ValidSafe.com

When you want to turn more visitors into customers, it’s almost all about your homepage copy, or in other words, the text/wording. Of course your site must be attractive, and easy to navigate through, and your logo must be nice. It cannot look cheap, and must inspire trust in the customer, but this is all the basis of your customer’s judgment. The final decision is made in your customer with a call to action.

When people are looking for information and products online, they are quick, uncaring, and often change their minds. For even the best sites, professionals estimate that over half of your visitors will become disinterested, and leave your site within less than 30 seconds. If you want to avoid this, and increase their time on your site, and their purchases from you, there are a few things you can do.

Have Simple Homepage Text

Don’t have a lot of text on your homepage. Your homepage is going to be in the user’s gaze for about 10 seconds. That’s all the time you have to capture the user’s attention–unless of course the user is desperately searching the web for something. But you can’t guarantee this will happen all the time. So now you understand the urgency of things. If the majority of your home page text is not on the screen, then you need to cut your text.

Use Subheadings

The next thing you want to do is use subheadings. These call the reader’s attention to the important factors that you want to put across. When a reader is quickly surfing, they are only going to be concerned about the information that pertains to them. This is where a nicely worded subtitle will hold them for a few more seconds, while they quickly scan the paragraph to determine whether it contains the data that they need.

Keep It Short

The last thing you should do is probably the most important. If you are selling, or marketing a product, you don’t want to use cliche’s or flowery wording, on your home page. If a reader is interested in a topic you present, yes they will probably continue on to read some longer articles throughout your site, for more in depth information. But on your homepage, you want to assure that reader, in 10 seconds or less, that there are tons of valuable resources on your site.

Convey Trust

The one hurdle that any potential customer must make is that they must gain the confidence to trust you. If you were at a sketchy-looking store with a suspicious-looking storeowner, you aren’t going to do business with him. Similarly, your website needs to look legit, and you need to convey trust to your potential customers before they will buy something from you.

The key with getting your business to explode is by building trust with your customers. However, this is impossible without trust, and trust is something that has to be earned. Customers these days are getting more savvy, and when faced with a shady business, would rather leave than to take chances.

A customer spends at most 22 seconds to make this decision. If the customer knows that you’re running a legitimate business, then you’ve immediately gained the attention of that customer. Otherwise, you’ve lost a customer forever.

That’s why people invest in a variety of factors to improve the credibility of their website. Some of these factors are: color scheme, layout and aesthetics, testimonials, copy, and so on.

Color Scheme

Choosing the right color scheme is something that seems rudimentary, but is something that many business owners either neglect or get wrong. Having the right color scheme is important, and we don’t just mean something that’s clear to the users. Of course, you shouldn’t be displaying grey text on a white background. However, what is also important is that the color scheme suits your business. This is heavily dependent on your nature of business. For instance, glaring colors may not be suitable for an online bookstore, but may be perfectly fine for a music band’s website.

Layout and Aesthetics

The layout and aesthetics of a website is important, but surprisingly something that business owners do not pay much attention to. Font size is always an issue. If you’ve used anything less than 12 points in size for your website, then you’re guilty of this. Having a layout that works is also important, e.g. having your important text and selling points “above the fold”, and minimising the links that your customers have to click.

Testimonials

To really boost customer trust and confidence in your business, products, and services, you should include genuine customer testimonials. These immediately increase your credibility and show your customers that they are buying something that’s used and well-liked by other fellow customers.

Copy

Investing in a gorgeous-looking website is pretty much useless if you don’t invest in a good copy-writer, or at least, a good editor/proof-reader. The thing about websites is that all your typographical mistakes are open to all to see, including your potential customers, and having grammatically wrong copy just reflects badly on the professionalism of your business.

Increasing Customer Trust

Of course, beside these points, having trust seals are another point that you can consider. Trust seals immediately show your customers that you are an actual business that invests in trust seals, and bothers to get yourself verified, thereby improving your credibility and their confidence in your business tremendously.