Are there parts of your website that people should be getting to, but aren’t?
Is it possible that you’ve missed something blindingly obvious?
We call this the buried treasure – parts of the website that, if people get to them, will generate more business.
Examples of this are:
Whatever it is, that part of your website is what will nudge people into taking action.
Make a note of that part of your website – specifically the url or urls that people would ideally be getting to.
Now use your analytics system (Google Analytics is free and sufficient) to see the numbers of website visitors have got to that part of your website in the previous month.
If you use A1WebStats, then you can filter those visitors to only those from the parts of the world that you would sell to.
So … what’s the number of visitors to that part of your website?
More importantly: how does that number compare to the numbers you would hope to get to that part of your website?
Depressed yet?
This website sells its products via distributors, not to the individual people who go to the website:
If the website visitor wants to buy a product, they need to go to a stockist.
That information is found via this part of the page:
All of the products within the website live within a website structure that contains /catalogue.
Analytics software can identify how many of those /catalogue pages visitors got as far as the stockists page.
In this case, a staggeringly low 3% of people who looked at products (over a one month period) got as far as the stockists page.
That leaves 97% who would have included people who were expecting to buy on the website and who also probably didn’t notice the stockists page link in the navigation bar.
This means less people asking for those products at the stockists, leading to less sales being made overall.
The buried treasure in this website is the page that will lead to a sale – the stockists page.
What would help here is a much clearer call to action on each product page, taking people to that stockists page. For example, a button inserted into each page (as shown in red below) that has a clear call to action of: “Buy this from our stockists nationwide”.
This website offers venue hire services for:
If you were on that website you wouldn’t immediately be aware of that service offering, because priority has been given to other elements within that main navigation bar.
How many people, visiting that website, would be aware that they could hold events at that venue?
Some people may click on Menu to see that Venue Hire is available, but why should they have to?
Although websites need to be mindful of how much is crammed into the main navigation bar, surely a (potentially revenue-generating) navigation bar option of ‘Venue Hire’ would fit into what is clearly enough space?
The buried treasure on that website is the section that makes it clear that the venue can be hired for events.
The problem is that people would have to dig for that but if it’s not immediately obvious, they may not bother.
If you’ve got website content that makes the difference between getting an enquiry or losing the website visitor, then you need to think of that content as being treasure.
It’s what the potential customer is looking for and is also what brings you more business.
Treasure.
That treasure needs to stand out bold and proud.
Even when your great website content is clearly visible in your navigation bar, people often don’t see it amongst everything else they’re looking at on the page.
You need to show them a great big virtual X that takes them off to that part of your website when they are viewing other pages.
Not sure what the buried treasure is within your website? Just contact us and we’ll point it out to you for free (and what to do about it).
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