Regardless of how active you are on Twitter or Facebook, your website is where the proverbial rubber meets the road. 

Clients often start their journey on your website, researching what you offer, and it in many cases is where they finish their journey – making the decision to email or phone you to make a purchase.  But small businesses fail to take the steps to monitor and improve their website conversions.  Why turn good customers away?  Just a few steps will make your website that much better.

1. Start Measuring. If you aren’t measuring your website’s performance, how can you improve it?  Thankfully, Google Analytics is a free tool that is often noted to be better – in terms of functionality and ease of use – than many of the paid tools on the market.  Get it installed, and start watching the data on where your customers come from and what they do when they get to your site.  Walk through the data in the shoes of your customer – how does it feel?

2. Spring Clean.  Technically we are still in Spring even though it feels like Summer. A good de-clutter is good for your home, both your real home and your virtual one.  Whenever Google adds something to their homepage, they decide what gets removed.  You don’t need to be that drastic, but you can definitely do some cleaning and de-cluttering.  Take a hard look at every page, image, and block of content and remove anything not adding value. (Actually it is a good idea to clean and de-clutter at least once a quarter.)

3. Get Some Feedback. It’s hard to catch all the little niggles and quirks of your website if you’re the one that wrote the content.  Get some feedback from a trusted source. Whether it’s a client, friend or family member, ask someone to tell you what you think.  You don’t know what you’re missing.  You could even give incentives or freebies to a few clients who give you feedback.

4. Add pictures of People. The secret of marketing is that people like to do business with people.  So many websites are cold and lifeless, and that could easily be fixed with a few images of you and your staff/massage therapists.  If there are no photos of you, what’s a visitor to think except what are you hiding?

5. Start answering some questions. The reality is most websites fail to include enough detail for their users.  People come to your website with a question – so have an answer.  Document every question you’ve ever been asked about your services or products, and get an FAQ page that answers those questions.  Ask your staff or whoever answer the phones or greets the clients when they arrive – what are those questions?

Building a great website is more like an art than a science; it’s about adding the information users are desperate for and getting rid of anything else that stands between yourself and your next client.  If you monitor your performance and get feedback, though, you’ll be leaps ahead of the competition.

Do you have any other secrets to make your website more effective?

When people come to your website, you want them to stay there long enough to learn more about your business and schedule a massage with you, right? But is your website copy telling your reader what they are going to get from you so they stay on your site or click to know more? Here are 6 Strategies for Website Copy to keep your readers on your website longer.

1. Answer their questions. You have about 5 seconds to capture their attention or they are gone. When a reader leaves your site, it’s because you didn’t give them the answers to their burning questions. Give them the information they want to know. When you are looking to get a massage (hopefully you all are taking care of yourself and getting massages regularly) or any other type of service, what do you look for? Chances are that your readers are asking the same questions.

2. Keep it short. It is very difficult to read for long periods of time on the computer. Anything over 500 words (about one page) looks very daunting on screen. Tighten your copy down to the concise facts that your user wants to know. (Just so you know this post is just under 500 words).

3. Target your audience. Who is in your target market? Now direct your copy towards those people especially on your home page. If you do this, you will be ahead of the game of most websites who are to general in their message.

4. Get the Objections out of the Way. There are as many objections as there are types of massage if not more. Let’s take the objection of “time”. You have a reader who is looking for a massage on Saturday at 2 p.m. but your hours are Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Let’s face it, not everyone is a perfect client. It would be better to have your hours of operation published than to have a prospect waste their time calling only to find out you aren’t open on Saturdays.

5. Have a call-to-action. Do your users know what to do next after reading a web page? Don’t babble on about what you do! Seduce and entice, then ask them to do something. “Call to schedule your appointment today.” Keep asking them over and over throughout the site. “Need a massage? We are here ready to help. Call today.”

6. Keep in Touch. There are some people who will never buy when they first learn about a business. Perhaps the timing isn’t right for them at the moment or maybe they never make spur-of-the-moment decisions. Have a way to capture their email address in return for something of value (i.e. a free report on a hot industry topic). Send them periodic emails with special offers, more about you and your business. Help them get to know you and want to buy.