How to hold your website visitors once they’ve clicked on your page.
Modern technology has made internet searches quicker and more efficient than ever, bringing potential clients, marketers, and advertisers to your website with just one click of the mouse or touch of a finger. But how do you keep potential clients on your website past five seconds?
Why Five Seconds?
While technology has quickened our ability to access information, that speed comes with the price of increasingly short attention spans. Studies have shown that we only spend about two to four seconds at a time focusing on a particular item when looking at a screen. Therefore, today’s marketing world needs to capture a potential client’s attention in five seconds or less.
Here are some basics tips to get your website moving in the right direction.
Tip #1: The Faster the Better
When working on your website, consider you will need to ensure fast load times for your visitors. This is crucial to keeping your viewers around longer than five seconds, as they will not want to wait for your website to load. Also, you will want to consider the following:
Compare and Contrast
If you have a business, you have competitors. Take a look at your competitors’ websites to determine what you like and don’t like about their websites. If one of those competitors has a leg up on your business, consider how updating your website to something similar might bring you success.
Have a plan for your website
Think about what you want—and what you don’t want—on your website. Be specific about basics, like the ability to upload documents, having clear subheadings, fast load time, etc. You should consider the goal and optimize your website for it.
Solutions to Existing Problems
After doing your research, look at solutions to problems you’ve encountered on your existing website. This could be a range of issues, quality of your content, broken links, inability to load high-resolution (or even standard) images, slow page speeds, etc. Anything that would cause a bad user experience should be high on your list to fix.
Test the User Interface
It would be beneficial to test the user interface before going live. Walk through the general design of the interface, including headings, subheadings, loading times, images, effects, etc. This will give you a glimpse into what the user experience of your website could look like and identify anything that is not working and that would merit changing.
Tip #2: Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
Think about how you could simplify your website, keeping it as straightforward as possible. Avoid overcrowding it with too much of anything (i.e., animations or pictures). Instead, try to make your writing stand out to your target audience and make any downloadable content easy to find and access.
Tip #3: Call to action
You should have a clear call to action for your prospects. What about your service or offering can be highlighted? What can differentiate you from the competition and standout? How can they get your service? What is the next step? Whatever that might be, make sure it is easy to see, read and visible throughout the website so that your visitors can have an incentive to take action.
Tip #4: Who, What, Where, When, Why
Remember the five Ws when working on copywriting: who, what, where, when, and why.
Explain who you are, what you provide your clients, where you are located, when clients can reach you, and why clients should care about your service. This is especially important nowadays because potential clients and/or marketers are looking to find your information fast, without having to click their mouse excessively to find that information.
Capture Your Audience
Be sure to capture your audience by making this part as engaging as possible. You can do so by writing your who, what, and why in the first two sentences before transitioning into where you are located and when clients can reach you. Try to make this as conversational as possible, as if you were trying to tell your friend or relative why they should check out a cool new website or service.
Don’t Talk At Your Audience, Talk With Them
Try not to think about what you want to say to your visitors, but instead what they might want to hear and/or how they might want to hear it. Do you offer a cutting-edge service that no one else in your area offers? Do you have an exclusive membership, free consultation, or discount that sets up apart from the competition? Whatever your clients like to hear, make sure it’s transparent on your main page.
Clarify What You Want Out of Your Clients
Don’t confuse your clients with fluff; keep your message direct. Use your call to action and remind your clients why they should choose you. You will want to refer to previous customer experiences, like frequently asked questions, what they’re looking for when they come to you, etc.
Tip #5: Analyze
If you’re stuck on what to do about your website, even with these tips, analyzing your viewership can be helpful. Looking at analytics can show you where you have lost viewers, how many people have visited and for how long, and other factors that could help you improve your website. There’s no harm in trial and error; you will perfect your website in time!
Benefits of Analyzing
Analytics can also help you determine how to budget your marketing. And the best part is that you can do this for free. Google offers a free analytics tool that can provide you data regarding viewer location, browsing trends, etc., in simple graphs and charts.
Tracking for Demographics
If you’ve been on Facebook, then you’ve seen their ads as you scroll through your feed. These ads are used to track analytics, which work well if you’re looking for the age, sex, location, income, and other demographics of your potential clientele. You can make informed decisions on how to optimize your website based on your audience.
Takeaways
Connecting with your viewers in the first five seconds is not as hard as it sounds if you follow the tips suggested in this article. Remember that the most important thing is to appeal to your viewers, which is achievable through feedback you have received from previous clients, following the five Ws, giving potential clients a reason why they should keep reading, and speaking with (and not at) your audience.
These suggestions, paired with a basic website should help keep your viewers engaged much longer than five seconds.
Conclusion
If potential clients are scurrying away from your site, don’t throw in the towel just yet. It just means you need to reassess your techniques and apply the suggestions provided in this article.
If you don’t have the time to optimize your website so it start capturing more leads for your business, that’s okay.
At Ravecode Solutions, we offer our Digital HQ product which focuses on transforming your website into your marketing biggest asset and your top sales employee. Your website should be a lead engine that helps your business grow.
