Your website is your #1 sales tool. It sells your services and products 24/7 the place where new prospective customers go to learn about your business before they contact you. When a person finds you in a Google search, or on Facebook or Instagram, good chance they will pay a visit to your website. If your site is clunky and cluttered, they will bounce, and you will never know. You may be ranked #1 in Google, but if your website sucks, you won’t get as many conversions. So there goes another client.
When a visitor lands on your website, it must be easy to navigate. Well, unless you are ok with losing prospective clients to your competitors, which I am sure you are not. Ask yourself this. Can visitors quickly find what they are looking for? Is it easy for them to contact us? It is your job to make sure that your pet sitting website is optimized to boost conversions. What do we mean when we say “conversions”? Getting a visitor to become a lead by contacting you or filling out a form by taking that next step in the sales process. This should be the goal of your website.
If your site is out-dated or poorly designed, you will be less likely to convert visitors into sales leads. If you are putting money into marketing and sending users to a crappy website, you might as well throw your money in the garbage or give to directly to your competition. Here are seven ways to help improve your conversion rate without the need to generate more traffic. Even implementing only a few of these suggestions can help convert more of your current traffic.
Visible Call-to-Actions (CTAs)
You must tell your customer exactly what you want them to do once they land on your website. What do you want them to do? Do you want them to book now? Schedule a meet and greet? Register for a dog training class? It is essential to use compelling buttons that stand out and draw attention to the eye to increase conversion rates on your pet sitting website. Make sure your buttons are visible, look good, and guide your visitors to take the next steps. Don’t make your visitors try and figure out how to get the information they are looking for. Be clear, or you may lose that opportunity.
Fast Page Load Times
The time it takes for your webpage to load affects conversions. The difference of a second or two can make your visitors bounce. This means there is a good chance they will head right back to Google find the next website in line. Make sure your pages load as quickly as possible to help increase the likelihood of a conversion. Your homepage should be clean and lean. The more content that you add to your website, the longer it takes to load. But, you also want to make sure that your homepage connects with the visitor and they click your CTA. You need to find that balance.
While videos may look cool, it is important to remember that images load much faster than videos. Therefore, a video will slow down your page load and may have a negative impact on conversions. Besides, embedding 3rd party applications to your homepage may also decrease the load time. While embedding YouTube videos and iframes may seem like a good idea, there is a good chance it will negatively affect your load time because your server needs to ‘talk’ to the other servers to get the information loaded, which takes extra time.
Easy to Navigate
Get rid of clutter. White space is good. Can your visitors quickly find what they are looking for? Are your phone number and email addresses visible at all times? Do you have a contact page with a simple form to make it easy for users to ask a question? Your navigation should be user-friendly and clean so users can get where they need to do. Make sure essential pages are front and center, and not hidden and hard to locate. Add a search bar to your page to make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for. Connect live chat or Facebook Messenger directly to your pet sitting website to help answer questions quickly. Use this step as a way to get a phone call or meet and greet scheduled to move the new lead down your sales funnel.
Images
Adding images to your website, in many cases, can help increase website conversion rates. Using images to help break up text, improve the user experience and keeps users engaged. But, don’t overload pages with images as this makes your webpage clutters and may distract users. Use pictures that relate to your visitors emotionally so they can visualize what your problem your services solve. Avoid low-quality images and always remember to use a tool to compress and optimize images.
Mobile Conversions
Your website must be mobile-friendly. More and more people are conducting searches from mobile devices, and Google is moving to a mobile-first algorithm. If you don’t keep up with the times, then your competitors will leave you in their dust. It’s not enough to have a mobile website, it must be optimized. Keep it simple and easy to navigate. Make it clean and easy to find the information they are looking for. Ensure it easy for visitors to contact you without having to scroll.
Modern Design
Outdated website design reflects poorly on your brand. Your website should be a top priority, I mean, it is many potential client’s first impression of your business. You are caring for people’s cherished pets. You need to convince people that you don’t know to trust you. If your website is old, not maintained, or not secure, why should anyone believe that your business is well maintained and professional? As a professional dog walker or pet sitter, you want to be trusted. Your website must reflect the quality of services that you provide. You will be losing many potential customers without even realizing it if you lack in the website department.
Your brand must be consistent EVERYWHERE! Look at your website and ask yourself, be honest, ‘does my website reflect my business’? Is it cluttered? Do you have too much text? Let’s be real; nobody reads long paragraphs of text on a homepage. Break it up and make it easy for visitors to quickly scan your site so they can find what they are looking for.
Landing Pages
Effectively using landing pages can help increase conversions from Ad campaigns. Landing pages are an essential part of Facebook Ad and Google Ad campaigns. Do your keyword research before spending any money on ads. Don’t advertise blindly or you will waste your money. For example, if you are running an ad to promote daily dog walks, send them to a landing page that is optimized with information about dog walks and a short form that they can fill out to inquire. Don’t send people to your homepage and make them figure out where to go next. Don’t send them to a services page where they need to navigate through your list of multiple services. Make is clean, simple, and specific. Also, it is critical to measure and track your results and make adjustments as needed!
You will notice that when you update your pet sitting or dog walking website to a professional design, your conversions will increase without even changing your current marketing strategy. Also, you may notice little change in traffic to your site, but you will see more people are contacting you. This is because you are positioning yourself as a professional leader in the industry by demonstrating credibility and trust. Visitors will now be more likely to contact you because your website is modern and user-friendly. If your site is out-dated and you want to increase the chance of conversions, send us a message.
Erika Godwin is the President of Barketing Solutions and the Co-Founder and CMO of ProPet Software, an industry-leading kennel management software. Erika has over 8 years of experience with WordPress and graduated from Elmira College in 2009 with a BS, Business Administration- Marketing and Management. View Erika’s Full Bio.
