How to make your website more profitable

Your website can look amazing, work beautifully and be completely on brand, but if it’s failing to attract and convert customers then something’s missing and it’s not doing the job it’s designed to do. Here are some ways to help your website become more profitable and help get customers through the door.

My website looks amazing, so why isn’t it working?

So you’ve invested time and money into a fantastic-looking website that’s functional and easy to navigate, but you’re not getting any conversions… why?

There are a range of different reasons customers aren’t picking up the phone, buying online or filling out your contact form (essentially ‘converting’), here are just a few things that might be causing this:-

• Too few ‘calls to action’
• Too wordy, not enough image appeal
• Contact details aren’t obvious or difficult to find
• Not optimised for mobiles and tablets
• Doesn’t look trustworthy
• Appeals to the wrong target market

Either way, if your website isn’t bringing in more sales, more quotes, more clicks or more customers there are a few key areas you can concentrate on to help make your website more profitable.

Content is king

The easiest way to show your potential customers that you’re an expert in your field and therefore trustworthy is to have relevant, informative and well-written content on your web pages.

Without high-quality content, a user may get to your site and try to find the information they need or the solutions to their problems with little success. It’s crucial that your business provides as many answers to customers' problems as possible – we call this “reducing the barriers to sale”.

The idea is that by the time they’ve finished looking through your website content they’re several steps further along the sales cycle and closer to becoming a paid customer.

Update your website regularly

Google loves websites that provide fresh, relevant and most importantly, regular content. The easiest way to do this is to have a News or a Blog section on your website and add 1-2 articles/items per month. This will show search engines that your website is constantly updated, and it will provide fresh and interesting information to your potential customer base.

When writing blog entries for your website, try thinking of content that will help your current customer base extend the life of your product or service, use your product better (hints and tips articles are great for this) or answer questions they may have about your product or service.

Remember to always have a commercial tie-in for your products or services throughout the blog articles you write and use emotive marketing messages to help convert more customers. Read our article Convert more customers using emotional responses in your website copy for hints and tips.

Calls to action

Does your website have enough calls to action? Buttons that say “Click here to find out about…” or “Contact us today for a quote”? A call to action is a reminder to the customer of what you want them to do. If you leave this to chance, chances are they’ll get it wrong so be very direct with customers about the path you want them to take.

Even if your website has the best content in the world, without a call to action you’re not giving your users any direction. They need to be told to sign up for this newsletter, or click this link for more info, etc – without it you’re missing out on that final link between a looker and a buyer.

Email marketing

Email marketing is one of the easiest and cost-effective ways to maintain regular contact with your subscriber base. It provides an opportunity for you to market your products and services to your already existing customers and frequency is practically free.

It’s the ideal way to regularly engage with your loyal customer base, and in addition to that, you can ‘advertise’ your news, articles and blog pages through your email marketing software, gaining more clicks to your website.

Social media

In today’s world, social media is used heavily for businesses to make connections and create online relationships with customers.
One thing to be mindful of is not putting all your content on social media platforms in isolation. It’s always a good idea to add the content to your website and then use your social media pages as a distribution channel for your content.

This way, you drive traffic back to your website and you have greater control over the conversion path of the customer.

Conversion optimisation

Analysing the traffic your website generates is one of the best ways to look at how your website is performing. Does it have a high bounce rate? Are users only spending 10 seconds on each website page when you know it takes at least 1-2 minutes to read your pages?

By looking at your statistics, it will provide an insight into the potential faults and downfalls of your website and areas you can improve. Look for patterns in your data, like if users have a high exit rate on a particular page – this may tell you there’s something wrong with the page's content, layout or information.

Understanding this gives you an opportunity to lure them in with something more engaging, eg. a special offer, a discount on a particular product, a free ebook download, etc.

Analysing your website’s traffic is the best way to learn how customers are using your site, which pages are the most popular and which pages they’re not even clicking on.

If you follow these guidelines above, it should help you to create a more profitable website for your business. If you’d like to chat with us further about how we can help you do that, please get in touch via our contact page.