subject: Make Your Business Website Efficient With These Strategies [print this page] There are 3 things I believe are a great thing to do for many small business websites. Some study on these things will be released by us in the coming months but for now here are 3 remarkable strategies for making every small business website an effective one.
1. The Title - Stop Them Skimming And Start Them Reading
If it is possible for you, try to avoid generic monotonous headings. You will never see a newspaper article with a boring heading. Journalists take it pretty seriously; they know how important the title is. Never ignore having a great heading.
Often website owners seem to think a heading of 'Welcome to [business name goes here]' is sufficient. We tend to really encourage small business owners to have a title that engages individuals right from the beginning. Ask a question or state what makes you unique, or say something surprising or interesting.
You'll need to be a little ingenious while also thinking about the time period for which this title could last and be advantageous. See our main site for an example http://www.webcircle.com.au/. Our heading (at the time of writing) is Web Circle is a progressive agency with a relentless drive to discover and implement what works on the web. But what does work? It notifies people what we do, it gives a hint to our point of difference and it asks a query to engage the visitor and draw them towards the main content in the website - all in just 2 sentences - stop them skimming and start them reading and that way people may stay in your site for a long time to actually learn what you do and find out that you may be an apt choice for whatever they are looking out for.
2. The welcome message -
There are many ways for doing this. You may not have a lengthy welcome message - for instance in our case we have a heading that includes the fundamentals of the welcome message and then we have the about us section further down. You may believe its suitable to have a more in depth welcome message. If you do, don't forget to tell people the basics of what you do, perhaps where you are situated but do not stop there. There are 2 other things you have to include:
1) What makes you different
2) A call to action
Firstly what makes you different - your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), competitive advantage or several other consultant buzzwords. It is important to say exactly what you do - that is you sell widgets but its as important perhaps a lot more important to talk about how you are different in ways that will engage prospective viewers. Most people who look around for widget selling companies will land on your site as a result. They would know completely well that you sell Widgets. But what is it about your business that will keep them on your website for a long time and believe yeah these guys sound really good. This can be done in many ways, you will perhaps know from your customers or from the reasons you started your business in the first place exactly what you do really well and why your business achieved success. This is exactly what you need in here. Just stating how you are different, ideally, in a way that will draw in the people you are trying to target is the key. Some ways could be to discuss your history, your family, personal stories, anything that you think can add credibility in the eyes of your clients, any accomplishments, testimonials and anything that adds to your point of difference and builds the reliability of your business.
We (http://www.webcircle.com.au/) make use of the words what actually works on the web. We have a tendency to talk about "building websites that work" simply because we are experts in knowing what actually works. We dont merely build websites.
Secondly, a call to action is crucial. What do you want them to do? You should make sure to be clear as to where you want to send the visitor. It might be to contact you, to download something, to buy something. Whatever it is- But Make It Clear. The last thing you want is an attracted visitor bouncing to a different site because they have given up trying to work out how they can take the next step. Ive done it plenty of times, there is only so much patience a person can have so make it easy.
3. Personalisation
Personalisation is exceptionally significant for small business. When you are thinking on the lines of what makes your business different a lot of small businesses will find that it is them that make the business unique. It is the personal relationship they have with their customers. It is their story, their history, their unique blend of skills. Thats why we emphasize on personalising as much as possible for most small business sites.
This is very effective particularly for the types of businesses that have a lot of in-person contact with their clients. People tend to give positive responce to personal messages with real photo. People love stories - they love success stories and small businesses love working with other small businesses.
We recently updated our homepage with a few changes, I uploaded my photo on the homepage and changed the about us section to The web circle story. I also wrote half of the story on the homepage, despite that I looked at the stats after a few weeks and found that lot of people had visited the page and people were spending almost 3 times as long as the page - implying they were actually reading it not just clicking on it and skimming it and passing it off as another about us page.
And thats for my boring web design business! Imagine if my story was indeed exciting! This is an simple technique for separating yourself from other competitors because the majority people dont perform it - indeed a set of small businesses cautiously try to make themselves appear bigger than they really are no matter what the cause might be.
Bringing it all together
We just designed a site for Act2 Solutions who retail Actuarial Certificates. Read this post for various information on the site. It includes a catchy title that states just what they do (and how they are different - they are reasonable), a welcome email that concentrates on how they are different, personalisation by using pictures of Andy along with a call to action telling clients to get the forms.
Do feel free to put up any comments or examples of sites you have and your experiences with any of these ideas.
