They Add Website Functionality…

The 1^st habit involved site owners consistently adding fresh text, image and video content to their site to keep people informed about new products and services while also improving their website’s SEO performance.

That increased SEO performance will deliver more quality traffic to their site and so the next habit of Highly Effective Site Owners is to serve those visitors as efficiently as possible once on the site.

Which means they consistently seek to add new functionality to their site which will help support existing customers as well as convert new site visitor traffic into actual leads.

As site traffic isn’t necessarily happening during working hours, Highly Effective Website Owners recognise that they need to also consider functionality which will assist site visitors who may be on their site late at night or over the weekends.

The ways in which they do all of this can be broadly grouped as follows:

• they utilise well-thought through enquiry forms which gather the key information site owners need to reach back out to their new site visitors effectively;
• for businesses which provide support to clients, an online support ticket system can make that whole process more efficient for both the site owner and the client;
• they provide a knowledge base or comprehensive FAQ section;
• live chat functionality is in place so that a site visitor can initiate contact in realtime which enables the site owner to follow-up immediately and not lose the prospect through unnecessary delay;
• if their business is one with a physical location, then they clearly show where they are based via Google Maps and provide a Directions link;
• they provide online payment options via Stripe or similar to allow their clients use a debit/credit card to process invoices with minimal effort;
• appointment booking functionality is available which allows the site visitor to view a diary and book a day and time to meet the site owner;
• the natural follow-on functionality to online appointment booking is to support online meetings via Zoom, Teams or similar;
• if their site has a significant number of pages, then search functionality will help site visitors access the content they need more quickly. They may also have separate search for the blog/news of the site;
• for eCommerce websites in particular, a newsletter subscriber opt-in provides the site owners with the ability to maintain and develop a customer relationship which builds up brand trust and hopefully delivers future sales; and
• they incorporate 3^rd party reviews onto their site, again of added importance for eCommerce sites but also relevant for businesses of every type. Positive reviews on Google, Trustpilot or similar provide site visitors with the extra reassurance which converts them from a site visitor to a real lead.

Depending on your industry and whether you have an eCommerce site or not, conversion rates may vary between 2% and 5%.

Those conversion rates means that every effort has to be to make it easy for site visitors to see what products and services you offer ( search ), to understand whether it’s the right product for them ( reviews, FAQs ), to make contact with you ( forms, live chat, maps, newsletters ), to discuss your offering ( appointment booking, zoom ) and so on.

Improving your website conversion rate from 3% to 6% could potentially double your leads which should have a significant impact on your sales and revenue.

Highly Effective Website Owners understand all this which is why reviewing and improving their website functionality is their 2^nd habit!

More tomorrow as we discuss habit no. 3…

Mark