Many businesses today offer multiple services across several different disciplines. To the consumer, these services may seem unrelated. For example: HVAC and Plumbing; Family Law, Estate Planning and Construction Litigation, etc.
When a prospective client searches for your business online, how do they know that you’re an EXPERT at what’s important to THEM? Are they immediately shown the service that is most applicable to their search? Or must they wade through all of the services that your business provides before seeing how you can help solve their needs?
We’ve all heard the phrase: “jack of all trades, master of none.” When it comes to representing your company across online search results, this is exactly the impression that you’ll want to avoid!
Learn how to make the best – and most targeted – first impression to turn your website visitors into clients by LEVERAGING YOUR TOP SELLERS FIRST! Here’s how:
Although we all enjoy choices in life, people visiting your website are typically looking for something specific. Each additional option you present a potential client outside of the service that they are actively seeking can create confusion, resulting in frustration…and ending in a much higher bounce rate and a lower conversion.
Does the homepage of your website offer clear and direct solutions for the people searching? For example, let’s pretend that you’re an attorney who specializes in real estate and divorce law. Although you specialize in both, you’re currently booked most consistently for real estate law. Thus, your homepage should predominately display your practice as a specialist in real estate, as you cater to your “top seller,” or in this case the more “active” higher demand.
You need to make sure your homepage displays your “bread and butter” services clearly and directly because that’s what the majority of your traffic is searching for. A more descriptive and thorough list of your services and offerings can be listed on the sub-pages of your site.
So how do you grow your other offerings? Just because a service isn’t your top converting right now, doesn’t mean you don’t want to market it to the right audience, at the right time and grow this area of your business. This can be accomplished by making sure your paid ads link to an optimized and targeted landing page – INSTEAD of your homepage.
Consider this: An attorney specializing in real estate law has paid ads that tout his service as “the expert” in real estate legal matters. However, when customers click on his ad, they are immediately taken to his practice’s homepage – a page that also touts family law and estate planning. A great customer experience, right? Not exactly!
The homepage of his website shows a whole host of information that is divergent from his real estate expertise, and is therefore not conducive to converting his visitors. It’s hard for a consumer to consider his practice as “the real estate expert” with a long list of all the other legal segments muddying the waters. These other practice areas could seriously veer potential customers from thinking they found the right specialist for their needs.
This dissonance between what your ads say and what your website predominately offers will cost you a large percentage of leads as chances are these prospects will drop off your page at a much higher rate as they continue their search for a specialist for their problem.
Landing pages, or the page in which a person “lands” after clicking a hyperlink, are created for one goal: to turn visitors into clients! Linking your paid ads to a customized landing page that simply and directly offers a solution to the searcher’s problem is a proven way in which to convert them into customers. When landing pages are built correctly (and with your business’s bottom line in mind) you can attribute this higher conversion to the following factors:
It highlights the content that matters most to the searcher:
- The particular service that they are searching for
- Your expertise and history of success in this service or practice area
- Your phone number, address, and mapped location
On mobile devices it should also:
- Drive calls with an easy “click-to-call” tracking number
- Load quickly and be optimized for mobile viewing
Now, it’s time to test your first impressions with potential customers. Ask yourself the following questions: When a prospect clicks through to your business website:
- Is it difficult to identify the exact services provided at a glance amid all the other information listed?
- Is it difficult to find the phone number and address without searching for it (or having to find and click on the contact tab)?
- If pulled up on a mobile device, do customers have to zoom in and out to find information? Services? Reputation? Contact information?
If you’ve answered “yes” to the majority of these questions, don’t sweat it, you’re not alone! Most small businesses have websites just like this – a whole lot of information and additional steps getting in the way of the customer contacting you directly. The majority of small businesses are also not optimized for mobile viewing – a huge issue in today’s mobile world. Google’s research shows that last year, 2015, over 50% of all searches for local businesses happened on mobile devices and we can only expect these numbers to go up as the race for market share continues to heat up between Android and Apple driving prices of smart phones down for the consumer.
To make the most of your marketing dollars (and the best, most targeted first impression,) link your paid ads to optimized landing pages rather than your business website. Additionally, try using a combination of specific ad copy and landing pages to achieve consistent messaging between your ads and website.
Sound a bit daunting? Let Yodle do the work for you! Through its completely customized landing pages tailored specifically for your business and its targeted services Yodle’s proven to garner calls and emails at a higher rate than the average small business website. They feature the content people value most while making it easy for potential customers to contact your business directly! Additionally, every visit is tracked, every call recorded, and every email automatically saved in one convenient dashboard making tracking and analysis simple and efficient!
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