Sell more to visitors

What do these people even DO?

Have you ever visited a website and come away with absolutely no idea what the business actually sells? MASSIVE PROMISES. Beautiful photography. Something about unlocking your potential and reimagining possibilities. Very inspiring. But are you selling software? Life coaching? Industrial adhesives? It’s like a weird perfume ad from the 90s. Someone’s running through a field in slow motion, a horse is looking meaningfully into the distance, and apparently the product is called Eternity. Selling on vibes.

Somewhere, buried beneath all that atmosphere, is a tiny explanation of what the business actually does. You scroll for three hours to find a button labelled Discover More, which takes you to another page, then eight articles, and eventually a contact form that asks for your entire life history. You submit it. Nothing happens. Did it work? Are they going to reply? Do they even sell the thing you wanted?

Who knows.

People are trying to give you money.

And you’re making it weirdly difficult. Most of the things that improve a website’s ability to turn visitors into customers aren’t especially mysterious. Tell people clearly and specifically what you do, what they’re getting and how it benefits them. Explain your prices, or at least how pricing works. Show them examples. Answer the questions that might stop them buying. Then make the next step so obvious that nobody has to go looking for it. A pathway to purchase lit by floodlights, with bright red arrows and claxons sounding in the distance.

Not literally, obviously. We still want the website to look nice. But someone who has decided they want to buy something should never have to solve a puzzle to work out how. And please don’t make your enquiry form feel like you’re applying for a mortgage. You probably don’t need their date of birth, their postal address, the name of their first pet and three paragraphs explaining their childhood before you can tell them whether you clean houses. Ask for what you need to take the next step. You can learn the rest later.

Your customer is not sitting in a quiet room admiring your website.

They’re trying to use it while being body-slammed by a toddler, stirring dinner and telling the dog to just. stop. barking. They’re on their phone. They’ve got approximately half their attention available, and that’s being generous. They might be interrupted halfway through filling out a form. They might need to check something with their partner. They might have to put their phone down because something is burning. If buying from you requires their full concentration, there’s a good chance it isn’t happening. They’ll tell themselves they’ll come back later. Maybe they will.

Getting that first sale is often the hardest part. People don’t know you yet. They’re still deciding whether they trust you, whether you’re worth the money and whether the whole thing is going to be more trouble than it’s worth. Don’t make the actual buying part another reason to hesitate. Make it clear. Make it easy. Make it forgiving of interruptions. Make it so straightforward that a child could follow the steps. In some households, the child probably will. They’re the most technically literate person in the building.

Go on. Try buying something from yourself.

Not as the business owner. As someone who’s never seen your website before. Better still, give your phone to someone else and watch them try. Don’t explain anything. Don’t point at buttons. Don’t say, ‘Oh, that bit’s actually under Services.’ See how they go.

But we can measure this properly, too.

Just as we can measure whether people are finding your website, we can measure what happens once they arrive. How many visitors enquire? How many start a booking? How many complete it? How many put something in their cart and never check out? Which pages seem to lose people? If we connect the right tracking to your forms, booking systems and checkout, we can start answering those questions. Then we make improvements and see what happens.

Maybe we rewrite an unclear page. Maybe we simplify a form. Maybe we make the booking button impossible to miss. Maybe we add the information customers keep asking for before they’re willing to buy. Sometimes the answer is a more substantial change to how the website works. Sometimes it’s moving a button. And sometimes you don’t need more visitors at all. You just need to stop losing the ones you’ve already got.

Do you know what a well-lit path looks like?

I do. I know how to make it obvious what you’re selling, why somebody might want it and how to get it. I know how to build booking, enquiry and checkout processes that don’t make people work harder than they need to. And I know how to measure whether those changes are actually helping. You don’t need to become an expert in website conversion, customer journeys or any of the technical stuff behind it. You just need to tell me what you sell and what you’d like people to do.

I’ll help make the path obvious.