Nearly every business makes the same simple mistake on their website. Here’s how to identify whether you have, too (and how to fix it).
Chances are, when you built your website, you started with the homepage. From there, you likely thought about all the other pages you’d need to link to. This product, that service — they all went into the mix.
Unfortunately, starting with the homepage is the wrong way to build a website. It encourages you to view your site as a warehouse of information.
Instead, you need your website to be the next step on your prospect’s journey towards a defined call to action.
Imagine you visit a museum. You enter the front doors, knowing there are one or two key items you want to see. But the museum is so vast that you’ve no idea where to start looking. You wander around for ages, getting nowhere. And, as your feet start to hurt, you give up and go home.
Now think about how different your museum experience would have been with an audio guide telling you exactly where to go.
Your website has to act like the audio guide — directing prospects to where they want to go.
When you leave people to find their own way around your website, there’s every chance they’ll get lost and give up. So, no new business for you…
The whole point of your content marketing campaigns is to get your prospects to take some form of action. Buy this. Read that. Get in touch.
Your website has to share this focus. After all, it’s another piece of collateral promoting your business. So, rather than simply adding links to a bloated homepage, you have to reverse engineer your site.
Just as you would with your other content, you need to start with your call to action. From here, you can create a journey through your site that gets prospects from A to B with minimal fuss. This could be straight from your homepage or involve a range of targeted landing pages.
Either way, it’s the audio guide effect. Potential customers quickly access the information they want; you get to entice them into taking action (and buying stuff from you).
Take a look back through your website, and be honest with yourself. Does it provide the quickest, clearest route to your call to action?
If not, it’s time to think about how you change your approach. After all, you could already be losing a lot of potential new business without even knowing it.
So here’s our call to action. If you want a hand putting together a website that turns visitors into qualified leads, get in touch — we’d love to help.
