Your Website Should Be Your Best Salesperson

Your website should be your best salesperson providing all the answers to your ideal customers’ and prospects’ questions. 

Look at it this way – where else can customers learn about your business 24/7/365? Your website never sleeps and is available worldwide. 

Your website’s visitors should easily be able to understand just by visiting your site what problems they have that your products or services solve. 

There aren’t any human salespeople that can offer that level of consistent and constant service.

But your website can only work for you at this level if you know how to structure it correctly and help it do its job.

Does Your Website Know Everything About Your Business?

If you’re using employees to market your business, you have training programs to familiarize them with your company’s products and services. Any information you would provide to a team member in that role must be on your website. 

Your website is your best salesperson because it is the most readily accessible source of information for potential customers. It should be their one-stop shop for information about your brand.

Consider whether your website:

• Addresses Your Customers Correctly. Is your website talking to the right customer the correct way? Using the right language and speaking to people at their level matters. You never want visitors to leave your website more confused. Clarity and understanding are key.
• Conveys Empathy. Salespeople always lead with empathy and understanding before they dig into solutions. They want potential customers to know they relate to them, feel for them, and understand their concerns. Make sure the content on your website focuses on your customers and empathizes with their issues.
• Covers Competition. A salesperson understands your competitors and how your products or services stack up (excel) in comparison. Your website also should address differentiators and easily showcase where your brand shines.
• Tells a Story. Salespeople share stories. They talk about their own experiences or other client’s successes. They show proof of value through storytelling. Your website should tell your brand’s story, too, through posts, pages, reviews, and case studies.

Your website needs to be thorough and complete. It should have information on who you are and your mission, vision, and values, along with full descriptions of your products, services, and pricing. 

Does Your Website Provide Complete Information on Your Offerings?

There’s nothing more frustrating for consumers than incomplete product or service information. Make sure your website is the best source of information about your products and services.

Product and service details to consider including on your site:

• Descriptions
• Measurements
• Purchasing options
• Photos
• Videos showing use
• Pricing information
• FAQs
• Customer reviews

It’s incredibly frustrating for potential customers when a site has minimal descriptions or no pricing information. Some business owners don’t want to list pricing on their website, especially for services, because they think it might turn customers away. But not listing pricing also creates a roadblock for potential customers by making them go through another step, like contacting your sales office for pricing. 

Yes, some consumers may balk at price, but that’s often because you haven’t convinced them of your value. Or it could be because they aren’t your target customers. Either way, be transparent, even about pricing. It’s expected and goes a long way in today’s digital market.

Your website can’t do its job as your best salesperson if you don’t provide all the information. That would be like hiring new employees, giving them a demo product and no other information, and sending them out to sell. It would not end well.

6 Website Technical Must-Haves

You must include some things beyond product or service details to succeed with your website. You need great content, but you need some technical components in place too. The following are six things to ensure you have on your site.

1. Simple, Attractive Design

The design of your site matters. Aesthetics affect things like bounce rate (how long a customer stays on your site) and click-throughs (where customers click through to other content on your site after their initial landing page). These factors matter when it comes to where search engines rank your site in results. 

So, the visual appeal of your site influences how consumers engage with your site and perceive your business, as well as how legitimate search engines think your business is.

Design is also essential when considering accessibility. Every site should consider the millions of consumers with accessibility issues such as visual and hearing impairments and limitations to mobility that might make navigating your site difficult.

For example, all videos should have subtitles for the hearing impaired. While it may sound great to have a video with energetic music playing in the background as pictures flash on the screen, it does little for the visually or hearing impaired consumer. The visually impaired consumer can’t see the video, so all they hear is music. The hearing impaired consumer is left wondering if you conveyed any real information they couldn’t hear.

2. Mobile Optimization

Most consumers shop online from their phones. Therefore, the speed and performance of your site on mobile are critical. Your designs should be “responsive.” In other words, the design of your site should look relatively the same, whether viewed on a phone, tablet, or computer. Many of today’s design tools allow you to view pages in each mode without switching devices, so you can test it to see what your audience will see.

Google also tests your site’s speed and mobile responsiveness and grades it according to established standards. You can get this information from your Google tools. These are more factors Google considers when ranking your site.

3. SEO

SEO is your path to a Page 1 position on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). SEO begins with writing with keywords. These are the words and phrases that searchers enter into the search engine’s query box to bring up a listing of relevant websites.

SEO is how you attract traffic for free. By optimizing your content using best practices for SEO, you will work to get your content to reach Page 1. 

4. Variety of Content

You’ll have two styles of content on your website: pages and blog posts. 

Pages consist of long-form (1,000-5,000 word) evergreen content. Evergreen content is valuable now and will continue to be worthwhile in the future. It’s not about trending topics. It’s about the fundamentals of your business. You will have pages on your site about each of your products or services. You can update these pages if any of the information changes.

Blog posts are more conversational. They may address evergreen issues or be about trending topics in your industry. They can be any length (but we recommend nothing shorter than 850 words). They also focus on keywords and try to answer questions or solve problems for your audience. 

5. Social Media Integration

With so many social media options, choosing how to interact with your customers can be challenging. Unless you have a huge in-house marketing department, it’s unlikely you can master them all. Here is how your website can assist.

First, decide what social media platforms you want to have a presence on. Then, add “Follow us on [Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.]” buttons to the header or footer of your website, so they appear on every page.

Next, make sure you enable social sharing on all of your content. Social sharing is a powerful way to boost your position in the SERP because social sharing creates backlinks to your site. Google interprets these shares as indications that you are an authority on the topic and ties them into your overall SEO strategy.

Putting these buttons on your posts and pages allows others to share your content when they find it helpful. You also should share your content and engage with your audience as much as possible on social platforms. Your website is your home, so it’s where you want to put most of your efforts, but social media also helps you build community and drive traffic to your site.

6. Site Security

To achieve Page 1 of the SERP, Google requires sites to have a Secure Socket Layer certificate. The certificate makes the transfer of information to/from the site secure. It’s indicated by the “s” in the “https:” portion of your site’s URL. 

SSL certificates are free from many sources, and your web host probably has a method of applying a free certificate to your site. If not, a Google search for “free SSL certificate” should yield the applicable instructions.

Technical SEO Considerations

Technical SEO includes things Google considers when ranking your site that aren’t keyword-related. 

Technical SEO includes:

• Site maps
• Alt text
• Tags
• Structured Data Markup
• Broken links
• Backlinks
• Page speed
• Well-formed CSS and JavaScript usage

Learn more in our post about the simple SEO solutions you can use to propel your site’s traffic. After all, it’s difficult for your website to be your best salesperson if no one can find it.

Other Reasons Your Website is Your Best Salesperson

Your website is often a forgotten salesperson, but it’s doing its best for you in many ways. It’s available globally, all day and all night, every day of the year. You can’t ask that of any human being. 

It’s also a consistent view of your brand and related messages in a fully controlled format. Even the most well-intentioned salespeople are bound to misspeak or misunderstand, making your website a more reliable way to communicate your messages. 

In addition, your website can juggle hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of customers simultaneously at different stages in their buyer’s journey. It’s a capacity you can’t expect from a sales team.

Finally, your website helps empower your customers. They can learn about your products or services and immediately make a purchasing decision. Customers are more likely to feel good about a purchase they control. Don’t believe me? Think about the last time you got a telemarketing call, or a door-to-door salesperson rang your doorbell. You didn’t love it, did you? Now compare that feeling to the last time you had a problem, then found and purchased a product or service online to solve it. Much better!

Let Content Journey Improve Your Site

Is your current website your best salesperson, or does it need some help? If you need help writing or rewriting pages, adding blog posts to your site, or your site just isn’t ranking where you want it to in search, and you don’t know why Content Journey is here to help. Book a call today, and let’s talk about how we can improve your site, so it helps grow your business.