Think about how you look for things?
You want to get a new car. Do you take a drive to the nearest dealership and walk around?
Nope! You jump on the internet; start browsing for car brands; check out the pricing; see something you like and click the ‘book a test drive’ button. Then make the plan to visit the dealership. Most people shop like you.
Today people would rather search for a type of business/product/service. Get a list of options and click on the relevant result they like. Browsing websites for information to assist with a decision before actually speaking to the owner or sales person.
This means your website firstly has to be optimised for a search engine. This is called SEO. We’ll get to that later.
Your landing page has to be informative, engaging and needs to sell your business/product/service within the first few minutes. The average bounce rate can be as little as 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Bounce rate can be monitored and reported with Google Analytics.
As soon as a potential client gets directed to your site the timer is on like the shark tank:
‘You have 2 minutes to impress me! Go!’
This sounds incredibly stressful! But don’t worry, that’s why web designers exist.
We are here to guide you to make the best decision about your business site and how to introduce yourself. We know the correct ratios of image, text and videos to add to a site to make in informative, engaging and before the client knows it, they’re hooked.
Generally speaking, you need to have a short 2 liner about your business offerings, maybe the area you service and maybe a hook to pull that visitor in. Something like this:
*At Carsure we are the leaders of car, van and truck finance in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. Finance your next vehicle with Carsure and we will guarantee, you won’t find a better deal in SA!
Secondly, having an image or video of your products/service is always the best way to attract a new client.
What clients dislike (I’m sure you can agree) is getting a popup that interrupts their reading or scrolling to ask about ‘joining a newsletter’ within the first 10 seconds of landing on your page.
This is a huge investment a new visitor has to make before even knowing if they want to interact with your business or not.
That being said, having that new visitors email address is so beneficial to your business, so here’s the happy medium: half way down the page pop in a ‘if you have any questions pop us an email or call’. ‘Would you like to join our newsletter’ should be in the footer. If they’ve scrolled to the bottom of your home page then they must be interested in your business.
For more tips and advice, keep following this blog series. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below and we’ll gladly answer them.
*This is a factitious statement for demonstration purposes only. Any business that may exist with this name is purely coincidental and can contact us if they have issues.
Terminology used in this article:
Bounce Rate: when a visitor clicks onto a website and exits almost immediately. With no further interactions.
Google Analytics: This is a platform Google has provided Web developers to gain insights on the performance of the website. A unique code is added onto every page of the website. The data collected has no personal information about the visitors. Only general info is collected like: Pages visited, time on the page, device used to access the website and the origin of the visit.