Empower Your 24/7 Sales Rep: Website Optimization Tools for Conversions

Picture this: a potential customer calls a member of your sales team. The sales rep isn't clear on your offerings, rambles on with a bunch of buzz words and doesn't initiate next steps. That leaves a bad impression for the potential customer, so they bounce off the call and move on. Talk about a NIGHTMARE. Would you give that sales rep additional coaching? Probably. Unfortunately, in this example, the rep is the website, a core and vital piece of your business.

For most companies, the sales person that works the hardest to close conversions, demos, purchases IS your website. If your website isn't optimized to clearly and effectively communicate what your business does, you're going to experience a high bounce rate and leave a bad impression or worse, damage your reputation.

Some things you can do to make your website clear and actually increase conversions is fairly simple:

1. Be up front and clear about your offering, don't make your visitors hunt for it

2. Have your CTA in several places and make it accurate

3. Provide the option for both self-qualification and disqualification

4. Make mobile optimization a QA standard before you publish

5. Actually try to break your website from the user's perspective

6. Use your resources - get a health check with website optimization tools

Tell your customer what you do

No really, I know that seems like a straightforward concept, but so many companies get caught up with buzz words and the inspirational, thought leadership lingo that they end up not telling the customer what they do. Your H1 and first paragraph should be the elevator pitch and the rest of the page should build on that, like a conversation. Help your drop off rate out and get clarity on your offering.

Say you sell tennis shoes, but they aren't just any tennis shoes, they have a unique design to support knee issues.

Instead of:

• H1: Supporting you to keep up with your everyday

• First paragraph: Patent technology for your feet so you can keep your knees in alignment while doing physical activity.

Try this:

• H1: Shoes that you knee-d

• First paragraph: Designed to protect your knees in any activity you do from basketball to yard work, our tennis shoes prevent your cartilage from breaking down.

The new H1 immediately communicates shoes = for your knees (albeit a little cheesy) and the first paragraph shows how you can see yourself using these shoes in every day life. All of your website copy should be clear on your offering, especially in top of funnel content. Save your deeper content for educational materials and the nitty gritty sales calls! Your mission is to first catch attention, then show why your product is important to solving your prospect's needs.

📝 You don't need to write on your own, here are a few of my fave writing helpers:

• Grammarly: ensure your messaging is clear with correct grammar and flow

• ChatGPT: ask AI if your message is clear (or ask for 10 more examples to make it clear)

Make your CTA accessible and clear

Have a main CTA? Don't hide it, make sure it's at the header menu, bottom, in the footer of the page, and in text on pages too. You don't want your customer to have to hunt for your button to book a call, demo, etc. Save them time and provide plenty of opportunity.

It can be a tough balance to nail down exactly how many times is too many to show your CTA (or how many different CTAs to have). Site heat maps and software that follows your site visitors can be helpful to watch how they interact with your pages.

Another important aspect to make sure your CTAs are effective is the language you use, in general, the shorter and more clear you can make it the better. Some examples of well performing ones are below:

• Book a Call

• Learn More

• Buy Now

• Download Now

Basically, a few words that indicate your intention and are clear on what the user is going to get is recommended.

👉 Helpful tools for crafting compelling and effective CTAs:

• Hubspot's CTA examples

• MasterClass article on writing an effective CTA

Prioritize your mobile experience

Have you checked how much of your web traffic comes in on their phone? You might be surprised! According to MobiLoud, mobile makes up 58% of all web traffic! If mobile traffic makes up a significant portion of your page views, you should strongly consider reviewing what your site looks like from your own phone. Is it cluttered? Do things shift off screen? Does your form or CTA break when you click on it?

Helpful tip: many people use the "inspect" tool browsers to view what web pages look like on different mobile devices, but it only goes so far and isn't always accurate. Take the extra step and preview it on your phone so you can see what visitors REALLY experience.

In order to maintain your mobile optimization, preview any and all changes on your phone prior to publishing and right after publishing. Integrate this into your usual QA process as you edit and crush new projects.

Read some basics on optimizing your website for mobile in this Leadpages article.

Let visitors both self-qualify and self-disqualify

More leads isn't always a blessing if they aren't going to end up buying your product or service. They're really just a waste of time for both parties. This sort of feeds into the first tip, about making your website's messaging clear and concise: if they know what you do, then hopefully they'll be able to understand if they are your target ICP.

However, messaging about your business only goes so far. You can also provide tools and even explicit call outs on your website that signal who your product IS for and who it ISN'T for. In most cases if you do it right, this doesn't deter your ICP, it should actually make them feel more confident in learning more about your offering.

Instead of casting a wide net for all people that wear shoes, our website copy example mentioned before does this pretty well. We could drill it down even further on a more targeted section of the website with graphics and language that entices the specific demographic and deters those that wouldn't see the value in shoes that were designed for knee support.

For a deeper dive into the reasons behind disqualifying leads, read this article by Lighter Capital.

Try to break your website

No for real, on your testing site or live site (NOT your dev site, please not your dev site), click around as much as you can and try to make it glitch out. See if you can get the formatting to go all side-ways. Because if you can do it, your customers can too.

This is just a basic QA/UAT rule but so many forget to aggressively test new sections, web pages, etc. It leaves some users with the feeling like you care as much about your user experience or worse, that it could be a fake site. They end up leaving your website quickly, dropping your session time and increasing your bounce rate.

So go ahead! Click on a million things, scroll like a madman, and mess up your forms. You'd be surprised about what you'll find!

Want a bad ass tool to cyber stalk site visitors? Check out Full Story for heat maps, explore rage clicks, and get real time info about broken part of your website. BTW there's a free plan for businesses just starting out.

Use website optimization tools for overall health checks

From your page speed, keyword ranking, broken/dead links and duplicative content, having your finger on the pulse of your website's health is key to understanding if you've enabled your 24/7 sales person to do their job well. It's like training an associate on how to do their job. If you put in the work, you'll see the results (and fruits of SEO)!

However, while this can be a "set it and forget it" activity for a little while, it's good to know that you should run health checks and diagnostics every few months in order to keep your traffic up.

Some awesome resources for learning about your site's health:

• Page Speed Insights by Google free

• Ahrefs Free SEO Tools free

• SEMRush - robust SEO tool starts at $129.95/mo

• Crazy Egg - heat-map analysis and user behavior tracking 30 day free trial

Armed with the tools, go get that bread

With these tips, your website can be the best darn sales rep you have. It works around the clock as your conversion engine, so why not invest a little more time?

Did you find this helpful or would you change or add any tools and tips to this list? Feel free to leave a comment below or connect with me on LinkedIn! I'd love to hear from you.