With the boom and flourish of the Internet, marketing online to grow or start a business has become a huge industry. Many people try to get up a website and then drive traffic to it for sales leads... much like a telemarketer might make lots of calls for leads, or a door-to-door salesman knocks on doors to see people. There are many companies that also specialize in helping people drive traffic to their website. This can be done through paid ads, affiliate marketing, email marketing, and search engine optimization, to name a few strategies.
While it sounds logical to learn how to drive more traffic to your website to increase sales or build a mailing list or get more leads, there's a key ingredient missing. If you're driving tons of traffic to your website but the site is not optimized for conversions, then the extra traffic is useless.
What does it mean to optimize a site for conversions? It means that the site is designed and organized around a consistent goal or idea and leads people to take an action. The action may be subtle, like clicking to another page to learn more. Or maybe it's to click and watch a video. Perhaps it's to get in contact with an email.
Regardless of the action you might want people to take on your site, one of the first things to do to optimize your website for conversions is to let people know where they are.
Where am I?
If you think of your prospect that may have found your site link from a search result, another site or an ad, they don't know much or anything about you or your site. They may know only the keyword that they used in Google got them to find your site, or they know they saw an ad that looked like it had a headline that caught their attention... and they clicked to get to your site.
Many times, people do not get to your site by directly typing in your domain name. Or, if they do, they may have heard it or met you in person and have your website address on a business card. But other than that, they may have no other information about your site and why it is interesting or useful to them.
So having your name to identify the site--name and logo--is a good start. But the name and logo may be meaningless to the new visitor. Or, you might have your face. But this may or may not be relevant to the visitor... does it hold meaning or significance to them? How can you convey identifying information in your name/logo, your imagery and then your content?
Think about what you might say to someone if they met you at a networking event or if you're approaching someone new you want to ask on a date. You have a few seconds--maybe a minute--to say hello, introduce yourself and be interesting or compelling enough to hold their interest.
Website home pages or landing pages are a lot like dating in many ways!
What can people find on your site? What is your site about? Who is it for? Having a descriptive tag line can help a lot too. For example, "Natural nutrition coaching for people over 50" or "Real Estate for Second-Home Buyers in Miami". This targets your audience---and can make your message much more powerful when you are clear on what your site is, what they an do there and and who it is for.
Look for my Web Design: Optimizing for Conversions Part 2 and Part 3 for more on creating a compelling website that converts leads or drives people to take action instead of clicking away.
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