Think Like a Customer – Would You Trust Your Website?
Would you trust your own website if you were a visitor? It seems a bit of a strange question to ask yourself, but it’s something that is often overlooked when it comes to trying to get more of your visitors to get in touch, enquire, or place an order.
I realise this touches upon a similar topic area that I write about last week, but have been reading more into this subject and realised how much can be done to optimise the website in terms of user interaction and the psychology behind it.
With a constant inflow of visitors coming to your site, you want the website to do as much of the work as possible, so that when the visitor does pick up the phone they are ready to part with their money.
It’s worth taking some time to step back and look at your website the way a visitor would see it and ask yourself a few questions, just as a visitor would subconsciously tick off boxes when they peruse your site;
Does the site appear to be an authority in its field? Think about brand identity and whether it fits the target audience and their expectations of your brand and products. This also follows through into the site’s design and the quality of content.
Look at your prices. Do they reflect the type of audience you want to attract? You don’t want to appear too cheap but you also don’t want to price yourselves out of the market.
Make sure the content appears to be written by an expert or enthusiast, and not by an amateur and make sure it doesn’t appear to be shallow and unknowledgeable. Rushed and partial content that doesn’t answer the users questions could potentially lose you a sale, recommendation or repeat visit.
Do what you can to ensure the content on each page is as ‘bookmarkable’ or ‘shareable’ as possible. Better still, ask yourself ‘would it get printed in a magazine’?
Ask random people who haven’t seen the site before if they trust the website and if they’d be happy to give their credit card details to the site. Make constant changes based on their feedback until the majority say ‘yes’.
As simple a mistake as it sounds, you’d be surprised how many times I come across a site that have spelling or grammatical issues and, once fixed, have shown considerable signs of improvement in terms of the volume and quality of online enquiries received. A poor quality site really puts people off.
A good idea might be to run Google Optimiser for a few months, running two slightly different versions of the site side by side and work out which provides a consistently better conversion rate. Once you’ve got a clear winner, roll out that version of the site to the public and run a second test with further changes made, rolling out the new winner until you have a site that sells in your sleep.
