This article was originally published on concentricmarketing.co.uk and describes the importance of making your website easy to navigate in order to obtain a high conversion rate from visits to sales.
Effectively driving traffic to your website can take a monumental effort. Youve got to invest time in generating quality, SEO-friendly content for your blog. Youve got to manage multiple social media accounts and create catchy status updates that will get your friends and followers to repost to their friends and followers. Last but not least, youve got to show some involvement in your niche by spending time of forums and commenting on other relevant blogs.
Despite the fact that your internet marketing efforts may comprise a few hours per day, there is still more to converting a visit into a sale than just getting prospective clients to click your link. How your site looks and functions and how easy youve made it for your prospective clients to actually make use of your calls to action plays just as big a part in getting a sale as the time and effort spent driving them to your website in the first place.
Clear and Identifiable Calls to Action
Though aesthetics are important and having a pretty website is something that you should be proud of, that pretty website will do your business no good if your prospects cant figure out how to navigate it. In order to ensure a high percentage of conversions from visit to sale, your calls to action need to be easy to identify and readily accessible to your visitors.
There is a good chance that someone whos been drawn to your website has at least some interest in the product or service that you are offering. If you force those prospects to hunt and peck around your site looking for the appropriate landing page to make a purchase, youll probably lose more sales than you are getting.
If youve got a top quality product or service, dont hide it on a site that cant be properly navigated without a map and compass clearly point prospects to where they can get it and youll see more conversions.
Avoid Distractions and Speed the Loading Process
There are few instances that merit a series of seizure-inducing lights and blaring music on a landing page. If you want visitors to your website to actually stay long enough to make a purchase or enjoy some of the content that youve worked so hard to produce, dont bombard them with loud and obnoxious noises or outlandish and unnecessary slideshows of imagery as soon as your site begins to open.
When youve managed to effectively direct some relevant traffic to your site you want that traffic to be able to get an essence of what your business is about. The last thing that you want to do is completely distract, unnerve or offend incoming traffic with sites or sounds that have nothing to do with the product or service that you offer.
Another downside to large image, video or audio files is that they can slow the loading process of your page. If youve attracted a first time visitor to your site with some clever content or a solid social media update, you want to get them right into your site so they can see what you have to offer. Excessively large files on the landing page that you are sending them to will cause your site to open slowly maybe too slowly for them to wait around, costing you another solid lead.
Youve worked hard developing your product or service and youve worked just as hard driving quality leads to your site dont make the mistake of missing out on the culmination of those efforts by having a site that isnt as user friendly as it could be.
