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Creating A Marketing
Focused Website That Sells
Many people look at a website as a separate
expense from marketing. This is unfortunate and the reason why many
websites under-perform in their sales potential. The Internet is still
very much in its infancy and therefore our view of the web is still
developing. It’s been a slow process, but many business owner’s attitudes
towards website development and marketing has begun to evolve.
Unfortunately, far too many businesses still don’t consider website
development as a part of their marketing efforts. They’ll pour thousands
of dollars into traditional forms of marketing (which often produce
significantly less return on the investment dollar) but fail to properly
plan and execute their website or invest in effective online marketing
strategies.
As you begin to put time, energy and (likely) significant sums of money
into your online presence it is important that you consider your website
as part of your overall marketing plan. Instead of being viewed as just
another IT expense, your website should be considered as a marketing
endeavor worthy of being incorporated fully into the marketing budget.
Businesses that take this view are setting themselves up to have a
long-term presence on the Internet as well as lasting success.
Compiling the Pieces that Build a Full-Service Sales Experience
With the exception of cloned websites, every website has its own unique
characteristics. When building your site there really is no
one-size-fits-all pattern to follow. Your site should be built to fulfill
your informational and sales needs, while being effective in getting your
target audience to take the desired actions. In order to do this there are
basic components that almost every website should have in place in order
to be effective both with the usability and marketing aspects.
Home Page
Every website has a home page, even if it’s just a one-page site. The home
page is the single most crucial page of a site because it is the page most
likely to be viewed, as well as the page most likely to send people away
if they don’t like what they see. It doesn’t matter what you have beyond
the home page if you can’t get visitors to click past it and into your
products or services.
Your home page must accomplish several things:
Establish Your Brand
Your visitor’s need to immediately know where they have landed (who are
you), what you do or offer (broad concepts), and you must be able to touch
them in such a way that they will be interested enough to click deeper
into your site and/or return at a later point.
Show What You’ve Got
Visitors need to quickly be able to find the specific products or services
they came looking for in the first place, with a clearly established path
to take them to the relevant pages. If you can’t direct them effectively
from the home page, you lose them at “Hello.”
Generate Interest
If your site is not compelling, all the information in the world won’t get
them to click any further. Your copy and layout must generate enough
interest and give them the desire to keep digging.
Convey Trust
Trust is an important element in the sales process. Your home page is
often the first impression your visitors get of you. If your site comes
across as a slick salesman selling a used car out of an impound lot,
chances are visitors will bolt.
Don’t Give Information Overload
Pace yourself. Don’t try and give too much information on your home page.
We know that every additional click a user has to perform causes visitor
loss, however putting too much information on a single page can also
confuse them. Sometimes forcing them to click is the surest way to
establish active interest.
Contact Us Page
Every site needs to have a designated contact information page. Even if
you have your phone number, email address, fax number and snail mail
address on every page of your website, it’s still important to have a full
page dedicated to this exact same information. Why? Inevitably there will
be people that will simply not notice your large and dominantly displayed
phone number and start looking for the contact page.
On top of displaying all your contact information, you should consider
putting a contact form on this page as well. Different people have
different preferences and its best if you can cover as many of those as
possible. You can use the request form to gather some information such as
name, company, email and phone information, as well as subscribing them to
your newsletter, auto responders, or coupon mailing list. Those who don’t
want to fill out the information can utilize the other ways of contacting
you, but don’t be too intrusive; otherwise you’ll lose the contact
altogether.
About Us Page
The “About Us” page is one that is used to provide information that
instills additional confidence in your business in the hearts and minds of
your visitors. The “About Us” page can be used to provide reassuring
company information such as how long you’ve been in business,
organizations you belongs to (chamber of commerce, BBB, etc) as well as
provide bios of the executive staff. All of these things will help many
visitors feel more comfortable when deciding to take the next step in
purchasing your products or utilizing your services.
Product & Service Pages
If you sell anything, whether a product or a service, you need a page or
sets of pages dedicated to providing details about what it is you offer.
Do you have only one item that fits easily on the home page? That
shouldn’t matter. Keep the home page information paired down and use
product or service pages to expound, giving additional details,
testimonials, uses, expected results, frequently asked questions and so
on. These pages will allow you to tell anything that anybody might
possibly need to know to make an informed purchase decision.
As with the home page, don’t overload a single page with too much
information about the product or service. It’s recommended that you break
out information over multiple pages, each highlighting a different set of
information. This ensures that each visitor can quickly and easily
navigate to the information that helps them make their buying decision.
FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions
If possible, assemble a FAQ page for each product or service you offer, or
each grouping of your products or services. This allows a one-stop page
where potential buyers can find out just about anything they want. FAQ
pages can be as long as they need to be to cover all of the potential
questions someone might ask. You can also break long pages up into
multiple pages with the main page highlighting each question and linking
to its answer.
Site Navigation
Construction of your site navigation can make or break your website’s
performance. Shoddy and haphazard navigation schemes can easily confuse
visitors causing them to make that dreaded click out of your site and onto
a competitor. A properly constructed navigation can help visitors easily
move from page to page finding everything that they are looking for
quickly and easily.
Be Consistent (Placement)
However you construct your site navigation scheme it should be consistent
from one page to the next. Don’t confuse your visitors by changing how the
navigation looks or by moving its on-page location to a different area.
There are many different forms of navigational elements: main menus,
sub-menus, breadcrumbs, etc. All of them should work together to create a
consistent and recognizable flow as the visitor navigates through the
site.
It is very important that no matter how big or complex the structure of
your site gets, each web page must keep a consistently located and easy to
find link back to your home page.
Be Obvious (Breadcrumbs)
Being obvious with your navigation prevents your visitors from “getting
lost” on the site and not knowing how to navigate back to other important
pages that may be in different sections of your site. It’s important that
your visitors be able to quickly discern what page they are on and figure
out where to go from there.
One of the simplest ways to display where a visitor is on your site,
regardless of how deep within the site’s architecture they are, is to use
breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are a set of navigational links that show the
navigational path from home to the current page.
Most visitors don’t actually use the breadcrumb links for navigational
purposes, but instead they act as an important visual cue allowing the
visitor to see what page, sub-section, and section they are within the
site.
Be Helpful (Site Map & Search)
Websites with large quantities of pages or products can easily create a
navigational nightmare. Even with properly implemented navigation,
visitors often find themselves “lost” and don’t know how to navigate
specifically to the information they are seeking. While it’s important to
eliminate these frustrations as best as possible, you also want to provide
some navigational “short cuts” for your visitors.
Site Map: Site maps provide a one-stop destination that allows your
visitors to always be no more than two clicks away from the product or
information they want. This is a helpful feature allowing anybody to
quickly see what you offer and where to get it, all from a single page.
Site maps are also useful to search engines allowing them to easily crawl
and index every page on your site. Most engines will only index a couple
of clicks deep with each visit, often taking weeks or months to dig all
the way through your site. Site maps can speed up that process by making
every page easily accessible to the search spider.
In the same manner that you have a consistent link to the home page, you
also want to have a link to the site map on every page as well.
Site Search: A site search feature isn’t required for good
navigation, but it can add an extra element of usefulness for your
visitors. Allowing your visitors to perform a quick search for the product
they are looking for can speed up the conversion process and eliminate
site abandonment.
Before implementing a site search feature, consider that most site
searches fail to deliver great results. Before making your search feature
live, run extensive tests to be sure that results are accurate and
relevant. Try using product numbers, brand names, misspellings, etc. If
you don’t carry an exact product which may be searched for, be sure to
deliver results for the similar or relevant products you do carry. If you
can’t make your site search engine perform under all of the above
situations then its best not to have a search function at all.
Putting all of these pieces together, much like a puzzle, allows you to
present a complete picture of who you are, what you do, and how you can
meet the needs of your visitors. While your website can and will function
without any one of these pieces, there will always be “something” missing,
and that something just might be what some visitors need to push them into
that final decision to purchase. A complete website, with all the pieces
in place is a much more effective website through and through.
About This Author:
Stoney deGeyter is president of Pole Position
Marketing, a
Reno SEO firm providing search engine optimization and marketing
services since 1998. Stoney is also a part-time instructor at Truckee
Meadows Community College, as well as a moderator in the Small Business
Ideas Forum. He also contributes daily to the
(EMP) E-Marketing
Performance search engine marketing blog
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