Your website MUST get these 3 things right to be effective
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Launching a DIY website can be really scary.
By the time you’re “as ready as you’ll ever be” and about to publish it, you’re probably also thinking (both at the same time):
What if this ACTUALLY works?
What if this DOESN’T work?
Right? 😂
Without that outside perspective of a skilled pro, or someone with a better ‘design eye’ than you have, or more of a ‘business brain,’ –how do you know if it’s any good?
Want the truth?
You don’t really ever know until there’s data to prove it. And you can’t get that data without launching it.
Websites are *literally* never perfect. Not mine, ––not anyone’s.
They always need to be tweaked, edited, revamped, restyled, added to, reorganized, re-strategized, pivoted, overhauled, redesigned, ––etc.
No matter how “perfect” you get it, or close to it, there may be broken links or features some rando’ doesn’t understand how to use (then promptly submits unsolicited constructive criticism via one of the forms ––it took a few years but yes, that HAS happened).
You can’t please everybody, and that’s a guarantee.
But there are always steps you can take toward “better” or “improvement” and some of them are even things you can do yourself.
6 basic strategies to get more sales and eyes on your website (Part 3)
SEO & Organic marketing
On-page hierarchal structure
When I say SEO here, I’m not actually talking about what you think I’m talking about. I’m talking about the content on the page & how it’s structured. There’s a reason word processors give you the option to structure your content using paragraph styles like title, subtitle, heading 1, heading 2, subheading, paragraph, etc.
On websites, code works the same way –within a hierarchy– and that means if you use a heading 4 for your page title because that’s the font style or size you want to see on the page in that spot then you’re doing this all wrong. And you won’t win any Google-points for that.
Keywords & keyphrases
While we’re talking about Google, keywords and key phrases don’t work like hashtags. The goal isn’t to “stuff” as many as you can into that caption until you hit your goal of 30. You want to infuse them into your content NATURALLY, so if it sounds weird when you read it back to yourself, ya got a problem.
Hiding secret pages
Hide all of your secret pages from Google, so that your Terms & Conditions page isn’t competing with your Services page for rank in search. It’s easy to do on Squarespace, just go into the page’s SEO settings and turn on that ‘hide from search results’ toggle, then save.
Error 404 page
One of those secret pages is your Error 404 page, and make sure you hide it too. On that page though, put everything you can think of that will help the viewer potentially find the thing they’d been looking for when they found the broken link to start with.
Ease-of-use
Bounce rate
Your website has to be pleasant to look at and easy for your ideal customer to use, because being ugly or unhelpful ––while generally bad qualities for people–– they’re also bad qualities for websites. The more often people land on your site and bail, the higher your ‘bounce rate’ (the percentage of people that leave after seeing just 1 page) will be, and if it stays that way Google may eventually assume your website isn’t very relevant to the keywords you’re using and begin to lower your rank in search results.
So think about all the types of things that you tend to find on super user-friendly websites that you love or visit often and have had a positive experience with. Now how much of those are already built-in features available within Squarespace? Probably a lot!
Start testing out those features, leave them in place for a while and see what kind of results you get back from users. (ie: are people actually using the site search bars?)
Long paragraphs
Long paragraphs are NEVER your friend, so don’t use them. On average, aim for 3-5 sentences per paragraph, depending no the sentence length.
You can also break up wordiness by removing filler words (“ya know, like, kind of,” etc), fluff words (“that,” most adverbs and words like “basically” or “essentially”), or unnecessarily long words (“utilize” instead of “use.”) You can also break up longer text by using other elements like images, backgrounds, videos, bullets or numbered lists, etc.
Transparent information
This is a huge one. If you’re a service-based business, a great example is your pricing. People want to know how much it cost to work with you, so please for the love of all things holy, do NOT hide your prices in a long paragraph or behind a wall and make people email to ask you about this. Display it proudly for all to see!
Ask for the sale
People who are shopping around for something they’ve not done before… don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know what they’re looking for and they don’t know what they don’t know. Make it easier for them to reach out with questions or to see if you’re available to work with by asking for the sale, –and do it more than once.
There’s a marketing statistic that says people need to see a thing 7x before they actually absorb it. Seven times. Not one time. Seven times. Seven feels like a lot, I know, but putting your call-to-action on a single page seven times will increase the odds that views actually absorb the fact that it’s there, by about 7 times. Right?! SEVEN… (See what I did there? 😉)
Easy to use
Websites with overwhelming or underwhelming navigations, a lack of buttons that direct the user through the site, too much information or a severe lack of information, no way to search the content on the site, or just have a very basic (clearly not customized) contact form on the contact page with no listed email address or anything… are not easy to use.
Do you remember any websites that frustrated you? Were you looking for something specific that you had trouble finding? Or did you find the answer only to have more questions? Go take a look and write down things you notice it lacks, that you wish it had, then you’ll have an idea of the types of things you might need to add to your site too.
For a better chance at sales
Know ‘your’ people.
If you want any chance at all of selling your product/service to your ‘ideal client’ then you need to know who that type of person or business is, first. Because if you are talking to everyone, you are talking to NO ONE.
Remember what I said earlier about pleasing everybody? Ya can’t do it.
Sure you can be a generalist if ya want, and work with or sell to everybody. But… let me take you on a short trip real quick:
Imagine that you come home from a vacation to find that your actual roof has caved in. There’s drywall, dust, insulation and god-only-knows what else laying on your bed with a giant hole in what was the ceiling right above it. You stand there in the doorway, staring up at the gaping hole in your roof and the blue clouds above it… while your mouth is open and expletives run through your head like flies buzzing around a dead carcass.
Your first thought is….? I’ve got to call a _______________. (fill in the blank)
It wasn’t “generalist” was it? 😂 Nope. Didn’t think so.
Build an email list.
Social media might be “king” (or whatever) but that’s not where the money is. That’s where the money goes. It’s all becoming a pay-to-play system, where our organic (unpaid) reach is getting thinner and shorter unless we pay for ads. So don’t play that game; start building a following on a platform you control and where you can actually engage with your fans in the most intimate place there is these days: your inbox.
Don’t know what to send them? That’s okay, start building it anyway. You can figure that out later, but for now, go ahead & start collecting groupies so that when Facebook shuts down your page or your group, or the whole damn platform goes down for 18 very long hours in the middle of a very important 24-hour flash sale where you were running ads ––you’ll have another place to reach your people.
Legalese is important.
Last but never least, you have GOT to protect the privacy of ‘your people,’ yourself, your content, and your business as best you can.
The best way to do that is to get some legalese for your website. My go-to resource is the Creative Law Shop® for which I’m both an affiliate and a customer! If you use my affiliate code LAUNCH10 at checkout, you can get 10% OFF your purchase any time, even on top of sale prices.
Privacy Policies are legally required in a LOT of countries. If you don’t have one, you are quite literally breaking the law.
Terms & Conditions are trickier. They’re a protective barrier for your website, and while not legally required they are highly recommended… and for a good reason. But which one do you need & how many T&Cs do you need?
T&Cs for websites are an unspoken agreement on how you expect people to use your website. They agree simply by being on your website.
T&Cs for online sales are a separate (additional) set of terms for the products you sell on your website.
T&Cs for online courses are (yet another) separate additional set of terms for the courses you sell on your website.
If you have a website, AND sell products, then you need 2 sets of T&Cs + a Privacy Policy. If you have a website AND you sell courses, then you also need 2 sets of T&Cs + a Privacy Policy. If you have a website AND sell products AND courses, ya need all that: 3 sets of T&Cs + Privacy Policy.
And don’t forget the Cookie Notice; that’s looped into the privacy thing. Luckily, Squarespace offers this part as a built-in option and you can track it down in Settings.
If you want a more robust Cookie Notice & Privacy Policy that stays up to date on its own, then use my affiliate code LAUNCH10 at Termageddon* to save on your first year. Termageddon is a subscription model option at around $100/year, which embeds their policy onto your website, wherever you want it & they keep the policies updated for you. Learn more about Termageddon over on my Toolbox page, or at Temageddon’s website.
*This post mentions affiliate codes. If you purchase using my affiliate discount code, I’ll earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. My reading fund thanks you! 🤓
