Nobody cares about your website. No one gives a flying fig about your website! They don’t care if your website cost £300, £3,000 or £30,000. They don’t care if it took you all weekend to write the content and they certainly don’t care if you’re using the latest version of WordPress (although, for security reasons, they should). But they just don’t care.
Why not?
Well because every visitor to every website is there for a specific objective, whether it is to find the hottest travel destinations, to find out what the funny mole on their arm is or whether it is to spend some personal time alone in a dark room with their laptop!
When they visit an accountant’s website it is more likely they are there to find a local, reputable, professional accountant rather than just for fun.
When they visit a stationery website they are there to compare prices to their current office stationery suppliers and try to save money.
When they visit a wedding planner’s website it’s because they are looking for help organising the biggest day of their lives.
Who’s the best person at this accountancy firm to talk to and what’s their number? How much cheaper are these stationers for this specific printer cartridge? What experience does this wedding planner have?
These are the questions your website visitor’s need to answer and if they can’t do it within seconds, well your competitors are only a Google search away.
Here are 5 solid reasons why people don’t care about your website and how you can make them care or at least not make their experience a bad one:
1) There’s no social proof that you can deliver what you say you can deliver
Testimonials and reviews are a great way to prove your awesomeness. If you put testimonials on your site – and you should – be sure to include the person’s full name and company (otherwise Mr J Bloggs might sound a bit fake.) Even better, link their name to their LinkedIn profile or get them to review you via a third-party such as Trust Pilot or Google.
Even better still is a video testimonial (if the user doesn’t watch them it still inserts trust that you’ve gone to the trouble to video your customers saying nice things and that’s worth brownie points.)
2) There’s no obvious ‘Home’ link in your site.
Yes, many people these days know that your logo will link back to the homepage, but why risk that your next big client knows this when a simple ‘Home’ link in your primary navigation allows them a quick route back to the start.
The Home link is a comforter, users can be nervous little flowers who fear to stray through too many links because they’re worried they’ll get lost. A Home link acts as a quick jump back to the start so they can do over and take a better path if they feel they have become lost the first time.
3) Your contact form is too long
Every field in your contact form is another excuse why your potential customers won’t fill it out and contact you. It’s obvious (you’d think) but only ask for the essential information you need at this initial stage in your relationship.
When you meet someone at a networking event you might like to know their name, their company and one or two methods of contact but do you need to know their address, their date of birth, their shoe size? Maybe, but justify every field.
Oh, and another thing, don’t ask for the first name in one field and last name in another, most CRM software can split these up and it’s much easier for users to type in one box then tab or click to the next box.
4) Your website doesn’t allow disabled people to use it
There are over eight million registered disabled people in the UK, naturally, not all of them have a problem accessing the web or would have any desire to access your website, but have you thought about how a blind person is going to visit your site and become a customer?
Blind and partially sites people can access the web and often do so using a screen-reader which scans the website and reads it out to them, including all the alternative tags on images and other elements that most other web users don’t read.
It can be a painful experience if the website is poorly coded or if there are no alt tags. Many sighted web users scan a page for link text in order to make their next move, likewise screen-reader users can pull up a list of links that appear on the page, but what good will it do if the linking text always says ‘Click Here’, ‘Click Here’, ‘Click Here’? It’s important to think about how links can be read out of the context of the paragraph or information they appear with.
There are many other considerations that disabled users might benefit from and therefore may convert to paying customers (they certainly won’t want to become customers if they can’t access the website), so keep them in mind and remember that there is also a law that states you must do this!
5) Your website says © 2014 or even © 2008
If your copyright notice (which should always be in the footer along with your legally binding privacy policy and cookie policy links) is out of date then what’s to say that the rest of the site or your prices aren’t out of date? Or worse yet that your business is no longer trading. Keep this up-to-date, even if you think no one looks at it – it’s not like it’s difficult to do!
Summary
Website users, and we’re all guilty, are fickle creatures. They won’t stay around if they can’t complete their objective quickly.
This is why it is important to get expert advice when building or running a website that you want to make your income with. It’s the same principle we all accept when a business owns vehicles, they need to be maintained and MOT’d. Or when a business has premises, they need regular servicing and sometimes a new lick of paint.
I offer a free, no obligation health check to find out what stops website visitors from completing their objectives – because I care about your website.
