How to Boost Enquiries From Your Website
A lot of businesses will spend time and money in setting up a great looking website but then forget about it for years afterwards. At some point, many realise that they are not generating as many leads from the website as they originally envisaged. Happily, there are a number of things you can do to drastically improve the number of enquiries you get.
There are two parts to getting the enquiries. The first is Search Engine Optimisation. This is the strategy you use to show up in search results so that you get people to click onto your website in the first place. The second is user engagement. It's all well and good to get someone to visit your website. But is it attractive enough to hold their attention? Does your business proposition fulfill their needs?
We will look at both of these but first off, I wanted to discuss:
Spend Some Time on Your Website
This is perhaps the hardest thing to hear for a busy entrepreneur. Many of us do not have much time on our hands. However, spending quality time reviewing your website can do your business the world of good and can bring many benefits.
I was trying to encourage a friend of mine recently to do exactly this. They were always complaining that they didn't have the time to do it. However, they spent a whole day delivering leaflets in an affluent area of Nottingham to try and bring in more customers. I pointed out that by spending the same amount of time on their website, they would have the potential to bring in many more customers than popping leaflets through letterboxes.
So now we have established this is a worthwhile endeavour, let's look at some of the ways you could get more customers.
Search Engines Like Fresh Quality Content
The text on your website is not just for the customers, it is something which the search engines read to decide where to put you in their search results pages. Make sure the content is fresh (review it every month or so). Add some articles if you have time. Most importantly, ensure you are not waffling and that you have created content that is truly useful to your customers. These simple steps can send a signal to the search engines that your website is worth placing higher up in the search results.
Engage the Customer
When you create your own business you are often very proud of your achievement and want to put lots of content on your website telling potential customers who you are, how the business originated and its history. Whilst there is a place for this on your website (usually the "About" page), it is not an approach that engages customers.
The best approach is to describe the main problem you can solve for the customer and tell them how easily, efficiently and cost-effectively you can resolve that problem. Read your website as if you were a potential customer and tell that potential customer what they want to here.
Call to Action
Also, liberally sprinkle "calls to action" throughout your website. That is, make it very clear what they must do next if they are interested in your products or services. This is usually a simple link to the contact page.
A contact page is essential on the website and I would argue that showing a phone number, preferably a landline number, on every page of your website will garner trust in your website's visitors. Websites that obscure ways of contacting them often look a bit dodgy or "fly-by-night".
What to do Next
There are many more things you can do, of course, to improve the number of enquiries you get from your website. But if you do all of the above as a minimum, you will be getting ahead of most of your competitors.
Contact me if you would like to know how I can help you create an optimised an engaging website.