All website should have a call to action on their homepage, which tells the website visitors where to go or what to do after reading it. If your call to action is good then most people will go onto that next page. This next page can make or break if you get someone’s business or not.
To get their business you need to do many different things, none of which need to be perfect but there should be some steps taken on each to ensure you get some business. Don’t worry about doing these in any order, they are all helpful to do at some point.
The 5 things are
- Make The Site Look Good On Any Device
- Convince Them To Take Action
- Make It Obvious What You Do And Who You Help
- Have An Easy Way For The Visitor To Get It (Whatever It Is)
- Have Related Blog Posts (If You Have A Blog)
Make The Site Look Good On Any Device
There are so many screen sizes that you can’t just make a website that only looks good on one screen size (or one device). Every site needs to be responsive. Visit your website on your phone and see how it looks, do you need to put less information on the page (thanks to Impact for this example) or need to change the theme to one that is responsive (Flywheel has more details if you are unsure if your theme is responsive). There are many online testers you can use to see how your website looks on different devices (or screen sizes), one to try is one at WhatIsMyScreenResolution.
Convince Them To Take Action
It’s not enough to get someone to go to another page on your website, you need to have some sort of content on that page to convince the person reading to take the next action. What type of content and how you display it is up to you and what you’re trying to get someone to do. Sometimes it may help to get someone else to read over your content to see if it will resonate with your target audience and if they understand what to do next. There is a blog post on this site that covers this in more detail, but ultimately focus on what you want them to do on this page.
Make It Obvious What You Do And Who You Help
While I have already talked about this in another blog post I feel it needs repeating. People like to go to whatever page shows up at the top of the results for them while searching, so on each page you may want to integrate into the blog post what your business does and who is your primary audience. This isn’t meant to alienate any type of customer but to show that you focus on a specific type of customer to ensure you provide the best service. Info Entrepreneurs says it best in their guide.
Have An Easy Way For The Visitor To Get It (Whatever It Is)
If someone is ready to take action and get what you are talking about then you should provide them an easy way to do so. If you’re a service-oriented business then have an contact form that is easy to use and easy to get to. Don’t make someone go through a bunch of page to try and find your contact form (or your contact information). If you’re a product business then let them add the item(s) to their cart right there and then check out, don’t make someone go through too many steps as that will result in them not coming back.
Have Related Blog Posts (If You Have A Blog)
There are many ways to get someone to your website, and blog posts tend to be a popular one. If you have a blog you may notice after a while that people will read your posts then leave your site, they most likely do this because they have read what they have come to read then there is nothing else that interests them so they go somewhere else. You can reduce this number by showing a number of related blog posts, the way you do this is up to you but it is a great way to get more people to spend more time on your website. Many websites platforms let you do this, from WordPress, to Squarespace, to Shopify, to Weebly, to Magento. This is frequently used on other sites, like on YouTube you may notice that it always lists related videos, that way you spend more time on their site.
The only way to see if these work is to try them yourself, and after a couple of weeks tweak it to see if there any change in the number of people who continue to another page on your website.
