some words on it. It really is a great place for a call to action, and it is probably the most powerful part of your website because it’s the first thing that people see.
Everything that you do should be laid out to take an action. If we’re talking about the slider in this case, then it shouldn’t be sliding. By the time the pictures load and then slide across, your visitor has scrolled down the page. I can tell you now. They are not waiting for 3 pictures to show so that they can read the great little slogans that you’ve got on it. You might think it’s cool. You might think it’s really, really useful, but in the end, you’re wasting your time.
Studies have shown, again and again and again, that sliders do not work. They interfere with the flow of a website. If you’re going to put a nice image there, pick one image, get a call to action or a form on top of the image, and use it to your advantage to get people to take an action as soon as they come on the website.
I also believe that underneath this one major action, you should have a maximum of 3 choices for people to choose. It might be, if you’re a car dealership, it might be buy a new car, lease a car, or get your car serviced – the 3 major things that most people do when they come to talk to you. If you have too many options, people just bounce out of the site, or they get confused, or they start digging around. They end up getting lost. Your job, when you’re working on your website, is to make life as easy as possible for your visitor. Having 3 pictures there makes it nice and easy for people.
I know that you’re familiar with what it is that most people need you to do when they come to your business. Coming back to the car dealership, it might be to buy a car, to lease a car, or to get their car serviced. That’s about it. I’m sure there are thousands of other things you can do, but the majority of people would probably be doing one of those 3 things.
If they’re not, that’s fine. Every business is different. If you think about your business – if you’re an electrician, for example, you might have emergency call, might be one option, building construction work, and a third option might be get a quote. It’s up to you just have a think about what it is.
ABOVE THE FOLD – NO NEED TO SCROLL
One of the key things with those 3 options is, though, that you want them to be above the fold. When we talk about above the fold in direct marketing, we’re talking about – when you open up a letter, it’s the first part of the letter that shows, so the fold in the letter. On the web, it’s the first page that loads on the screen. The key thing to remember here is the screen. It’s irrelevant of what device. If you’re on a mobile phone, you’re on a tablet, or you’re on a desktop, obviously the size of the fold is going to change, and you have to take into consideration.
In most cases, your visitors, depending on your business – and you should be able to tell this from your statistics – will come either from a desktop/laptop, or from a tablet or phone. You need to set them up slightly differently. When they come in, they see the slider area, which is the picture at the top with the call to action on it; and underneath that, they are given 3 choices. That little section on its own should be above the fold. It should absolutely be the first thing people see before they start to scroll down. Above the fold, don’t need to scroll.
Obviously, if it’s on a mobile phone, it gets a little different. They’re going to scroll down a bit because the screen is considerably smaller than the screen that you’d see on a desktop or laptop computer.
If you want maximum results from your website, some people would suggest that it’s best to actually rid of the whole slider. Personally, I feel that it’s important. It adds a visual touch. It gives you a place for a call to action, and if you do track it… Watch on your analytics to see whether people actually click on the call to action or not. If they’re not, then maybe you do need to look at changing it.
MOST WANTED ACTION – DIRECTING YOUR EFFORTS
The key to success with a good website is to focus on your most wanted action. It’s commonly known as the MWA, and there are hundreds of other terms that mean the same thing. That is the action that you want your visitors to take when they come to your website. Most people don’t really think about this. They think they want to expose their business to the person who’s coming, show them everything that they do, etc. That’s a bad way to go about it. It will cost your business because you just confuse people. There are too many options. Make sure you think about these before you go to your designer and start talking to a designer.
Often when I work with companies, I’ll sit down and work all these out beforehand; and then they go to web designers and tell the web designer this is what we want to achieve, and the designer comes back with the graphic design to back up that most wanted action.
In your case, have a think about your small business website. Is it actually working for you to get people take the most wanted action? In many cases, the most wanted action is very, very simple. It is, “Call us.” If that’s the case, if you want people to call you, your phone number should be the top of the screen, whether you’re on a mobile or whether you’re on a desktop. In top right hand corner, which is the expected place to see a phone number, you should see your mobile phone there.
One of the things I often see when I look through statistics for sites in the most popular pages, and the second most popular page in most websites is the contact us page. When I look at the website, often the reason that number is so high is because the phone number is not on the home page in top corner where people can find it easy. You got a percentage of visitors who know who you are, but they want to get in contact with you. They might have heard about you a while back when they might have talked to someone; so they search your name, they come to your website, and they want to get in contact. Make sure your phone number is up there.
CAPTURING YOUR VISITORS – UPDATING YOUR MARKETING LIST
Your most wanted action will change depending on what stage your business is going through, what specials you’re running, what time of year. Maybe that in your slider areas, which is an area that’s very easily accessible in most content management systems, you will be able to change the wording on that and adjust it depending on what the special of the month is, etc.
If your most wanted action is for people to call you, the second most wanted action, and the one that I would suggest is super important, is to capture those people. When I talk about capturing them, I mean getting their email address and name if possible into an email marketing list.
Why would I want you to capture them? A lot of people come to your website, and they only ever, ever come there once. Because we all know that you’ve been on the web, and you’ve found a website; and then a week later you think, “Oh, could I get back to that website and get this certain piece of information,” only to find that you cannot find that website. It’s like it’s disappeared from the web. It’s never been there. There’s no trace of it. It doesn’t matter what you do, you cannot find it. That doesn’t mean the website has disappeared. It just means that the web is so vast. It’s very hard to go back. You actually miss out on that customer.
If you can, work out a way to capture those people. One of the most common ways is to obviously have a capture form that people fill out to get information or a quote form where they fill in some details, and then you ring them with a quote or you email them with a quote. One of the major mistakes I see businesses making is they set these forms up, and it’s all very well. They are there. And send you an email, but you never take those email addresses and put them into your marketing email list. Yet, there are dozens and dozens of tools that will allow you to do that.
For example, in WordPress, which is one of our most common content management systems, there is a plug-in that most people use called Contact Form 7, which we use when we’re doing email contact forms – not so much email capture but email contact. Did you know that there is just a little piece of code that you could drop in there that will connect it to MailChimp and other email marketing systems; so that when someone fills in a form, and it comes to your email, it also takes their name and email address and enters it into your marketing list. You don’t have to worry about adding them in, they automatically go on to your marketing list.
When you send out information to all your people into your marketing list, all those people who filled out the form along way to talk to you or to get some more information automatically get your latest newsletter. You might think that that’s spamming, but it’s not. These people were interested in your services. They may still be interested, or they might be interested in the future; and if you’re sending out some interesting information, it’s going to put you in a position whereby you’re getting your brand in front of them. Hopefully, when the time comes that they do need your service, you’re the one they’re going to think of.
LOOKING REAL – USING THE RIGHT PHOTOS
When you’re putting photos on to your website, especially in your slider, please don’t use stock photos. They’re terrible. They might look really nice and clean to you, but to a real person, they look fake. The people don’t look real. They’re too perfect. It doesn’t look like what we expect from a business, especially for example, in different parts of the world. You might have stock photos – a lot of them will come from the USA. They don’t necessarily look like the backgrounds you would see in the UK, or Australia, or New Zealand. There are different trees and different styles of houses, different clothing styles that are popular.
If you can, use photos of your own staff, your own business. It doesn’t take much to grab a camera or a phone even these days. The quality is so high. Go and shoot some nice, neat photos that you can use on your website. It makes it more real. When people walk in to your business, they recognize the front of the business. They recognize some of the people who are working in the business because they’ve seen the photos. It’s super important. When you’re adding images to your homepage and to your other pages on your website, make sure you use real photos.
FLOW OF THE WEBSITE – MAKING IT EASY TO USE
One of the most important things with the website is the actual structure of the flow of the website. What I’m talking about here is how easy is it to get to the information people are searching for. There is a popular rule online that everything should be within one click of the homepage. That’s not always possible because want menus that are hundreds of items deep. You might have a link on your homepage, and your menu says services. That brings them to a page where your services are listed; and then you click again to go down into the specifics of a service they’re interested in.
It’s not always possible to list all your services under the menu so it’s one click – so you got in the menu, you slide down, and click to go to there. But you do want to try and keep them as close to the top as possible without crowding your menus.
Often I find menus are one of those areas that people keep adding, and adding, and adding, and they get overwhelmed and become impossible to use. Especially when you switch to a mobile device, the menus can be really quite messy. They’re fine on a desktop, but when you get on a small phone, it becomes difficult to use your website. Be very careful when you’re building your menus. You pick your major things, and then you have nice clean links at the second level to go off to a range of services or a range of products.
One of the things that I also see often is that people really mess their menus up. There are certain conventions or norms, as I call them normals, that people look for in websites. For example, the last item in the menu bar should be the contact us. Everybody expects it to be there. It’s always been in that position. If you put it second in your menu and you have testimonials last, people automatically… Eyes are going to go to the end looking for contact us, and then they are going to have to scroll back visually to find the contact us button.
It can be quite annoying when you’re working in a large site. For example, a shopping cart or something like that, where you’re going in and out, and you’re looking at different products in there.
Make sure you look at those norms. Go on and have look at a range of other sites, and work out what they are. One of them, for example, is that you would have a home link. That would be the first menu item that you would see, and the last one should be contact us. You might have 4 or 5 other options like products, services, about us, testimonials in between. Think about those things when you’re doing your menus.
If you’ve got existing information about your website that you’ve collected through analytics etcetera, it’s worth having a look to find out what the most popular pages were and where the traffic flows within the website. It’s important because you can see what people are already looking at, what they need. The most popular pages are often the ones that should be at the top of the menu. They are the ones that people are looking for. They are the ones that they’re going to go more often than any other, especially if you look at the flow of visitors through analytic. You’d see they’re coming to the home page and then where they go from there. That will give you information.
SCOUTING COMPETITORS’ WEBSITES – LEARNING FROM THEM
Before you do a new website, go and have a look at some of your competitors’ websites. Often, you learn a lot from looking at their websites. It doesn’t necessarily mean their websites are any better, but if you start to see a particular style across all your competitors’ websites, it might be considered that that is a sort of style that everybody expects to see for that particular type of business.
For example, a car yard might have a particular layout of website. Make sure you’re going to have a look at what they’re doing. Work out if it’s suitable for what you want to achieve with your website. It might not be. In which case, they might be completely off the wrong track to what you’re trying to do.
Go and learn something. Go on dig around and find out what they’re doing. Get a feel for what the industry is doing, because things change over time. If you’ve got a website, you should look at updating it, probably every 2 years. At the outside, you really should be bringing it a whole new look, because the web changes. The options are available – the fonts, the looks, the whole thing. As I said right back at the start, people are drawing conclusions about your business when they have a look at it.
REVIEW YOUR WEBSITE – GET HONEST OPINIONS
Another thing I would suggest that you do is get some people to review your website, not necessarily friends; but if you want to go that way, think about asking them to give you an honest opinion about the website. Tell them that you’re looking to review it, you’re looking to change it or make some changes; and you want their honest opinion about how it worked. Was it easy to use? Did it actually look good? Did it function? Did they find things that they are looking for where they expected to find them?
Get some feedback before you go forward. Don’t just automatically take feedback from designers or people like that. I’ve found in the past that designers can be very forward thinking, but that often means that you end up with a website that doesn’t fit your needs. It might look fantastic, but it’s not necessarily practical for your audience or for your business. It looks great but doesn’t function on the search engine level, doesn’t convert from pay per click, etc.; but visually, it’s amazing. Don’t be drawn into discussions with the designers until such time as you’ve had a look at what’s available, and what it is that you want to do for your website.
Just to bring you back to the start, remember that your website is a member of staff. You paid good money for it, so make sure that your website earns its keep just like you would any other member of staff. They have to earn you money, or they’re not worth keeping in the business.
Well that’s it for this week’s podcast. I’m Brad Hauck, Mr. Web Marketing. I hope you’ve learned something about getting a site that sells, and I hope this helps you make decisions when you look at your website. I look forward to catching you in the next episode.
If you need any help, or you would like to ask a question, please send them to me at brad@mrwebmarketing.com, or catch me on social media. My username, of course, is MrWebMarketing. See you then.