How to Keep Visitors on Your Site

You may have all the visitors in the world coming through your site, but if they don’t stay and buy anything then they are worse than useless. This happens to more sites than you would believe but there are some simple tips to help keep the visitors from just bouncing out.

Teach them something. You may be trying to sell to visitors but dress it up as education and you will keep your customers interested enough to stick around. We have all seen the one pages websites selling ebooks on diet pills or whatever. Mostly we click right through them because they are a blatant sales page and we don’t want to buy. Dress the sale up in some articles on weight loss, or nestle your product within healthy eating recipes or something and you will start doing business.

Keep your site navigation simple. Don’t make the site too deep or complicated. Keeping it as simple and consistent as possible will take away many of the barriers to visitors. There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to find the page you’re looking for. More often than not a visitor will just give up and move on. Don’t assume a visitor will always arrive at you home page either. Recommendations or search results of specific terms will result in visitors arriving from all over the place. Bear this in mind with your site design and ensure navigation is easy from whatever page you happen to be on.

Provide full product descriptions and good images. This may seem like a no brainer but it is essential to give your buyers the fullest possible picture about what they are getting for their money. Describe the product here, don’t sell it. List the benefits by all means, but keep on topic.

Give the customer choice about how to order. Offer online purchasing, phone or mail. Many people are still very sceptical about buying online because of all the stories they hear in the media. Cover that one off by offering telephone sales or ordering by mail. In a similar vein, use every security precaution you can think of and advertise the fact on your site. Use SSL, Thawte or whatever to give your buyers confidence in your operation.

Encourage interaction with your visitors. Employ a blog or forum and encourage user feedback of your product. Sites like Amazon saw a big jump in conversions why they added the customer feedback piece to their pages. This is as good as a testimonial. An example of a real life person telling the world that your product does what you say it can do.

Keep the tone light. When you write your pages, keep it conversational, and if replying to forum posts or blogs keep it the same. Talk to and engage your audience. Avoid geek speak at all costs. Jargon just turns people off, keep the language positive and accessible to all. You don’t want to limit your potential market.