Have you ever landed on a website and after exploring through images and pages for a while, you still had no clue what the business is about? That's what happens when there's poor website communication. Companies invest a large amount of money on improving user experience, product development, forming a sales team, and customer success; however website messaging can make or break a deal, especially in online businesses and is typically overlooked.
The sole purpose of a website is to give valuable information to your customers about the services or products you offer. This means website communication is one of the most important aspects of your website that should always be optimized for clarity. By sending clear messages to your customer, you will ensure they know the value of your business.
What is website communication?
Website communication is the visual and textual elements on your website, whose main purpose is to serve as points of information for your customers. These elements should be able to make your customers understand what you are offering and why it is beneficial to them.
The reality is that website visitors are impatient. This means they won't even spend 1 minute navigating through your website before deciding it wasn't clear enough and closing it. Visitors should be able to easily tell why your business will bring value to them. That's why in this article we will give you some tips to improve your website communication.
Considering all the time you put into your business and website, it would be disastrous if no one understood what your business actually offers. - Neil Patel
3 ways to improve your website communication
1. Focus your landing page on answering 3 questions
As a business owner, you know what you are offering, however, some of the people who land on your website might know absolutely nothing about your business. That's why as soon as your customers land on your website, they should be able to tell 3 things: what's your business about, how it helps them, and why you are the right fit. This means that they shouldn't have to navigate through tabs to get a general idea.
Now we don't mean that you should write a lengthy paragraph detailing your value proposition at the top of your landing page, you should be able to communicate through clear, concise, and catchy phrases. While this sounds like a lot, an easy way to test if your website communication is working is by asking people if they understood your business model just by taking a look at the landing page.
2. Use images or visual elements
They say one image is worth a thousand words, which is also true in the case of website communication. Being able to communicate the core of your business clearly and concisely can be really difficult especially for some products, that's where images play a key role.
Since we humans are visual learners an image is able to demonstrate how your product looks, or the way it should be implemented, which can improve the clarity of your message. Not only do images help your message be crystal clear for customers it also serves as an engaging element that provides a break in between text.
For example, let's use websites from the food industry. Imagine you sell ice-creams, it would be very difficult to describe why your ice cream is the best in the market with words such as "sweet frozen food". Instead, it would be more appealing to customers being able to see an ice cream cone with a colorful scoop on top of the cone. In this case, an image would give a greater context and information about your product than text.
3. Make your website is easy to navigate
We already discussed the fact the landing page should be your top priority when it comes to website optimization, the closest second you should take care of is your website navigation. Real-life shopping is a good example of this, checkout is usually not the first thing you see, first, you walk through different products, check out the offers of the day, and then you have the option to buy something.
Online shopping follows a similar pattern. Your customers will land on your homepage, if this captures their attention and convinces them it's something they need, the next step will be to scroll through your products. This means that your website should be very organized, each product should be easy to find, have its own individual sales page, and customers should be able to navigate towards their shopping cart. Here's how to use empathy on your website to avoid common mistakes.
Final thoughts
Improving your website communication is a key part of website optimization that can improve conversion rates, however, it's usually overlooked. The key deciding factors are being able to be clear and concise while at the same time addressing customers' questions such as what's your business about, how it helps customers, and why you are the best fit. It also helps to show relevant images since some products are harder to describe in text. While the landing page should be your top priority, don't miss out on navigation optimization.