Do you have a website for your small business but it’s not showing the results you hoped for? Are you looking for ways to attract more customers online?
These days, the opportunities when it comes to online selling are endless. However, it’s key that you make sure you’re going about it efficiently! These quick and easy tricks can help you attract more customers online.
Let’s have a look at how you can improve your small business website and use your online presence to generate new business on a daily basis!
Customer focus
As always in marketing, seeing things through your customers’ eyes is the best way forward. So if you want to attract more customers online through your website, keep in mind what your target market is looking for.
Ask yourself, what situation they are likely in when they’re looking for services or products like yours:
- Are they in a hurry?
- What keywords will they have most likely used?
- Are they likely to buy at their first visit or is it a decision that takes time?
Let’s have a look if these 10 quick and easy tricks to attract more customers online for your small business.
Find out more how to define your target market and define the right keywords for your website.
1. Menu
Structurally, the menu is the main focus of every website. People who are looking for your help are usually not willing to spend lots of time sifting through your site in order to find the information they are looking for. They need to be directed to it as quickly and with as few clicks as possible.
So make sure that your main menu is easy to find and works like a straightforward path through your site. Keep it short and simple – ideally, the page titles shouldn’t be more than 1-3 words each and try not to have more than 5-6 menu items in total.
Also, if your website’s main goal is to increase sign-ups for your free trial or to promote your latest discount, make sure you add an extra button to your menu that stands out and leads visitors directly to your shopping cart or sign up form.
2. You vs I
Now we have to look at your content. Are you talking about yourself most of the time – what you do, where you are and so on? You might want to reconsider that.
If you want your website to perform well, you need to focus on the potential customer and not on yourself. Tell them which problem of theirs you can solve, how you can make their life happier and easier.
The ideal mixture of customer and self-focus is 3:1 or anything above that. You can test your own website with this free customer focus calculator and then tweak your content accordingly.
3. Above the fold
If you want to attract more customers online for your small business, start by having a look at your web stats. Find out what screen size most people are using when visiting your business’s online presence.
Then make sure the most relevant content is visible to them “above the fold”, which means without scrolling down the page.
But be careful, don’t put everything up there and confuse everyone. Focus on your main call-to-action and direct people quickly to the information they’re looking for.
4. CTAs
To attract more customers online, make sure that your content talks to your visitors directly and tell them what you want them to do. Call-to-actions (or short CTAs) are very important for the performance of your website.
Do you want them to get in touch or sign up for a free trial? Tell them how to get in touch with you and make it as easy as possible (‘Click here’ or ‘Call me now on…’). Make sure you use a button to make your call to action stand out (‘Sign up now’ or ‘Free trial’).
To make your message clear, don’t use several call-to-actions on a page. Focus on the main goal of the page visually and through your content and don’t forget to tell your visitors what the benefits of your services or products are.
5. Links
Another way to make your company website easy to navigate for your customers is to link your content from within your content. Don’t just rely on your menu, tell people what else they can find on your site and link to relevant pages in your written content.
If your visitors are reading through your product or service pages, offer them a quick and easy way to find out what your customers are saying about it and link to your testimonials or case studies.
If you have a closer look at my web pages, you will see that I finish every page with a written call to action and a few more links that might be interesting to visitors at this point. See if you can add something like this to your pages to keep visitors longer on your site.
6. SEO
Search engine optimisation is a vast field. For the intents and purposes of this blog post, however, let’s have a look at your keywords and meta tags.
Note: You should always write your web content with your reader in mind. Don’t just think about Google’s little bots and your page rank! Write as you speak and use the words that your potential customers are likely to use when searching for your products/services.
When it comes to your page titles and descriptions (meta tags or the things Google shows in their search results), make sure to not exceed 60 characters for page titles and 160 characters for page descriptions. Otherwise, Google is going to truncate your lovely content.
7. Loading time
You don’t have to be as impatient as me to know that this is a biggie when you want to attract more customers online. The longer people have to wait for your content to appear, the quicker they move on to the next result in their online search (aka your competition).
Several studies have shown that a site speed of up to 3 seconds is acceptable. Everything that’s slower than 7 seconds will lose you potential customers.
There are free site speed tools out there that can help you improve your website’s performance. This is even more important now that people are surfing the internet on their mobile devices and websites are becoming more and more complex and content-heavy.
8. Forms
Whether you are looking at your contact form or a sign-up form for your newsletter or product, always make sure it’s as simple and easy to use as possible.
The more people have to fill out the more likely they are to run away screaming. If you want more information than their name and email address, then at least make the fields optional.
Also, add your little data privacy blurb to the form (the one where you swear that you’re not giving any details to third parties and comply with GDPR). And try to get rid of the captcha stuff and use more subtle honey pot methods to keep spammers at bay.
9. SSL
To attract more customers online and protect your web visitors’ data, you have to invest in more security for your small business website. Getting an SSL certificate for your website and switch to HTTPS is easy and relatively cheap. It’s often offered by web hosting services as add-on to your normal hosting subscription.
To make the web more secure, Google is starting to penalise websites without SSL and many people will see a warning in their browsers if they try to surf to a website with an HTTP rather than an HTTPS address.
10. Mobile
Last but not least, please get a responsive website if you want to attract more customers online. Google has started to penalise non-responsive websites with lower rankings in their search results. And it’s downhill from there.
Especially if you use social media marketing and have a blog, you need a website that is accessible on all possible devices and screen sizes. Google Analytics will tell you how many of your web visitors are already using their smartphone or tablet to look at your online presence. 2020 stats suggest that 40% of people search only on a smartphone, so keep that in mind.
The data also tells you how long people are lingering, reading and clicking through your pages when on the road. If that is considerably lower than your desktop visitors, you’ll need to act.
KEEP READING
If you are interested in reading more about this topic, have a look at these:
6 Tips to Convert More Website Visitors Into Paying Customers
4 Tips for a Web Copy That Converts
How to Get Started With Your Small Business SEO
7 Ways to Turn Your Social Media Followers Into Paying Customers
