5 Simple questions your website should answer for your visitors

Getting visitors to your website is a great first step. However, to convert a website visitor into a new customer, you need to answer five simple questions.

I’d like to raise this is a discussion point because I get so many customers that don’t want to necessarily do this in a way that is clear for their customer. They ask for their website to be about them and not about the problem a customer is trying to solve. They get sucked into talking about themselves so much they forget about their customers problem or the why them.

The first 3 below you should at least address in the hero area of the site and not just use the heading to display your business name. True, they need to know who you are but it should emphasis point number 3 as the most important. This is 100% customer focused and why they will contact you. The rest of these points can be left to the content strategy of the site and even prioritised according to your customer type.

• Who are you?
• What do you do?
• How can you help me?
• Can I trust you?
• How do I get in touch?

Every time new visitors reach your website, they’re essentially interviewing your business. They must know the answers to these five simple questions to trust that you can help them.

Visitors will leave and look elsewhere if your website fails to answer these questions. Sadly, that’s an easy way to send more traffic to your biggest competitors.

Your content addresses the users questions

But let’s focus on the good news!

With the right website pages and content, you can effectively address all these questions. Your visitors will find the information they need and be one step closer to becoming new customers.

So, let’s examine the questions in more detail and focus on the content you need to convert visitors into customers.

The Five Questions

Who are you?

You have one shot at this, to tell people who you are and express your identity beyond your name. It’s about your purpose and making a connection with the reader.

For example:

“Get Leads AU is a website hosting & management company that does custom website design and development”

At this point we fall into a general category with thousands of other businesses that do exactly the same thing.

Another example:

“Green thumb offers quality household and commercial lawn & garden services”

Same story here your no different to the thousands of others out there. Keep it simple and uncomplicated. It’s focusing on the basics for now. The one thing of note is the “who” they serve.

What do you do?

This is more than just the fact your a gardener, this is your opportunity to present services that fix problems of the client.

For example:

With 25 years experience Green Jim’s in the Cairns area delivers quality services in a carbon neutral way that is second to none.

** How can you help me? **

This is the most important question visitors will ask. They need to know that they’re in the right place to solve the problem they’re experiencing.

Overgrown gardens, regular lawn care, lawn coring. You can have a focus where you’d want your business to grow or even if there’s one particular area that makes the business the most amount of money.

In web design one of the trickiest problems we often have with businesses is when they want to promote everything and end up succeeding to promote nothing. In addition to this often we’ll have a business come along with two completely different interests wanting to do both. For example, sell motorbikes and hardware. What’s the main focus and how can you concentrate messaging with laser focus to influence the same client. Is it the same client or are these completely different customers. It all get’s a bit messy.

While I claim to be an expert on focusing our strategy and communications it’s easy to fall into traps. Look at my location pages for this site. The Wagga location page has the most page rank authority while Cairns has very little and then the homepage rarely ranks in front of these two. By design, my location pages have become my homepage for towns looking for web designers.

Can I trust you?

People buy from those they know, like and trust. This is a key area I’m constantly trying to revisit to break some sort of code that means everyone can trust me. Visuals play a big part in this but also strategic language.

Really though different people trust different signals from different sources but what makes them act is an emotional response that they may consider logical based on their thought process and experiences. Here I could tell you to put up your testimonials, put up your awards, portfolios, certifications or even social proof figures.

I think it’s only half the story and while some of these will work with some warm or cold customers customers may need more of a nudge. This is where I think it’s more useful to lead with being helpful than simply utilising a strategy that has been used a thousand times before by every second website you’ve been on. You can read about developing trust and nurture in my article.

I’m not saying don’t do these things but you probably shouldn’t just expect conversions because of these alone.

I expect any brand to have several consistent touch points of up to 8 times in different areas before a customer finally get around to contacting me. This is why I email my customers once a month to let them know I’m still here and then contact them twice a year and push out some ads every now and then. Better to be seen doing something rather than nothing.

How do I get in touch?

It’s not just about having a contact page and your phone number in your header or footer. It’s not just having availability of details for hours or availability, name, address (+map), phone, email (via contact form) should be on your contact page.

We’ve been making contact pages almost the same for the last 20 years, we want the contact, we want the engagement to take the next step. My preference though has become always using inline or poup forms for the initial contact instead of just leading a customer to the contact page.

Make it quick, make it simple. Don’t include too many details in your form, these are things that can be fleshed out on first phone contact.

One last piece of advise because I hear it all the time from customers. “Can you create a link to my Facebook, instagram or twitter from my contact page”. I’ll avoid these where I can because why would we want a social platform to be a tools to influence the conversion when we have little control over it other than your business posts that are mixed with your competitors advertising. Why would I trust a platform to tell my customer the story in the way I want that information to influence and establish trust.

CTA‘s or Call to Action’s

CTA’s are super important to lead to engagement and there should be at least two of these on every page in the form of asking a customer to do something.

The call to action should use the same language and be consistent and be active not passive.

Think about “Call us!” vs. “Contact Us” or “Let’s Chat” vs. “Contact” pair this with a question that addresses the users problem with a solution to tug at that emotional decision process.