Building a small business website that sells you

One of the things I am continually amazed at is how many small business websites don’t really sell the benefits of doing business with them.  How does your website sell benefits of doing business with you, rather than your competitor?  This is probably one of the very first things I ask any new business, right after I ask them if they’re satisfied with how their website is working to produce leads for them.  Almost always the response I get is no, or I have no idea how it’s working.  In this post I will cover a tactic that I have found very helpful in converting visitors into prospects.

Websites are sales people too

Might seem silly to say websites are sales people too, but sometimes small business owners need to be reminded of that.  In the almost 10 years I have been doing this, I’ve heard websites referred to everything from “online brochures”, “24 hour sales person”, “online menu of services” and so on, and however you may view your website, one question every business owner needs to ask themselves is: How does my website reflect upon me and my services/company?  Sharp or sloppy?

Being viewed as a Professional Small Business

Websites need nurturing, just like a sales person would.  Do you keep up on your website?  Have you trained it on your newest products and/or offerings?  Does it talk, in detail, about what you do, how your business is different, and what the benefits of doing business with you versus one of your competitors?  If the answer is no to any of the above, it might be time to make a change.

Building a small business website that sells

I come from a background of sales, so when I started City Ranked, it seemed a no brainer to me that a small business website needed to sell the very best attributes a small business had, sell the benefits of doing business with said small business and how that business made it easy to do business with them.  With convincing from one of my very first customers, we tested a new website layout that almost “punched” a website visitor in the face with the benefits, confidence and convenience factors of doing business with them, on every single page.

After conducting an exhaustive list of services the client offered, we dived into what set them apart from their competition.  This client offered Junk and Garbage Hauling Services, and because it only takes a couple guys with a truck to offer this type of service, the market is littered with these types of business, both local and national and fly-by-night operations.  So making sure that we remind website visitors the “benefits” of doing business with this client were key.  As you can see from the above screenshot, we came up with 8 key points that we needed to remind visitors of, as a side point their old website only mentioned 3 of these points in tiny small text within the website text.

The results of our website redesign

Almost immediately the quality of customer leads and phone calls coming off the website shot up.  No longer was “price” the driving question behind what the customer was providing.  Questions such as “how fast can you come?”, and “Do you pick up from ___?” became the norm.  Second we saw website conversion percentage increase dramatically.  People that would have normally visited then left, were now visiting and calling.  Obviously more calls = more sales.  Also customer has seen an increase in calls from commercial clients.

Websites that sell, ring up sales

So what did my customer and I learn from all this?  Building a website, that sells a small businesses best qualities, right up top, where every visitor can see them nets results.  For me I can safely say that I have a very satisfied customer, for my customer, their website is finally working they way they always wanted it to work.  My customer even stated that their sales were up over 80% versus the same period the prior year! Now obviously other factors such as local search optimization, professional SEM, and website SEO went into those results…but at the end of the day, we can drive tons of traffic, if the website still doesn’t sell, it does no good.

If that doesn’t convince you to build a website that sells, I don’t know what will.