Is your website driving new business into your firm? The key with powerful websites isn't so much what they look like, but what visitors do when they arrive. Here are a few quick tips for fixing your website so it drives more qualified prospects to you.
1. Simplify navigation
Focus on having simple navigation that will take people from your home page to exactly where you want them to go. Most visitors will go to 1.3 pages on a website (including your home page) with the 2nd most popular place being the about us page (they really want to know who you are). What else do you want them to see? Establish links driving visitors to other interesting information inside your site.
2. Target the highest common denominator
No one wants to know you can work with everyone — they only want to know you can work with them. Who do you really want to attract? Focus your messaging on the best, highest common denominator prospect, not everyone. Using this strategy will avoid targeting your messaging to broadly.
3. Use authentic pictures
Use pictures of actual people who work in your office. Marketing Experiments performed a test comparing the use of stock photography versus real imagery on a website and each of their effects on lead generation. What they found was that photos of real people outperformed stock photos by 95 percent. Why? Because stock images tend to be irrelevant.
Simple, informative messaging appeals to prospects and clients. (Photo: iStock)
4. Improve your About Us
The biggest mistake made in marketing — and a reason success can be so elusive — is not clearly explaining who you are and what you offer to your prospects, clients and potential referral sources. Answer three questions in one about us paragraph describing what your firm does:
- What do you do?
- Who do you work with?
- What is interesting about what your firm does?
5. Keep messaging short and concise
Reduce your website messaging so it is short, concise and directed to your target market. Assume people don't want to read. Substitute a lot of words with enticing headlines summarizing the words below you want them to read. If you have more than a couple paragraphs of verbiage on each page, it is probably too much (bios excluded).
