Your Web Design is Costing You Leads
Poor or outdated web design could be costing you business, turning away leads and hurting your bottom line.
The internet is everything nowadays. If you aren’t utilizing the power of your website to the best of its capabilities, you’re losing out on potential leads.
Your website is how people discover your business, gather information, make their decision and contact you to complete your services. It is up to your website to guide visitors through each of these stages, from discovery to contact, to gather leads.
Your website needs to accomplish three main things:
- Create trust with visitors
- Provide easy navigation & clearly presented information
- Offer clear conversion methods
If your website doesn’t do these things, then it’s actively hurting your business by alienating customers and turning them away.
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1. Create Trust with Visitors
One of the main reasons visitors come to your website is to find out more information about both your services and the company itself.
When someone lands on your website for the first time, they will be evaluating your business, determining if they can trust you to work in their home.
This can be done by incorporating a few elements throughout your website:
- Provide consistent contact information
- Show your experience, certifications and qualifications
- Utilize past customer reviews and testimonials
With these three things on your website, visitors will be able to know how to contact you and that you’re still in business. Additionally, they will get a clear idea of the services you provide and the quality in which you complete them.
2. Provide Easy Navigation & Clearly Presented Information
Once someone has made it to your website, they will be looking for more information about your company and the services you provide. It’s essential that you make this information easy to find and understand.
For this, you’ll want clear menu items to quickly bring site visitors where they want to go. These items should bring consumers to simple landing pages that are easy to read and straight to the point. You’ll want to avoid using complicated language and industry-specific jargon.
You’ll also want to use short paragraphs and sentences, lists, in addition to implementing interesting visuals and graphics to provide information in a more dynamic way.
Offer Clear Conversion Methods
Once website visitors have found the information they are looking for, they’ll want a way to make a purchase or contact your company for more information. Make it easy for visitors to do what you want them to by providing a clear path.
Put contact forms along the side of important landing pages and at the bottom of every page. Make phone numbers clickable so mobile users can call easily. The trick is to make it as simple as possible for potential customers to contact you.
Web Design's Role in Being Found
In addition to the three things listed above, your website’s design will help it be found on Google – or at least it should – by being optimized for search engines.
To leverage your website’s design to boost business, focus on 3 additional elements:
- Site speed
- Graphics and images
- Mobile-forward design
For more detailed information, check out our blog dedicated to the topic.
Site Speed
Looking at site speed involves finding out how long it takes your website to load. A long load time can result in lower conversion rates and more people leaving your website immediately.
To improve slow page loads on your business’s website, minimize HTTP requests, compress images and consider upgrading your site’s hosting.
Graphics and images
Images and graphics are a great addition to almost any webpage. Not only do images break up text, they can provide more information in a dynamic way and keep site visitors’ attention.
Additionally, Google’s search algorithm is designed to push web pages with images higher on the results pages. Note: for the algorithm to recognize images, make sure you include alt text with each image, which will provide a description of the picture.
Infographics can be used in the same way, and can easily be reused in other places, like social media.
Mobile Forward Design
It’s also important to make sure that your website is easily accessible for mobile devices like phones and tablets.The more searches that are being completed on mobile devices, the more important a mobile site becomes for consumers and for the Google algorithm.
Start by implementing a responsive design on your website. This should help your website switch between mobile and desktop devices with ease, offering a design that works well with both. Additionally, make sure that page layouts still work on smaller phone screens. Buttons should be large with text easy to digest.
Start Improving Your Website to Encourage More Leads
Review your website and begin crafting a plan to improve your website’s design with the intention of improving leads.
If you find that overwhelming or would rather focus on running your business, call in the pros at ThreeSixty to tackle your website and get you tangible results.
