Why WebSite Visitors May Not Become Clients
Even if you have obtained high search engine rankings for your website under your important keywords, and even if you have hundreds of visitors per day, web surfers still might not take advantage of your services.
Why do visitors sometimes not convert into sales? We will give you several reasons that can prevent surfers from taking your website seriously.
Reason 1: Your Site does not load fast enough.
Because you offer high-end services, your perspective clients are most likely not going to be using a slow internet service. Your general web surfers hate to wait for slow loading web pages. If your website does not load fast enough, many web surfers will go away without taking a look at your site.
No matter how great your product is: if your website is not fast enough, web surfers will not see it. Fast loading sites are crucial if you want to sell something on the Internet.
There are several things you can do to speed up your website listed here below:
NOTE:These options are pertaining to websites built with FLASH technology as used by Roadside Multimedia. Otherwise these options may or may not apply to you.
- WebSite Server: A fast and reliable server is a must no matter how your website was built. If you are hosted by Roadside Multimedia then you have the best. However, if your hosting is elsewhere then finding a better server may be an easy fix for a slow site.
- Skip Into: The first thing you see when entering your site is usually an into movie. If a visitor found your site by way of a search engine, quite likely they will leave within a few seconds if they do not see immediate information. By adding a Skip Into option you can hold the interest of many of these visitors who otherwise would have left your site moving on to your competition.
- Introduction Page: Another option is an Introduction page giving the visitor the choice of a simpler, slower connection (aka dialup) or the full version of the site for those with patience and/or a faster connection.
- Optimization: Flash technology can be optimized using several options. You may or may not be able to have your site further tweaked for speed, depending on the manner of its creation and what type of optimization was applied initially. But this is worth asking your site developer about. Also note; This is cutting edge technology. New optimization options become available every few months. If nothing can be done today, ask again in a few months.
- Auto Index: An experienced surfer uses the search engines and will load ten or more recommended sites at a time before seeing if any of the sites are what they were looking for. If they have to dig deeper into a site to find the desired information they usually just go to the next site. Good SEP requires that text pages be added to a site, but these pages are most likely a little generic looking and do not match the site. For this reason, after many complaints, we have added a feature that will send the visitor to your front door; making them see the site from your main entry point. We refer to this as Auto Indexing. They can still navigate to these added text pages, but the experienced surfer will probably leave the site after not finding the desired text within a few seconds. This feature thus has a positive and negative outcome. Measure its importance and decide if maybe it should be eliminated.
Reason 2: Is your website trustworthy?
It is very important that your website visitors have trust and confidence in your company. Your customers must trust you. They will not user your services if they do not trust you.
On the World Wide Web, you cannot speak face to face with your customer so you have to establish credibility in other ways.
- Make sure that your web pages have a professional design:
- Your web pages have to look perfect. Do not use blinking text, funny animations or flashy banners on your page. Pop-ups and animation can be done right, but avoid anything that has the feel of fast paced advertising. People will simply tune this out or, worse yet, leave your site.
- Do not use automatically created web pages. Some software programs allow you to automatically create pages that are optimized for a special keyword. These doorway pages no not work anymore on search engines (its simply spamming).
- In addition, human web surfers are turned away by that kind of pages. While doorway pages might look attractive to software programs, web surfers usually hate them. Automatically created doorway pages usually look ugly to human web surfers. Often, they consist of nothing more than a list of buzz-words. You will not get good results with this method because human web surfers will quickly close such a web page.
- Tell your website visitors who you are:
Make sure that customers know that a real person is sitting behind this Web page. Include your full contact information on your website and make it easy to find.
If your visitors no not know from whom they will purchase or how to contact you, they will not buy anything. Show your privacy policy. - Offer free trials and show your refund policy:
The most common things to establish trustworthiness is to offer a free trial and a money back guarantee. If your customers know what they will get, they will be more likely to purchase. - Use testimonials:
Its far better if other people say nice things about you than you saying nice things about yourself. Testimonials from satisfied customers will show how your business can do a better job than your competitor when it comes to customer satisfaction.
Reason 3: Is your website content convincing?
It is important that your web pages are interesting to your visitors. Every visitor wants to get a prompt answer to the question what is in it for me?. In the first paragraph of your web page, you should tell your visitors the following:
- What You Do
- Why People Should Stay On Your Site
- What Is In For Your Visitors
If you no not answer these questions quickly enough, people will go away.
People are not necessarily interested in your service or in your company. You must convince your website visitors with good copy.
Before starting to write copy, make sure that you know your product and that you are passionate about it. You have to fully believe in your product or services. If you do not, you should not sell it. You cannot write convincing copy if you do not stand behind your product. You must be sure that you are doing your customers a favor by offering them your product.
- What is in for your customers?:
Your customers want benefits. What can your product do for them? What can it do for them now? The benefits of your product should be the first words on your site. Make them bold and make them big. If your visitors no not know what is in it for them after the first few seconds, they will leave your site.
People do not read everything on your page. They scan it for interesting information. Grab their attention with benefits. - Do not mix up features and benefits:
You must differentiate between features and benefits. Features are the attributes of your product, benefits are what your product promises. For example, if you sell a solar-powered clock, then the feature is uses new 38/12 solar cells. The benefit to the buyer is you save money because you do not have to buy batteries anymore.
no not bore your potential customers with technical details. Tell them what your product will do for them. How they will feel when they tried your product. Maybe your product or service will make them more money, maybe it will save them time. Tell them and do not be shy. - Killer headlines will grab your visitors attention:
Nobody will read your entire page. Make it easier for your customers by dividing your page into paragraphs where each paragraph has a headline. Your headlines should make clear what to expect in the next sentences and they should grab your visitors' attention.
Use words like free, proven, benefit, first, discover, complete, exclusive and avoid words like should, could and but. Make sure that you use you more than I or we. Remember: Your customers no not really care about you and your business. They only want to know what is in for them. - End your sales copy by telling the reader what to do:
At the end of your copy text, you must tell your visitors what to do next, for example Click here to order now for immediate delivery.
Use these tips to write as persuasively as you can, but remember not to deceive your customers in any way. You would risk poor word of mouth, legal action, no repeat business and refund requests.
Reason 4: If you offer product, is your order page easy to use?
Statistics show that more than 60 percent of online shoppers abort the ordering process. If your order page is not easy to use, all other website promotion efforts will be in vain.
Here are the most important points for a successful order page:
- Link from the home page and from all product and service pages to the order page.
- Give the links on your order page names that your customers can easily recognize: Order, Buy, Store, Checkout, etc.
- Do not hide the price for your products or services. People will not buy if they do not know what they have to pay.
- Tell your visitors about shipping costs and state taxes.
- Tell your visitors the final price before they have to enter the credit card number.
- Tell your visitors who you are and tell them your complete company address.
Offer an unconditional money-back guarantee if at all possible.
- Tell your visitors upfront about your refund policy.
- Make sure that your order pages are secure. Use at least 40 bit encryption so that your customers can safely enter their contact and purchase information.
- Make sure that your order pages are easy to understand. Test them with your friends or relatives that no not connect to the Internet very often.
- Regularly test your order pages to make sure that they work.
- Make sure that you will get notified if your server goes down.
- Make sure that your order page displays a meaningful message if the customer forgets to enter the street name or any other required field.
- Make sure that your order pages work with international customers. German customers do not know what to enter in the State field and usually leave it empty. Some countries no not even have postal numbers. Your order pages should work for these customers.
If your order pages are easy to use and secure, they will not hinder or deter customers from completing their purchase.
It is very important that your order pages are a secure place to shop for your customers. Use as much encryption as you can and join the additional security services that are offered by some credit card companies.
In Conclusion
Having a website is important to your business, especially if you rely on the website for finding new clients. But it is just as important that your website be all that it can be. No one is interested is visiting just another website.