Where Most Small Businesses Go Wrong When It Comes To Website Conversion
I don’t know about you, but I can really struggle to order from a menu if there is just too much choice. If you ever watch any of these restaurant rescue TV programmes, you will see that I am not alone. Often the first things that the critique usually does is to simplify the menu, stripping it down to just four to six choices maximum in each category of starter, main course and dessert.
Why?
Two reasons. Firstly, it makes it easier to prepare in the kitchen and to ensure that the ingredients are fresh. Secondly, it makes it much easier for the customers of the restaurant to make a choice.
What has this got to do with your small business website, I hear you ask?
Well, just like the restaurant menu, half of the time you just give your website visitor far too much choice.
Here are some of the options that are made available from many small business websites, often all on the same page:
Download this guide, call me, read this article on our blog post, have a look at this post on our twitterbookedIn profile, watch this video, phone a friend, ask for a call back…. Need I go on?
When your website visitor sees all of these options, just like me seeing too many choices on a menu, they hit capacity and are unable to make a decision. Now in a restaurant, this usually leads to me picking something I usually eat, as it is just a much easier decision to make, but on your website, it is a much bigger problem. It leads to your website visitor leaving your restaurant and eating at your nearby competitors, metaphorically speaking of course.
Faced with this overwhelm of choices on your website, they hit the ‘back’ button and go to the next search result for the service that they are looking for help with, and you lose a potential client.
I have an acronym that I would like you to keep in mind whenever you are looking at your website:
OPPP.
One
Purpose
Per
Page
You should have just one overriding purpose per page. Just one main action you would like your website visitor to take to move them one step closer to becoming one of your clients.
Not three options or four, just one main option which will usually be one of the following:
- Contact you; or
- Download something in exchange for their email address.
That’s largely about it. You might sometimes have a purpose of a blog post to generate comments but by and large, most small business owners just want someone to contact them or to be added to their email database.
Take a look at your website and see if you are not adhering to the OPPP rule. If you are making the mistake of overwhelming your visitors with too much choice, change that now and you should see a marked improvement in your website conversion rate.
Tomorrow, I deal with one of my absolute pet hates when it comes to website conversion.. prepare to hear a rant :).
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