As a business owner, one of your most valuable marketing assets is your website. As I mentioned in Marketing Your Business for Free, attracting people to your website through a Google listing is key to getting new customers.

Once they click over to your website, is it doing all it can to encourage the potential customer to do business with you? Instead, it may be turning people away once they get there. A study a few years ago showed that your website may only have a mere 1/20th of a second to make a great impression on a visitor.

Are you losing business because of some small changes you can make? Here are some thoughts for you, and you might take a look at your own website to see if these ideas can help your business. 

Convert your visitors

Once you've done the job of getting people to your website (which often may be the hard part), the most common button they're likely to click is the "Back" button - meaning "I'm outta here." It may very well be that your business is exactly what they're looking for. However, if your website makes it hard for them to get in touch, they may just very well click the "outta here" button.

We in the western world start reading from the top left corner of the computer screen, and it's an automatic thing that our eyes start there.

Always make sure that your contact information is at the top left corner of your website on every single page.

Look at your own site, and see where your contact information is. Is it easily found on every single page, or do you make them hunt for it at the bottom or even have to bother with clicking on the "Contact Us" page? If you make your customers work for it, it's likely that they're leaving without bothering to look further.

When someone arrives at your website, what's the one thing that you want them to do? Call you? Sign up for your newsletter? Buy something? These are called "conversions."

Studies have shown that if you have too many conversion tools (i.e. too many choices), people will choose none. Make it absolutely clear exactly what you really want people to do. If it's not clear, they won't do it, and they'll leave.

Trust factors convert

Does your website exude trustworthiness? If not, it's a factor that can prevent people from doing business with you. If they don't trust your website, they won't trust you with their money.

What types of trust factors can you include?

Logos like the Better Business Bureau or Diamond Certified help people to make a decision about your business. Are these logos on every page and easy to see? Links to Yelp or other review sites can also help people to see other customers' experiences who have liked (or not liked) doing business with you.

Testimonials and customer reviews can be critical to persuading people to do business with you, so make sure they're prominently positioned on every page - with photos if possible (and with their permission of course).

If your business sells things online through a catalog, make sure you have security shields like McAfee Secure™ or Authorize.net logos that show you take credit card fraud prevention and security seriously, and your customers will appreciate it.

"You" focused content works best

It's really easy to talk about ourselves. It's really easy to talk about our services, how expert we are, and all the great things we can do for our customers. The trouble is, it's boring, and everyone else says pretty much the same thing.

Make sure your web content is "you" focused, and doesn't just talk about yourself. Look for phrases like "we offer", "we do", or worse, "we sell" in your content. If you see too much of this, your customers will be turned off.

Instead, try focusing your content on the problems your customers might have, and how you can solve them.

Go to the "We We Calculator" and see how your website stacks up. Put your web address and your company name into the program, and it'll tell you how "we" or "you" focused your website is. I bet you'll be surprised at the answer. 

Tie it all together

Bring all these things together, and you'll have a website that works for you instead of against you.

Here are a couple examples of websites that tie these things all together into a total marketing package:

Dr. Theresa Shen from Eastern Medical Center in Pleasanton has trust factors like testimonials, photos of happy customers, and logos that show that she is a verified healthcare professional. When one of her customers is looking for a professional to help them, these factors all help build trust.

She also has her contact information at the top left of every page of the website, making it easy to do business with her, no matter where they are in the site. Her content is "you" focused, which helps people to identify with her services.

Michele Molitor, CEO of Nectar Consulting has done a great job of making sure her contact information is easy to find on every page. Her call-to-action is clear - either make a phone call or sign up for her newsletter. These are both clear in the upper left corner of every page of the site.

She also has a clear link in the upper left corner to the Yelp rating service, as well as her social media icons, and testimonials on each page. These too build trust in her potential customers. The content on her website is "you" focused to help visitors identify with the problems she may be able to help solve.

You can easily make many of these changes on your own website, and it shouldn't cost you more than a little time.

These small changes can make the difference between someone wanting to do business with you or clicking the "outta here" button.