Secret #2 is this: You have approximately 15 seconds from the time a visitor gets to your website to clearly tell the visitor what your site is about and identify why the visitor should stay longer. If you don’t accomplish this the visitor is gone! Lost forever!
You see, buying patterns on the Internet are different from buying patterns off the Internet. For example:
Let’s say you need to find some sort of stain remover to get the embarassing under arm stains out of your favorite work shirt. And let’s also say you have loaded the kids up in the van and headed over to the local Wal-Mart to try and find a stain remover equal to the task. What happens when you walk through the front door of Wal-Mart and have no idea where the stain removers are located?
You don’t walk right back out, load the kids back up and drive over to Target right? You walk around a little, and if necessary ask an associate for help.
If you’re searching for a stain remover online from the comfort of your living room, still in your pajamas and bunny slippers… it’s different. When you type “stain remover” into a search engine and get to a specific website, you expect to see what you searched for immediately. And if you don’t see it right away, you don’t spend too much time looking at what else the site has to offer. Instead you go right back to that search engine and see what the next site on the list has to offer.
So, to keep people from getting to your website and then immediately leaving there are a few things you need to do.
- Make sure your website loads quickly. Nothing frustrates visitors more than having to wait longer than about 15-20 seconds for your website to even load. Ask your web designer what you can do to keep your load times down, especially on your home page. Having lots of images on a page really slows down load times, as does having flash or other animations. It’s definitely good to have images, but use them sparingly and place them strategically. Also, make sure your web designer helps you optimize your images for faster loading.
- Have a good headline. I could (and will) write a whole other series on composing effective headlines! For now, to create a good headline make sure the headline of the page clearly identifies the benefit to reading the rest of the text on the page. Site visitors are selfish! They all want to know “What’s in it for me”. So create a headline that clearly tells the visitor why they should read on. The biggest suggestion I could make here would be to look at other people’s effective headlines, figure out why they work so well, and model yours after the same principles.
- Break up long blocks of text into short, easy to read paragraphs. Use bold text and even additional headlines to draw the reader’s eyes to main points throughout the content of the page.
- Having a numbered or bulleted list of benefits on the page tends to keep a visitor’s interest longer than just sentences of text. Be clear and to the point with your text. People generally don’t like to wade through lots of fluff on a website. Think like your potential site visitor and identify what does he or she really want to learn on your website? What questions does he or she have that need to be answered?
- Make sure your web designer uses as little code as possible. If your web designer really knows what he’s doing, he can accomplish what your website needs without tons of extra code and/or comment tags that significantly slow down how quickly your website loads.
The Elvtech.com home page currently takes about 11 seconds to load on a 56k modem. How long does yours take? As of this writing, you can do a free check of how long it takes your website to load by going here: http://www.netmechanic.com.
That about does it for part 2 of this series. Part 3 will be posted soon and will deal with the look and feel of your website. Best of success to you!
