How to build a website which converts visitors into customers and builds trust?

For every website, there is a distinct order in which you should display information. When you follow this order, you’re following a logical narrative which people expect to find information. But before diving into what that is, let’s go back to psychology. 

• Usable – Site must be easy to navigate, easily approachable and logical

• Informative – User must be getting something of value on your site

• Findable – Content needs to be locatable and navigable offsite and onsite

• Useful – Content should be original and fulfill a need

• Credible – Users must believe and trust what you tell them

• Actionable – When a potential customer comes to your site, give them a way to take action to solve their pain points.

• Open – Reduce barriers to entry as much as possible

A credible website is logical and easy to comprehend. You have on average, 8 seconds to capture someone’s attention. That’s roughly the same attention span of a goldfish. And we live in a world where attention is the greatest currency there is. We earn it. We spend it. We value it. And sometimes, we lose it. And that’s a problem for impact entrepreneurs. You don’t have the luxury to go into details about your circularity methodology or your technology stack. People simply don’t have enough attention span to care. They care about themselves, their needs and their problems. So to reduce how quickly someone encounters and then leaves your site, design, comprehensibility and a focus on problem-solving are key. 

Your website visitor should be able to figure out what your website is about within the first few seconds of landing on the page. In this first glance, they will see your design, logo, slogan and one sentence of text on the homepage of your site. This is the equivalent of a digital elevator pitch. If the prospect browsing your site doesn’t know within the first 8 seconds exactly what they can expect from you, then they will almost certainly leave.

To plan out the structure of your website, you should focus on keeping a three-phase structure of content. The typical tri-layered website structure is as follows:

1. Home Page

The first layer should be simple and easy to understand for your target audience. It should answer their needs and address their pain points whilst giving them social proof that you’re up to the job. This is an example of a high converting UX designed home page:

• Above the Fold. Before you scroll down, you should see either a Hero Image or a full page video banner with Text over it. The text should address the prospect and tell them that they are in the right place. In most cases, you only have about seven seconds to capture someones attention on your website. Your tagline must be concise and intelligible enough to make sure that your visitor walks away with a comprehensive understanding of what you offer and for who.

• Description. Create a description that’s a bit more in-depth than your tagline that shows how you’re solving a problem for your target market.

  • Purpose. (WHY) written concisely.

  • Tagline. (HOW) strongly worded which shows the benefits your target users will get.

  • Product. (WHAT) Outline your product so that the visitor knows what you’re talking about.

• Visuals. A video between 30 – 120 seconds can take place of a description. This can be also placed higher in the website to replace the your company’s description.

• Call to action. Sign up to email list, join the platform, get a free trial, download your latest whitepaper...

• Testimonials for social proof. You should ideally be posting three testimonials with photographs of the individuals giving them and a link to their company or organization. Having testimonials provides social proof that what you’re offering, works.

• Client or partner banner. Further displaying social proof.

• Seen in the Press section/Blog articles. Here you can put either articles from your most impressive blog content or a section linking to your most recent press articles. Press is valued as social proof above your blog, so if you have finally got that interview with Fast Company, this is where it should live.

• Footer. Add social media links & contact details.

2. About — Services — Blog — Contact

The second layer should provide an extra layer of complexity. 

You should assume that if your visitor has made it there from the home page, they are at least intrigued by your solution. 

This is where you can get more specific about the industry that you're active in, expand on your purpose and the greater societal trends which are driving your existence. 

Here you can go in-depth on WHAT you do. Outline your services, define your product. Chances are, when someone is on this page, they’re here to find out if they can use your product. 

To make it as easy and actionable as possible, give prices, show videos, add personality.

3. Long-Form Pillar Content

The third layer is where you can get into your in depth analysis of your subject matter. This layer consists of services, knowledge, insights in the form of articles, blogs and news. 

For your website’s blog and pillar pages, you should be directly responding to the issues that your customers have. Save the more conceptual stuff for your personal blog. Remember — it’s about the customer. I’m going to keep on saying that until it sinks in. Hopefully I can convey the importance of the message to you so that it sinks in a bit easier.

Anything to act as proof of why you are an expert on the subject at hand. This not only helps your social reach but it also plays into your content and SEO strategy.

• 2-3 articles solving key business problems your target audience faces with 2000+ words each

• Multiple subheadings with searchable topics

• Always link to Pillar Content in your blog for optimized SEO

Headlines & content for blogs

Blog content should be titled with clickable headlines (not clickbait, but not sciency stuff that your target audience doesn't understand). 

This is simply because that’s how people search on the internet. For example, say you’ve written a great piece of long-form content about bees in cities. For instance: If your headline reads “Why bees are important for Smart Cities” then it’s more likely to show up over “Apoidea Ointment: Lo-Fi Smart City Natural Capital”. 

Whilst the second may be more intriguing for a magazine article, it’s going to be lost in the deep blue depths of Google’s search algorithm and certainly, unless your target audience is a bee-keeping fanatic, it's going to go straight past them.

That doesn’t mean you have to make the article boring, just that the titles have to appease the search engine gods, not your ego. 

The article can be whatever you want it to be. It simply means that there is no point in creating something that is purely for yourself to enjoy. And by utilizing SEO, you can make sure that your content actually brings value to people out there. You need to give them something that they will find useful, entertaining, or funny. 

Blogging, SEO, and pillar content

For brands, it’s hard to rank at the top of Google for keywords. It’s even harder if you don’t optimize your content. The general strategy I tend to use is to write four or five long-form articles — pillar content — and focus on optimizing them first. 

A pillar page broadly covers a particular topic, and cluster content should address a specific keyword related to that topic in-depth. For example, you might write a pillar page about renewable energy — a vast topic in itself — and have multiple pieces of topic specific cluster content about electric vehicles, batteries and household solar within the article.

To optimize the content that you have created for your pillar content, it’s important that you consider your target audience’s pain points.

Consider how they ask search engines about them. For instance, when a customer wants help becoming circular in their waste streams, they search for “how to create a circular waste stream” rather than a brand name “CE Consultancy”. To give your results the best chance to top the list, it’s important to make sure you’ve got content that answers these questions.

That’s the basic principle of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short. It asks, what are your customers searching for and where you fit into that? Often if you’re selling something new, we believe that people are going to use new words to find us. This is not true at all. We must find the words which our customers are using to look for our solutions and own them, rather than creating a whole new way to describe our solution. 

To make a start on this, all blog content should align with your keywords. Make a list of the words which you believe your target customers will use to search for you. For some help use; Scrape suggested keywords from multiple sources, Google Trends is another great free option to explore. Another good way is to go to the websites of your most successful competitors and see what words they’re using to start you off. Incorporate these keywords naturally (about 1-3% of your written content) to maximize your keyword search results.