How a Good Website Makes Sales
Ecommerce is booming right now and showing no signs of slowing down. Both established businesses and new ventures are investing in their websites, and for good reason. With more people than ever shopping online, websites have become high value assets for generating leads and driving sales.
A good website doesn’t just make money out of thin air, though. There are methods in marketing and web design that have to be applied in order for a website to maximize revenue. To remove the guess work, we broke down the most important qualities that go into a sales-driving website.
Let’s go through them and assess how they all work together to make that all important sale.
Easy navigation for best user experience
Web design starts with structure and navigation. The easier a website is to navigate, the better it can keep visitors engaged. Good navigation includes things like a properly labeled navigation bar, unobtrusive sidebars, visible hyperlinks and a clear call to action where needed.
Site visitors should be able to move between the homepage, business page, product page, contact information and transaction point with as few clicks as possible. The homepage and transaction point in particular should never be more than one click away.
This makes it easier for visitors to move around your site, but it also makes the site itself easier to maintain and update without breaking navigation flows.
A credible resource for customers
Your website will host visitors who are at every stage in the sales process. Some may find your business through social media and go to your site ready to buy, while others might only see your site for the first time when Google returns it as a search result. Either way, the website should build trust with potential customers.
Blog pages are a great way to build website credibility with customers. Blogs are a good way to present your expertise while talking about topics directly related to your product. Being able to provide visitors with insightful information can turn a website from a basic pay point to a valued resource for your target audience.
The more people trust a brand, the easier it is to make a sale.
Strategic calls to action (CTAs) to maximize sales
We mentioned calls to action as an important part of good navigation, but their core purpose is to close the deal and make the sale. A call to action isn’t a command, though, because no one likes being told what to do, let alone what to buy. Think of calls to action as the red carpet you roll out once a lead is ready to buy.
Navigation, credibility and product quality are the tools that convince customers to buy. A call to action should come right after the convincing stage. In blogs, calls to action usually come as an encouraging phrase with a link at the end of a post. They can also be threaded throughout the post, so long as they appear at the places where a customer might be ready to take the final step in the sales process.
Responsive design for efficient sales flow
Responsive design is meant to work hand in hand with easy navigation to create the smoothest user experience possible. Features like high resolution images, moving graphics and embedded videos might look great on a website, but having too many at once can slow down loading times.
Slow loading times make a whole site less responsive. That hurts more than just sales.
Search engines like Google weigh up a website’s loading time, among other things, to determine which ones to recommend to users. This makes a responsive website important for engaging existing leads as well as finding new ones.
SEO-friendly content to boost visibility
So response time is one of the things the Google algorithm considers in search results, but there’s another factor that’s just as important: content.
When search engines are deciding on which websites to display on the first results page, they assess a site’s keywords to determine how relevant it is to the user search. The combination of keywords and phrases that the algorithm filters for is known as metadata. It exists in a site’s HTML code and, more importantly to visitors, in the public text on a website.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is about making a site more attractive to both search engines and customers, which is why SEO best practices benefit both. SEO is about presenting relevant keywords, but it’s also about writing and structuring text for readability.
Generally, SEO favors shorter paragraphs, subheadings to break up long text every 200-400 words, keywords in headings and subheadings, as well as clean copy. Notice how these are elements that site visitors want to see too – that’s why search engines value them, and why your website should too.
Good design leads to sales
For a site to make sales, it needs to be built to turn strangers into buyers and buyers into loyal customers. As online shoppers become savvier, the ecommerce sites that meet their rising standards and deliver a quality experience are the ones that’ll get ahead.
