Welcome back to Behind The Madness. I know it's been a while, but in between Paul being far too busy to edit the podcast and Jamie who's actually left the company and is travelling around the Arctic, we've been struggling to get a co host, but He's popped in to say hello. So I have got the wires back out, got the mics dusted off, and we are here to go for another episode.
So for those who don't know, this is Behind the Madness, where we talk about business growth, ways to work smarter, and the fundamentals of business, all geared to unlocking your brand's peak performance. I'm your host, James Roberts. I'm the owner and founder of Method, and today, luckily, because he popped in for a cup of tea, I'm joined by Jamie, who I'm going to call the co host so he can't go on his travels too far away again.
But before we jump into this weeks, hopefully episode, I wanted to let you know about ways you can contact the show. We have a dedicated email address podcast@hellomethod.co.uk where you can give any feedback, ask any questions, and we will try and answer them on future episodes or catch up with us across all of your favorite social platforms where we publish content helping our listeners grow your business. So today we are going to be talking about how to get more conversions from your website.
Is that what we're talking about?
That's what we're going to talk about. That's exactly what we're going to talk about.
Well, let's get right into it. So firstly, Jamie, how was your travels? It's nice to have you back.
Yeah, it was really good, thanks. It's, uh, warmer here than in the Arctic. So, uh, the shorts are back on and the big coat's back in the wardrobe.
Antarctic has
penguins the guys in the tuxedos the happy feet down south big guys up north
There you go. You learned something, learned something new?
That's why it's called Antarctic means no bears
Did not know that.
Yeah, there you go fun fact today. But you didn't think you're gonna learn that when you clicked on that button to go I want to learn more about conversions.
Now is that how they're going to get more conversions? Is it by understanding the difference between the uh, the north and the south?
Well, technically, it is understanding the journey. That is a big key to it. So you could say, in a roundabout way, yes, it is.
Amazing considering this is unscripted
Nailed it. Nailed it. Absolutely nailed it.
Come back next week. So websites, as we all know, are probably your shop front for most businesses now they are the prime focus for bringing in customers, leads, whatever we're going to call them and giving them enough information that they are going to get in contact. We don't know who these people are who land on our website, and what we're wanting to do, in essence, is work out who they are as quickly as possible. Give them the right information so they will get in contact.
Fun fact, there is a high proportion of people who land on your website that will never contact you. You think about all the websites you visit every day and how many of those you will actually get in contact with the, with that company is very, very few. The ones that you do, if you just think about even just today, who you've contacted will make it super easy or be focusing on what you want to do that.
So really, in essence, we are going to hopefully try and give you some tips and some takeaways that you can apply to your website, or certainly, I guess, analyze your website, what's going wrong, to turn a nobody into a somebody.
And I think the key thing there is, ideally, if your website works well, they don't need to contact you. When was the last time you spoke to Amazon? Because you go on, you buy, it gets delivered, and hopefully all is well. Even when you need to return, you go onto the website, everything's signposted well. And it does the job. There's been a big switch, websites used to be a vehicle, it used to be one of the things that people could have for a business.
But like you said, it's become the shop front, it's become almost the business. The other things that feed in social medias, blogs, whether you leaflet, whatever. They're the added now, and a website's out on its own. So you've got to treat it like that, you've got to treat it and put the importance on of, kind of, If you're opening up a shop, you wouldn't make it look crap. You wouldn't go, oh, well, people can't even get through the front door, they don't know where the changing rooms are.
We've all been in the shops where you look, yeah, you look, you go into a shop, And you pick something up, and then you're looking, well, where are the fitting rooms? How do I pay for this? And you think, I won't bother so you leave we've all done it, we've all done it on the high street. We can talk about the high street on another day. So why do it on a website? Someone's in the comfort of their own home, make life easy. Remove every bit of friction you can.
Yep, and there's so many things that websites grow over time as well, and it's so easy and we come across this every day of people wanting to add some more up to date information. We've got this now and we do this now and let's add it, and before anything's actually been thought about, it's added onto that top navigation, which is again, making it harder for people to get to actually what they want. Obviously some things have their place on that top nav.
But everything has a place and needs to be thought about, and websites can grow and grow and grow and grow and grow, and become so difficult to navigate. Imagine just doing that with a shop and just adding absolutely everything into your shop.
Sure, sure.
You probably wouldn't even bother going in through the front door because you could just see it being so busy.
Well, a lot of good websites adopt a minimalistic, you think of Apple. Yep. Like, uh, everyone I think will agree their website's decent. They've got a few pennies to put towards it. Um question. Go on. What's your favourite websites?
Oooohh Which
ones do you go on? You go, do you know what this was seamless. Like I'm a big Amazon fan because it's, it does what I want it to do.
It comes through my doorstep without me even realising I've bought it.
Yeah.
Which is great.
Well, that's it. It, it completes the customer dream. The dream outcome is I want this book, I go on, I search the book, I pay for the book, the book arrives.
Interestingly, I've got a lot of websites that I will go to on a daily basis that might not necessarily be very good, but my need outweighs how bad they are.
Have they got the sweet spot then?
No,
So go on for everyone who's listening. So all five people, um What
Hi Mum.
What websites do you love using and guys if you have ones chuck them down in the comments, that'd be great Bit of a loaded question, because everyone's website does need work because our customers are always evolving brings us nicely on to kind of buyer personas understanding who you are.
So James, talk to us a bit about that importance about understanding the customer before you've done a website, but also after when you've got a bit of analytics, because when you go in beforehand, you do have to go a bit broad to learn who they are. So people who are maybe trying to get it right first time, Talk to us about the importance of kind of going broad and then narrowing over time.
Everybody setting up a business will have a rough idea of who they're selling to. That grows over time, exactly as you said, as you learn more about them you're going to get highly tuned into it and start to know more about their pain points, but you've got to start somewhere. So becoming broad is easier, um, especially when you're starting off a business, you'll almost take anything, and then you can filter it down.
If you take it back to the analogy of having a shop, I don't know, you're selling female clothing, for example, for gym goers. You are not going to expect a load of middle aged men to come through the door, for example. So understanding, having a rough understanding of who's coming in through the door is going to help massively and then why you should, even just your tone of voice, everything that's going on the website should feel comfortable to them.
So what kind of things are, I'm going to jump in there, and this is going into the kind of UX, UI side of how a website looks, feels. You mentioned tone. Yeah. What are the kind of key elements? I imagine colours.
Colors, imagery, uh, your tone of voice. If you land on a page and you know when it's right for you. We always kind of talk about the the messaging and the actual text That's there that is huge. Um But also there's so much if you see somebody who's familiar to you or is wearing the clothes that you want to wear and has the same kind of colors that you like and isn't off putting and the font even the choice of font matches exactly. You feel at home, you feel comfortable, or you aspire to be that.
Do you see what I mean, so, you know, you, you never see a certain type of there's a certain type of person you see on fitness websites are who you generally want to look like or become.and it's it's very, very much that.
Still really wish I was David Beckham from 2005, from the Adidas adverts.
Was it the hair?
Yeah, the cornrows.
It's feeling comfortable around that website, with also trust comes into it massively. Um, and again price points of businesses. So if it's a big purchase item, then trust is obviously a sliding scale. If it's a five pound purchase you might take a punt. If it's a thousand pounds, you're going to want to know about that company. You want to make sure you're going to get the product.
So there's, there's trust factor in there, now that trust can be instilled with knowing that you're in with the right crowd that feel that quality. We've all been onto a terrible website that has been awful to navigate. It's felt clunky and your trust element of when you're buying that product, whether it's even going to turn up is reduced.
So there's so many factors that go into it, but around tone of voice, imagery, colors, and again, a lot of it people say, well, yeah, but is this going to be attract the person that I want to attract as long as you're not doing anything that is so different that's going to put them off.
You're not going to be too far wrong getting something started and then as I said over time as soon as you know well, actually our buyer persona now is this person who almost shops here, who is this age who is interested in these type of things, who has these challenges, you can refine it and improve it.
I think you've always got to come back to a sense of quality, for example, you wouldn't open up, you know, you wouldn't open up your shop when you're still having work done to it or there's, you know, there's things lying around. Um, the same thing comes there, it's down to that quality and that pride and sometimes that's forgotten.
So, a big thing we talk about in the kind of the digital sphere is attention. And you got my attention because I've clicked on your link. I've come to your website, gone through the things you've spoken about in terms of starting to build that trust elements, and how you build that when someone lands on the website, we've spoken about them finding their own crowd talking in the right tone imagery colors all of these things that you have a good broad idea about.
How do we then go from a trust element and build that journey into a buying element. Because, I imagine a lot of people listening will have looked at their website traffic and they'll say, I've got a thousand people a day coming on and I'm getting three sales. So where are all the 997
Firstly, the hardest point is getting people to your website. There's so many websites that are built by companies and then handed over and go good luck, off you go, and they think, well we've got the best website in the world, nobody knows it's there, and it's, yeah, we've all heard it.
Before we do that, because I think, I reckon if we put some stuff in at the end, some tips in at the end, on how you can drive the traffic, as well as the conversion, I think that'll be it, so stay around.
So we've got, we've got the thousand people coming in, which is amazing. That is sometimes the hardest bit, okay? So, but for this, I'm landing on the website. Why? And I would go the other way. Why aren't we getting more people? if you're getting a thousand people and you're getting three sales, something is wrong.
How do I find out what's wrong though?
So you've gotta understand where people are coming from to start off with, I think with this. So for argument's sake, we put a Facebook ad out, right? Facebook ad is flying. We're getting a thousand clicks a day that are coming to our website, and they're all landing on the website and they're not converting. My first thought then would be to go back to the ad and review the content on it, review who I'm targeting and work it out, and, and start there.
There's no point in almost refining the website. Because what you might be doing is having the wrong people come to your website in the first place. So you're just going to change your whole website based on the people coming in who may be the wrong people in the first place. So all of those thousand people might be the wrong people who you've targeted to start off with. Yeah. And the three people just found you.
Okay, so you're looking at things, something like call to actions there, where on your, like your input, where the traffic's coming from, could be something like, check out our new website, rather than buy here. So they're not coming to buy.
They don't understand why they're going, it's more of an interest thing. Then when they get there, they understand why they're there, and it's not for them. Yeah,
But they weren't in the headspace to buy anyway. So you haven't... Those leads haven't been primed, they haven't been kind of qualified. kind of qualified.
Because the chances are, when you're setting you've probably got a... If we're talking generically, starting off... You know your website, you're going to have quite an open reach, so your ads are going to be quite open, and again over time you want to tailor that into who you're actually targeting, and make it more specific.
Um, and you are when you're talking more generic about ads, you are going to get a lot of people who are falling just outside your target audience, so so they're naturally just going to do it out of interest. Probably is not going to do any harm in terms of brand awareness, but you're going to get enough, maybe 80 90 percent of people who are clicking on the ad who should be targeted, but they might, it's exactly as you said, the wording might be wrong.
So in that journey from going okay, conversions low to conversion high, which what we're trying to help you guys with at the end of the day is tilting that balance in your favour.
Yep.
Yeah. Also one thing here, is be realistic a thousand people landing on your website a thousand people aren't going to convert um, you've got to like have an idea about your percentage for your industry what that conversion is.
Yep.
Because If you have unrealistic expectations, you are setting yourself up to fail and when you're doing a great job, you may be thinking you're doing a poor job.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, completely. Those three out of a thousand might be amazing.
Yeah, exactly.
If each sale was two hundred and fifty thousand pounds ads
Then let me, let me in on your business if you need a podcast
Exactly. So it is, it is kind of, you know, we, we worked with a client before who would only need a couple of sales a year, depending on the high value. They were very, very high value products. Um, so they would get an enormous amount of hits with little sales, but understand that. So we were generating a huge amount of hits on the website, but very low conversion rates. But understanding the business, we knew that was going to be the case.
So understand your traffic input, and what's on the other end. What's getting people to your website to start with. I'm on the website, I'm looking around, what should I be looking at? You mentioned navigation before. Talk to me what that means in terms of what does navigation mean? Like where buttons are, how menus, buy button, call to actions I've heard about. How important is that and how can I audit it? If I'm going away from this podcast and going, okay, James has said navigation.
What do I look at?
So, if we're taking the ad, we don't want to send somebody from an ad to a homepage. Right? The whole point in your homepage is generally, you will offer a number of services, a number of products. Every business kind of does and the homepage, the whole job in the homepage is to get that person as quickly as possible to the area of the website that they're interested in. Right?
So as a consequence of that, you've got to put a hell of a lot of information on that page, to try and capture as quickly what they are. So you do the high level stuff first. These are the products we sell. Are you interested? Boom. They've gone off to the products. Fine. Following on from that, it might be, Well actually, these are the services we offer, are they interested in services? So products, no. Services, yes.
But failing that, you might then go in with, maybe it's some news from the website or something, or some helpful advice. And you kind of tier it, there's a hierarchy, so the most important thing that you're trying to sell is first, and then if they're not interested in that, you try and capture them down and down and
Yeah, because you're already seeing about us, or our story,
Yeah, yeah. you don't know, you don't know. That person who's landing on the website may not know anything about you, but Steve down the road has said, oh, you've got to go on this website. It's great. Trust, I wonder what I wonder about, wonder what they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. So got to have that background. So again, this is why we throw everything onto the homepage, little snippets of the rest of the website. So that is obviously the one stage, if they're coming at it from, from kind of cold.
If you're taking them from an ad, and we'll carry that journey on, because I think it works quite nicely. So I've come from an ad, um, I've landed on the website. I would then target them with a page. If we're trying to push a product, you land straight on that page. Because it makes sense. Do you want these glasses? Yes I do. There's no point in sending them to, to something else which is selling them shoes or selling them something else. I want to go directly to relating to that ad.
But in terms of the navigation when you're there, again, there's, there's this two phase thing. If you're sending it from an ad, you probably just want to be talking about this thing that, that engages them. I just want to see about those sunglasses or those shoes or whatever I'm going to. And the rest of the navigation should almost die back a bit because I don't want to send them off and get them confused. But, in terms of a navigation, again, keep it simple.
People will also, and this is James top tip, people will also try and come up with cool names for stuff. So rather than about us, they'll try and say, well, this is our, this is our incentives. And, and, and it's words that we don't associate with it. Aren't familiar, like yeah, so you're like, what the hell is that? And then the other one, another one of my pet hates is people have a news and a blog.
And they'll have a reason for having both, which tends to be the news is about company news, and the blog is helpful information, or resources, or things like that.
And I think that's really important. They'll understand what they're talking about. How many times do people build a website for them versus building it for their customer?
Exactly, so combine them into two. Nobody's going to be upset going to news and finding useful information. And
And that's where you put the unique
stuff Exactly. 100%. Yeah, so you got all that in. Another tip with the news is I wouldn't necessarily, or the blog, I wouldn't necessarily put it in the top navigation. Because we're trying to push, and this is where you can start to focus down on what's in that navigation. You really want to focus on stuff that you're trying to sell or stuff that you're helping people with, right?
So, I come onto a website, for Apple for example, you go straight into the products and I think it will lead you into what type of product. Maybe it's a Mac or it's a phone or it's, right? And then it's probably next up, and I'm not looking at it, it's probably support or something along those lines. If you want to know about Apple, it's probably not up there. If you want to contact Apple, it's probably not up there.
Because what they want to do is drive you into what they're trying to sell or what they're trying to offer. So everything else can be there. Home, don't have home in your navigation. Because you'll land on home and then you're going to go to interesting areas after that. I don't want home, I don't want somebody who's not going to go back to home, do you see what I mean? To then have everything thrown at them again use the logo.
I think that's really key and I'm just going to kind of see if I can summarize that just to, so I understand, but also so that people can take away from. Is, you're building your website for your customers, not for you, but you have to be intentional for what you want them to do. So, for example, I'm building it for John and Barbara, but what I want John and Barbara to do is buy a photo album. So albums would be there on that navigation. Happy days.
Yeah, exactly that, and then the other thing is, if we go back to the original... You know, people aren't going to contact you if they're buying a product, they don't need to. We need to know who they are, be that if you're a service led business and you're selling a service, we need them to contact or to find out more if they are a product led business, we might want them to buy or get a demo in of the product.
And that is another fact, the contact page is very, very rarely used, um, for transactional stuff, right? It's usually, if we take our contact page, for example, we have to have it on there.
Something's buggered up and I need help.
It's actually usually people selling services to us, not people who we're targeting.
So hide it..
If you notice on many, many websites certainly the bigger websites now trying to get in contact with most companies is a nightmare because they have they've taken it off. Because they want to drive you into what their main focus is, which is selling a product or getting you interested. And again, if you come back to that, if you're trying to sell a service, somebody isn't going to go, oh, I'm really interested in your service tell me more and go to the contact page to fill that out.
But if you give them a reason saying, you know, uh, if you, do you want us to tell you more about this? Um, here's a download, here's a something. So we can get that person's information. They're more likely to do that than go to a contact page and fill in a form saying, I'm really interested in XML. Um, products slightly different again, because obviously you're going to go, have you got it in this size? Does it work with this? And you might have questions about that product.
If somebody does do that, and this, this comes into, I'm kind of going off the subject a little bit, but sales and marketing sales are going to be at the front line of knowing what's wrong with your people buying. Right? I've got a problem that people keep asking me this as a sales agent, as a, as a sales guy, uh, everybody's asking, does it do this? Can it fit this? If, in marketing, if you speak to the sales and go, well, what are you being asked? Why are sales falling down?
They'll go, oh, everybody's asking about, can we have it in blue? And you go, yeah, of course you can have it in blue. We'll put that on the website, get that there. So that question is being, yeah, being removed. There's no blockers to sale.
As you can all probably tell, James is very passionate about this subject. We'll put him on the clock to bring down, make it more concise.
Yeah.
I wanna know three and I'm gonna give you 15 seconds for each, of the biggest friction points that you see on websites, and in that 15 seconds, how they can fix them. So, friction point, how they can fix it.
15 seconds for each.
15 seconds for each. Okay, first one, starting now.
Don't put your social media on your website.
What's the fix?
Uh, basically everybody has social media on their website, and then you will click it and go to Facebook and learn out what Aunty Sally's just been up to, and you'll never go back to the website. But we always put it in to try and get that news across, so remove it. Don't put that in there.
Number two.
Uh, number two is simplify your navigation, don't put everything in the navigation. Just put your target points of what you want to achieve or where you want to push people on your navigation.
How many rough in a navigation?
Five Okay. Last one. Uh, last one, keep it simple to start off with, so clear messages with clear outcomes. People like to add a load of content, so much content that people generally don't want to read. But you can put that further down the sitemap.
Brill. I think, I think they're super useful, super actionable. And like looking at this, kind of thinking about how we can kind of wrap this. That user journey, super, super important. Be intentional as a company, from a customer point of view, whether you're gonna lead with empathy there with that persona with that kind of idea of who you're who you're targeting.
Obviously, over time, your data will show you who you should be targeting, working with sales and marketing, like James says, getting blue at the front of the product page if that's the color people are after. And then literally just making sure you are spending time kind of maybe once a quarter going through your website and doing an audit. Looking at it and kind of going what's changed in the market, our video is more prominent.
Look at TikTok, look at Reels All of those elements just to make sure you're up to date are really key as well. I mentioned a bit earlier that if you got to the end of this podcast that we would throw in some stuff about sources. So how to get people to it traffic wise. I imagine we'll probably do a podcast about this because it's a big topic. So I'm gonna ask James for his five top ways to get traffic to a website to increase your traffic. Conversion we've looked at. Traffic.
James, wrap us up with how we can do that.
Traffic can come from a number of different places. And as I said, to start off with people get a website built and then forget about it and hope if you build it, they will come. Doesn't happen. I
Oh, damn.
I know. It'd be lovely if it did. Well, we'd be out of a job if it did. Um, so firstly, again, we say this a lot and I know we sound like a broken record, but understand who they are, then you know where they are. So if you know who they are, you know where they're hanging out, right?
Attention.
Exactly. So. we can all jump into SEO, right? SEO is brilliant, and it has a massive place.
Which a lot of people forget about as a source.
Yep, yep. But SEO is key because Google is winning outright.
Google, never heard of it..
No, I know right? Uh, forget about being an Ask Jeeves. Um, think about Google winning out. And, and... For our younger listeners. I know, we now go into a question. So, we don't go... If you remember when you used to do a search... And I'm not going to spend too long on this. We'll probably do a whole podcast. But you used to say, red iPhone, right now we go, what is the best iPhone? Kind of asking, asking the questions because we're getting better results back.
Yeah.
So think about that in terms of your, your blog and the content you're putting out. So what are the best iPhones? If you're selling phones. Do a post about what are the best phones.
Sure.
So SEO is key and getting that content going is huge. The problem with SEO is it can take a bit of time to kind of get it enforced. So a quick win is to get ads running, right? Ads are a quick way, Google ads, um, are a quick way of, of cheating really. Costs a bit of money, there's no point in doing a huge SEO spend on some keywords that you think might be right. Why don't you put a bit of money behind it and target them. And you're going to get that traffic coming through.
If they work, again this comes back to the ROI, if you're putting £100 into an ad and you're making £1000 out of it, what happens if you put £200 in? You're going to make £2000, SEO, ads.
So I'm really sorry. I've clearly set them off. So clearly we need another podcast on this well. We're two out of five. We're two, we're two out five. If you agree, maybe like the podcast or something. If you want a traffic thing. Three, rattle through.
Social media, there's so many people on it and we can target who they are.
Perfect attention know where they are.
Exactly, social media, get the right content out to them. Um, again, it might be the blogs that might be bringing them in, uh, education. I think we've done a few podcasts on that. Uh, but get the content out onto them on social media. Um, in a similar way that obviously you could use that with ads with social media, use groups. Right, LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, there will be your target audience sat there all chatting away. Be that helpful person within there.
Yeah, yeah. And then they already feel good when they come into it because they're finding that tribe we spoke about earlier.
Exactly, that, uh, is that four. Oh, you want one more? Uh, link building. People will be out there already, hopefully, if you've got a business, you're solving a problem. Right? Um, Hopefully. Yeah. Um, people will be asking about solutions. How do I do this? How can I get this done? What is the best product?
Do that search yourself, see what comes up, and if people are asking it in public domains, or forums, or places like that, go in being that helpful resource and saying, do you know we do this? Um, we've just had this done, let me know what you think. The best thing about that is you're not only helping that one person who's asked the question.
If you've done that search and found it, other people are going to do that search and find well, and you're going to be out there and that's going to be good. That ties back into the SEO.
I was going to say, that SEO familiarisation, keywords, all of that ties in nicely to that point, so I think wraps that up nicely.
Yep. I think that's my five. And took me less than half an hour.
I know, I'm quite impressed, as in those five not the whole podcast.
podcast. Right, I think, Jamie, I will let you pack your bags, get your suitcase packed so you can go on another trip for about five days and I'll see if I can get you on the phone to do another one. Uh, the whole idea is we want to keep this going, but we want to give you more kind of insightful information. Some actionable, points that you can use within your website.
Um, so if you are struggling with anything to do with your business that you just want Jamie and I to bash out and hopefully come up with some answers for you, then just drop it in the comments or drop it onto our website. We want to know how you're feeling about your business. We want to know how we can help, okay. And if we're generally helping you, we can help more people, that's the whole point in this podcast we want to help as many people as possible.
So make sure you subscribe for more tips, more insights on growing your business. Uh, again, thanks for tuning in and until next time, happy marketing. And remember, you can always drop any comments directly to us on our email podcast at hellomethod.co.uk