Local customers that visit local businesses’ websites usually have high purchase intent. These customers do their research on other platforms such as yelp, yp, and other aggregators or review sites. But when they land on the business’ site itself, they do it to make an order, book an appointment or complete a transaction. It is called – “conversion.” The percentage of the website visitors that “convert” of the total website traffic is called “conversion rate.” Converting visitors into customers is the main, if not the only goal of the website itself, because anything else – branding, increasing awareness, or announcing sales and discounts – is done on external websites. Therefore, increasing website conversion rate is a top priority for local businesses.
The question of how to do that, how to increase the website conversion rate, is probably the billion dollar question. One thing that we do know, is that bad website experience will almost certainly lead to a bounced session. A bounced sessions is a when a visitor exists the site without completing a single interaction on-site, meaning – absolutely no conversion.
We also know that on-site engagement (reading long content, liking, commenting, viewing key webpages) can sometimes lead to a series of interactions, which if built with a proper sequence will lead to a conversion.
So in this case we can conclude that if we make it easy for website visitors to engage with the site’s content, they will be more likely to convert from visitors to customers.
And this is exactly what this blog post is about. Here are 6 different ways to increase on-site engagements with local shoppers / customers:
Create high-quality and helpful website content
One of the best ways to engage with website visitors is writing helpful content. By providing honest advice, great tips or some sort of guidance or a solution to a common problem that your customers may experience, you can position your business as an authority in your field. This will help you prompt newsletter sign-ups on your site and build a free communication channel with your prospects which you will use to reduce objections and promote your deals and offers.
Encourage visitors to comment and respond to comments
When you publish content on your company blog, invite website visitors to comment and express their opinion on the subject. On-site discussion via tools such as disqus can not only increase trust and business legitimacy but also drive more traffic to your website through its content discovery platform.
Make it super easy to contact you
Imagine you’re at a store, and you want to ask few questions regarding one of the products you see. You turn around to find a sales or service rep, but there is no one there. You may feel a little bit disappointed, but you’ll still wait a little more or maybe call out with a polite “excuse me.” But when you’re online, you will just navigate away from the site after a few seconds of uncertainty.
This is exactly why you need to make sure that potential customers that visit your site can easily contact you. It really shouldn’t take more than 2 clicks/taps or 5 seconds.
We believe that Overtok is a great solution for that. We built it specifically to help local customers interact easily with local businesses. Learn more about it here.
And btw, Intercom is a great solution if you’re a SaaS company.
Ensure an optimized experience for mobile web browsers
Web traffic from mobile browsers is about 51%-53% of the world wide traffic (desktop is only 45% while the rest is traffic from tablet devices). For many websites, mobile web visits can reach 70%-80% of the total traffic.
However, website owners are usually more familiar with the desktop version of their sites. It happens because most of our back office operation related to the office requires a PC or a laptop. Every time we update the website’s content we do that from a desktop computer. This is the reason why there are so many mismatches between desktop and mobile websites. Even if your mobile version is responsive, there are still many things that can go wrong, especially when inserting new rich content such as images, GIFs or videos.
Bad mobile user experience will result in less engaged website visitors, more bounced sessions, and a decline in conversions.
Other things that can ruin the mobile user experience are having the page load slowly or when certain elements on the page take more time than usual to load with the rest of the page. If these elements are responsible for the engagement or conversion, it will directly damage your online performance. A recent consumer survey found that 40% of consumers will leave a web page that takes more than 3 seconds to load!
As you probably understand, mobile user experience is directly linked a website’s ability to generate revenue and leads. Make sure that your website and all its content are optimized for the mobile web experience.
Analyze visitors’ behavior via google analytics
Data scientists are one of the fastest growing professions in the world today. Valuable insights are hidden inside of the insane amounts of data that the internet produces every day. The more data you collect through your web properties, the more complicated analysis you’ll be required to do in order to mine data and translate it into business information and intelligence.
For small-medium sized local business, a website can be a real treasure if the data is collected and analyzed properly. But that’s not the only good news. In order for understand website visitors’ preferences, a data scientist position isn’t a must. Google Analytics is a free software that is easy to implement and collects 90% of the website’s visitors’ behavior data automatically. With its user-friendly interface you can learn a lot about what your customer like or dislike on your site. Use this data to optimize the website’s content accordingly. For instance, if you see a high bounce rate on a certain landing page (meaning that users are coming to your site and leaving it immediately after without a single interaction), change its appearance or choose another landing page for your marketing campaigns. Also, if you write a company blog and create several content topics, you can see on Google Analytics which blog posts create the most engagement and lead to the most sales / leads. Once you understand what draws visitors, you can create more content on the particular topic.
Add share / follow buttons
Another great way to improve on-site engagement is making it easy for customers to share what they like about your products/service or content with their friends or colleagues. A floating bar of social network share buttons motivates customers to inform others about what they like about your website with a single tap or click.
On webpages that don’t have high-quality and helpful content, such as a homepage, catalog page, about page, contact page, it is recommended to add social “follow me” buttons. It will help to grow your list of followers on social media and will allow you to drive more engagement and traffic through these channels.
Rap
Local customers visit websites in order to complete a specific action – make a purchase, book an appointment, order delivery, etc. – meaning, they come to convert. Therefore, if your business is targeting local customer, it is extremely important to have an on-site user experience that allows customers to complete the task with the most ease and comfort. Failing to do so, will lead to low website conversion rates and a loss of potential income.
When website visitors engage with the site’s content, it increases the chances for them to flow into the right sequence of interactions that will lead to a conversion. We gave 6 examples of key factors and website elements that will help increase on-site engagement and drive more revenue from the local customer segment.
Local customers that visit local businesses’ websites usually have high purchase intent. These customers do their research on other platforms such as yelp, yp, and other aggregators or review sites. But when they land on the business’ site itself, they do it to make an order, book an appointment or complete a transaction. It is called – “conversion.”
The percentage of the website visitors that “convert” of the total website traffic is called “conversion rate.” Converting visitors into customers is the main, if not the only goal of the website itself, because anything else – branding, increasing awareness, or announcing sales and discounts – is done on external websites. Therefore, increasing website conversion rate is a top priority for local businesses.
The question of how to do that, how to increase the website conversion rate, is probably the billion dollar question. One thing that we do know, is that bad website experience will almost certainly lead to a bounced session. A bounced sessions is a when a visitor exists the site without completing a single interaction on-site, meaning – absolutely no conversion.
We also know that on-site engagement (reading long content, liking, commenting, viewing key webpages) can sometimes lead to a series of interactions, which if built with a proper sequence will lead to a conversion.
So in this case we can conclude that if we make it easy for website visitors to engage with the site’s content, they will be more likely to convert from visitors to customers.
And this is exactly what this blog post is about. Here are 6 different ways to increase on-site engagements with local shoppers / customers:
Create high-quality and helpful website content
One of the best ways to engage with website visitors is writing helpful content. By providing honest advice, great tips or some sort of guidance or a solution to a common problem that your customers may experience, you can position your business as an authority in your field. This will help you prompt newsletter sign-ups on your site and build a free communication channel with your prospects which you will use to reduce objections and promote your deals and offers.
Encourage visitors to comment and respond to comments
When you publish content on your company blog, invite website visitors to comment and express their opinion on the subject. On-site discussion via tools such as disqus can not only increase trust and business legitimacy but also drive more traffic to your website through its content discovery platform.
Make it super easy to contact you
Imagine you’re at a store, and you want to ask few questions regarding one of the products you see. You turn around to find a sales or service rep, but there is no one there. You may feel a little bit disappointed, but you’ll still wait a little more or maybe call out with a polite “excuse me.” But when you’re online, you will just navigate away from the site after a few seconds of uncertainty.
This is exactly why you need to make sure that potential customers that visit your site can easily contact you. It really shouldn’t take more than 2 clicks/taps or 5 seconds.
We believe that Overtok is a great solution for that. We built it specifically to help local customers interact easily with local businesses. Learn more about it here.
And btw, Intercom is a great solution if you’re a SaaS company.
Ensure an optimized experience for mobile web browsers
Web traffic from mobile browsers is about 51%-53% of the world wide traffic (desktop is only 45% while the rest is traffic from tablet devices). For many websites, mobile web visits can reach 70%-80% of the total traffic.
However, website owners are usually more familiar with the desktop version of their sites. It happens because most of our back office operation related to the office requires a PC or a laptop. Every time we update the website’s content we do that from a desktop computer. This is the reason why there are so many mismatches between desktop and mobile websites. Even if your mobile version is responsive, there are still many things that can go wrong, especially when inserting new rich content such as images, GIFs or videos.
Bad mobile user experience will result in less engaged website visitors, more bounced sessions, and a decline in conversions.
Other things that can ruin the mobile user experience are having the page load slowly or when certain elements on the page take more time than usual to load with the rest of the page. If these elements are responsible for the engagement or conversion, it will directly damage your online performance. A recent consumer survey found that 40% of consumers will leave a web page that takes more than 3 seconds to load!
As you probably understand, mobile user experience is directly linked a website’s ability to generate revenue and leads. Make sure that your website and all its content are optimized for the mobile web experience.
Analyze visitors’ behavior via google analytics
Data scientists are one of the fastest growing professions in the world today. Valuable insights are hidden inside of the insane amounts of data that the internet produces every day. The more data you collect through your web properties, the more complicated analysis you’ll be required to do in order to mine data and translate it into business information and intelligence.
For small-medium sized local business, a website can be a real treasure if the data is collected and analyzed properly. But that’s not the only good news. In order for understand website visitors’ preferences, a data scientist position isn’t a must. Google Analytics is a free software that is easy to implement and collects 90% of the website’s visitors’ behavior data automatically. With its user-friendly interface you can learn a lot about what your customer like or dislike on your site.
Use this data to optimize the website’s content accordingly. For instance, if you see a high bounce rate on a certain landing page (meaning that users are coming to your site and leaving it immediately after without a single interaction), change its appearance or choose another landing page for your marketing campaigns. Also, if you write a company blog and create several content topics, you can see on Google Analytics which blog posts create the most engagement and lead to the most sales / leads. Once you understand what draws visitors, you can create more content on the particular topic.
Add share / follow buttons
Another great way to improve on-site engagement is making it easy for customers to share what they like about your products/service or content with their friends or colleagues. A floating bar of social network share buttons motivates customers to inform others about what they like about your website with a single tap or click.
On webpages that don’t have high-quality and helpful content, such as a homepage, catalog page, about page, contact page, it is recommended to add social “follow me” buttons. It will help to grow your list of followers on social media and will allow you to drive more engagement and traffic through these channels.
Rap
Local customers visit websites in order to complete a specific action – make a purchase, book an appointment, order delivery, etc. – meaning, they come to convert. Therefore, if your business is targeting local customer, it is extremely important to have an on-site user experience that allows customers to complete the task with the most ease and comfort. Failing to do so, will lead to low website conversion rates and a loss of potential income.
When website visitors engage with the site’s content, it increases the chances for them to flow into the right sequence of interactions that will lead to a conversion. We gave 6 examples of key factors and website elements that will help increase on-site engagement and drive more revenue from the local customer segment.