Are you struggling to turn your website into a strategic part of your business and a revenue driver? If so, you are not alone. Many businesses have a website, but that website doesn’t drive leads or sales. When people visit your website, they come with a purpose. Your site provides a digital experience for your company but often doesn’t reflect your business goals and objectives. When these three things (intent, user experience, and business objectives) align, businesses see more leads and revenue. Here are three questions your visitors ask when they come to your website, and if your website can answer them, you stand a much better chance of increasing your revenues.

Am I in the right place?

When visitors hit your website, they want to know they are in the right place to solve the problem they set out to solve. This goes back to their intent to visit your website. One of the most essential things you can provide to answer this question is a statement at the top of your website that explains the services you offer or “what you do” to help clients. If they came from an email or an ad campaign, it is important for any upstream messaging from those ads or emails to align with what they see. If the message that brought them to your website doesn’t match, it will lead to cognitive friction. What is cognitive friction, you ask? It refers to the amount of mental effort used in the working memory, or in simple terms, it’s making people overthink. 

How do I feel about this website?

The second question people ask is how they feel about your website, but they are asking whether I can trust this company. They are looking at your website for trust factors. What are trust factors? It can be a lot of different things. One of the most important trust factors is having your phone number in the upper right-hand corner of your website because it shows that your company is legitimate. Other trust factors may include social proof such as ratings and reviews, client testimonials, data that speaks to the results you have delivered for clients, your number of years in business, and much more. Your website should include a mixture of information for visitors to absorb and trust factors that help them feel better about working with you and persuade them to fill out a form on your website or call you.

What do I do here?

Unfortunately, when someone visits your website, you don’t know what else has happened in their day to distract them mentally, so you must make your website easy to navigate. People who hit your site may be unsure what to do or where to go. Not everyone will use the navigation bar at the top of your website to move around the site. Images, icons, and colors are essential features that tell people where to go and what to do. Many people will look for pictures that resonate with them or call-to-action buttons that use unique colors when navigating your website and click there because a picture is worth a thousand words. Offer up information trailheads on your website using color, pictures, and buttons for your visitors to follow. It will make it easier for them to engage with your site and connect with your business. Many businesses forget to make the products and services that drive the most revenue more prominent on their site so that visitors turn into dollars.

Summary

As you can now see, there are many things to consider when building a website to convert traffic to leads. This is the science of conversation rate optimization or CRO. Many companies can build you a website, but can they build one that will drive leads and revenue? We recommend you set your site up to answer these three questions BEFORE paying a marketing agency a lot of monthly money to drive traffic to your website. If your website isn’t built to convert, you are likely spending money to drive your visitors and leads off a cliff and into nowhere. Are you thinking of making some marketing changes in Q4 of 2023 to set you up for success in 2024? If so, let us provide you with a complimentary assessment of your website by visiting this web page. We’ll give you some design tips and look at how you compare to three competitors in search engines. Thanks for reading, and best of luck on your marketing journey. 

About the Author

Todd McCarty, WSI, has over 25 years of experience in Marketing and has worked for some of Atlanta’s leading companies in marketing leadership roles.