Your website isn’t just about throwing up some pages and hoping to get some customers. In this episode (with transcript below), learn how to make your website that will convert visitors into paying clients.

Discussion Highlights:

00:22 – Computer business websites

00:39 – Optimizing your website for conversions

01:25 – Catch visitors’ attention with a headline

02:23 – Avoid big blocks of text and use bullet points

03:15 – Call to Action

03:42 – Leaks of the sales funnel

04:00 – Important things about Search Engine Optimization

05:09 – Analyze your website using feedthebot.com

05:26 – Google prefers mobile ready websites

05:47 – Website loading speed is a factor for website ranking

06:36 – Images not optimized for the web

06:48 – Plugin Performance Profiler

If you need help with your website, join the Technibble Forums.

Tweetables:

“A guide to create an effective sales funnel for your website.” [Click To Tweet]

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Transcription:

Computer business websites are an important part of your marketing efforts. Ten years ago, business websites were seen as not much more than an online brochure but these days your website needs to be so much more. It needs to be optimized both technically and for conversions so you can get the call.

Optimizing your website for conversions.

Your website isn’t just about throwing up some pages and hoping to get some customers. You need to think about the whole system that makes up your websites sales funnel.

Like a funnel that you would use to pour oil into your cars engine, your sales funnel is wide at the top and thin at the bottom.

At the top you are pulling in customers from multiple sources, this could be Google Adwords, organic search engine traffic, article writing or social media activities.

Once they are in the top of our sales funnel, we need to convince them that we are the right person in the middle of our funnel, but we cant just go writing huge blocks of text talking about our service because people looking for services don’t read sites, they scan them.

There is a good chance that the visitor has 10 other tabs with your competitors sites open. So we need to catch their attention very quickly with a headline. For example, what you do and where you are located. In the internet marketing world, they say you have about 7 seconds to grab someone’s attention before they leave the site.

The solution to this is having a headline saying what your business is about in a very short paragraph right up the top of the page. The headline can be as simple as saying “Los Angeles Computer Repair”. This answers the question of what you do and where you do it, which are the first two questions they are most likely look for. Now that you have their attention, they are more likely to read the rest of the copy on your website. The next small paragraph can say something like “We are a Professional, Certified and Insured Computer Repair company operating in the Los Angeles area. We serve small and medium sized businesses as well as home offices”. Again, this answers as many questions as quickly as possible to maintain their attention.

Now, we need to convey more information to let them know that we are what they are looking for, while still remembering that people scan websites. You need to avoid big blocks of text and use bullet points instead. The best way to take advantage of the bullet points is to list your services in them. For example:

Laptop Repair

Virus Removal

Desktop Repair

Data Recovery and Backup etc.

The client usually knows what they want. If they believe that they have a virus then they are going to be scanning for the page for the words “virus removal”.

Once you tick that box in their mind, they are much more likely to continue reading your website.

One warning though, don’t use terms that we use, use terms that clients use. For example, if you are doing managed services, don’t over use words like “managed services” or “RMM” because customers don’t really search for those terms. Its an all encompassing term that WE use in this industry, but our customers don’t really search for. Instead target terms like “virus monitoring”, Outlook 365 Support, Cloud backup and so on.

Now our funnel has been working to push your visitors into the thin part of the funnel to make them do what we really want, for them to make contact. Every single bit of content should be pushing towards a “call to action” of some sort, this should be either your phone number or an email form and it should be at the bottom of every single page. It doesnt really make sense successfully converting a customer and them then having to go find your contact page. Put a way to contact you at the bottom of every page.

Also, be careful of leaks in your funnel. We spend so much time, effort and money to get people to the website, only for them to get distracted by the “Like us on Facebook” button. There should be no links that take people away from your website, nothing to distract them from the only thing we want – making the call.

Now onto SEO

Search Engine Optimization is a huge topic in itself, but here is just the important stuff:

1. Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Google considers usability very important.

2. Make sure your site has a clear hiearchy of navigation and all of your content is reachable from at least one static text link.

3. Make sure your content accurately describes what you do.

4. It’s a good idea to have the keyword you are targeting in the title of the page, the URL of the page and in the body of the content.

5. Don’t target short-tail keywords like just “computer repair”, rather, try to target location specific keywords like “computer repair los angeles” or “computer repair orange county”. You are far more likely to rank well and your client is more likely to be searching for it.

6. Don’t overuse you keywords like “Bobs computer repair is the best computer repair in Los Angeles. Contact Bobs computer repair for all your computer repair needs. This is known as keyword stuffing and you will rank lower and potentially even penalized for this. Write for humans first.

There is actually a great site called FeedTheBot.com which analyzes your website and lets you know if it follows the Google webmaster guidelines and makes suggestions on how you can improve.

In the last few years, Google has been focusing heavily on giving better ranking to websites with good user experience. Two important ones is whether the site is mobile responsive and the speed that the site loads.

On April 22nd 2015, Google did a major change that the internet marketing world called “Mobile-geddon”. Basically, sites that change appropriately depending on the device they are viewed on, will rank better than those that don’t. If you saw a large dip in your organic traffic during this time, it was probably because your site wasn’t mobile responsive.

If you are running WordPress and your current theme is not responsive, you can install a free plugin called WP-Touch, which will make use of a different mobile optimized theme when your site is viewed on mobile devices.

To test to see whether your site is mobile responsive in the eyes of Google, search for the “Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool”

As was mentioned before, the speed a site loads is also an important factor in ranking. To test the speed of your site, you can use a website called WebPageTest.org

It will show you whats called a “waterfall” view of your site, showing what loads and how long it takes to do so, represented by how long the bar graph is.

Ideally you want your sites load time to be under 3 seconds. If you see any really long bars on items like images, its probably because that image is not optimized for the web. You can use a free online tool like optimizilla.com to help you compress your images with minimal loss of quality.

If your “time till first byte” is high, which is the amount of time it took for your browser to get the first byte of data, this means either you have a slow web host. Or, if you are using WordPress you may have a bad plugin slowing down your site.

To test to see whether it’s a badly behaving WordPress plugin, install the plugin “P3 Plugin Performance Profiler”. This will show you how long each plugin takes to load and how much time it contributes to the overall loading of your website. If you see a plugin adding a significant amount of time to your sites loading speed, consider whether you really need it or if you do, find a replacement.

If you can’t see plugin causing any significant slowdowns, then the slowdown is probably your web host and you’ll need to talk to them.

If you need help with your website, come join us on the Technibble forums.