Pretend to be your customer
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. This could easily be the most important tip in tis list. Forget you know anything about your business, and pretend you a customer, visiting your own website for the first time. Ask yourself questions like, “What does this company offer?”, “How or where can I make a purchase?”, “Are they local?”, “is there a contact number?”. Next time you are looking for a service, or product online, take mental note of the questions you want the website to answer, and see if your own website content, would answer those questions.
FAQs
Customer’s can have lots of questions, rather than waste your own time answering them each time, a “Frequently Asked Questions”, section can be a gold mine. Not every customer will want to know the ins and outs of your business, but for the ones who do, all the answers are there in the open. This not only informs your potential customers, but it also helps create trust. Customer’s can see you aren’t hiding any information from them, or trying to sneak in any tricks in.
Explain it simply
Even though you are an expert at your business, your customer may have no background in your industry. For example, I could list loads of facts about website development, getting very technical about how the code actually works. This is fascinating to me, but irreleveant to our clients. Our clients come to Sites On Fire because they need an awesome website built. They always care exactly how we do it, as long as we do it. Likewise for your own business, say you are an electrician, your customer won’t really want to know about volts, ohms and amps. They do know they have a problem with the power in their house and they want an expert out. In the example of an electrician, their website would contain content like “we are domestic power experts”, “we can fix anything”.
Caveman test
The caveman test is simple, if you showed someone your website for 10 seconds and then closed it. Would they be able to tell you what the website was about? I.e like a caveman could they grunt things like “you electrician”, “fix broken”, “live in melbourne”. In a nutshell, could they summarize your website in just a few “grunts”
Be brief
Today more than ever, our attention spans are dwindling, so thanks for making it this far into this blog. Your website needs to be clear and to the point. You only have 5 – 10 seconds to get your message across before your customer loses focus, and moves on to a website that is easier to understand.
That’s it! Make sure you go over the content on your own website to see if it meets these 5 rules. If you need help Sites On Fire would be willing to help.