Optimise your Website

Is your Website up to date?

Does your landing page (the first page your customer sees) actually tell the prospect (they are not a 'customer' yet) what you can do for them?

Does it showcase your bestselling items?  And /Or the items you really want to sell?

Who is the important person on your website – you, or your potential customer?

Yes, the customer does want to know about you – but usually only in relation to how you can help them.

So don’t just tell them how great you are, tell them that you are great and that means that you are the best supplier for what they want.

Or are you just showing your visitor pretty pictures?

Does the page talk directly to your customer, and tell them how you can help them with what they want – or is it all about you, and leaves the customer not really knowing what to do from there?

A general  ‘contact us’ form does not help the customer clarify their thinking.

Are you leading the customer through the information, and the options that they actually want to know about?

Are you giving them all the information they need?

If they feel that you understand them, and can help them, then they are more likely to take the next step towards actually placing an order.

So look at your website as if you are a customer with a purchase in mind. (Do this a few times for the different products you want to sell.

• Is he a Dad looking for a Birthday Cake for Little Jonny who is turning 9 in a month?
• Perhaps a Grandma looking for a Christening Cake?
• Are they an Engaged Young Couple looking for the Best and Biggest Wedding Cake their guests have ever seen?
• Do they want a beautifully spooky Halloween Party Cake to impress the neighbours?
• Is she a Single Mom wanting a nice, but not too expensive, cake for her daughter's Quinceañera? (15th Birthday)

Does your site say to every one of these people that you are the best cake supplier for them?

But, if you specialize in say, Wedding Cakes, and don’t ever want to do Birthday or Halloween Cakes, then make it obvious that is your specialty, so they don’t waste their time looking for what you don’t have, and they don’t waste your time with unnecessary queries.

If you do want orders of many types of cakes, then make it easy for them to find the information they need for their particular occasion, here on your website, today.

This may require grouping photos into types, or perhaps showing a list of Occasions with links to a different page for each, so that you can include specific information & options, for each category.

Whatever type of Cake they want, Ask them questions about what options they want, and get them to send a list of answers on a ‘contact us’ type of form on each category page.

Add a 'Best time for me (store) to call you (customer)?"  and offer some time ranges suitable for you.

Put the questions that you normally start with, when talking to your customer, on the form, with a space for each answer. So that when you call them back, you already have some idea about what they want and you have already made them think about some of the specifics that they want.

If they have already made some decisions about what they want, and know that you will be calling them, they are less likely to look around further at someone else's website, because the process has already begun. (They can put 'half a tick' on that to-do list!)

Of course, be prepared for the customer to have completely changed their mind about the answers before you even talk to them. If they have changed their answers, then they are even better organized, and have clarified their own thoughts, so they are actually one step closer to placing the order, before you have even spoken to them.

Are there too many options on your website?   For instance - do you offer 250 different flavors - So they are just confused? Do they get choice paralysis on that page? If it's too hard, they will leave! How many options are too many?  Should you offer fewer, and ask if they have something else in mind, or tell them more are available?

Could you group the choices into a few categories – Classic, Summer, Floral, Fruit, Wild, Trending, etc, so they have a better idea of what the flavor is likely to be and can reduce the actual number they are trying to choose from?  They are then more likely to actually make a choice, rather than leave your site overwhelmed & confused.

While we are talking about option choices, do you prompt for just few basic "types" of cake - birthday, wedding, christening?   Do you also tell your customers that you do anything they want, such as - 4th July, Baby Shower, Baptism Christening, Bar & Bat Mitzvah, Chinese New Year, Christmas, Divorce, Diwali, Graduation, Halloween, Kwanzaa, Mother's Day, Quinceanera, Retirement, Thanksgiving, Valentines Day,
Wedding Anniversary, etc.

If all these options (and you can probably think of more,) are actually mentioned on your website, then your website is more likely to be shown in a Google search for those occasion cakes.  List them all as 'keywords & keyword phrases -  "Divorce Cake", or "Divorce Celebration Party Cake" to make long tail keywords, that are more likely to be found in a search for that occasion - your website designer will know what we are talking about here.

Your site should of course always have the usual Contact Us, About Us, Store Email Address, Store Street Address, Phone Number, & perhaps a Map so they can see where you actually are.   w

As well as your address, somewhere on your website you should also mention all the suburbs/towns you consider your local customer base - so that when Google gets a search for "cake stores in (a suburb a few miles away)" Google will know to return your store in the results as well.

 

Consider putting an actual order form for Seasonal Items that your customers can easily order in advance for you, eg 4th July Cupcakes & Cookies.

If you have a shopping cart on your site, you could have 12 x 4th July Cupcakes as a product they can put into their 'cart" and order and pay in advance for.

You can set some pick-up dates as part of the item.  eg "12 x 4th July Cupcakes for pickup on 2nd July" as the item definition, with another item being "6 x 4th July Cupcakes for pickup on 3rd July". And the same for Cookies etc.

If you don't want to put a shopping cart on your site, make a contact form for those orders. You cannot take their payment through that, but you could arrange to phone them back to finalize the order.    Make sure to include a prompt for their name and phone number, or you will have to email them back for that info.

If you do want to include Taking Orders on your website, see this is a great example. It will not be suitable for all types & sizes of stores, but have a look and take some great ideas from the Cakes Order Website Link Here

You should always include your Social Media links. Many customers like to see the newest posts and comments back from other customers.  We recommend putting these links in the header or footer sections (rather than on another page) so that they can be easily found from any page.  If the customer wants them but cannot find them, they may leave because they could not satisfy that curiosity.

So again – look at your site from those customer’s point of view – or ask someone else to pretend to be a customer looking for that list of customer/cake types above. Ask them to give you honest feedback on how they felt going to your site as that customer.  (This is called CX – the Customer Experience!)  Ask them to be a little bit hard on you to get a more honest opinion. (Or ask them, to ask one of their friends, to do that, in case they don't want to strain your relationship with criticism.)

Each page should also end with a prompt to the customer on what to do next – a prompt to visit the next logical page or a Call To Action such as “email us now at . . . .  for . . .”    or    “Phone (name) on 123 555 123 to check availability for . . . .”    or    “Leave your details on this form and we will get back to you”     or anything else that would be appropriate for that page.

Then, after you have some honest feedback, talk to your website designer about ways to improve that Customer Experience.

 

You should also have Google Analytics linked to your site so that you can see how many visitors you had and compare that to how many contacts/orders came through to you.  You won't get 100%. If you get 20-30% or more, that is a good result, and if you have the statistics/numbers, then you can make adjustments and see those numbers improve.

Google Analytics can also tell you what pages were the ones that were looked at the most, so you can see what your visitors were most interested in. So if you have different pages for Wedding, Ladies Birthday, Kids Birthday etc, then you can see how many visitors looked at each of those pages.

It can also tell you what the Exit Pages were - so you can see where they left your site from.   If you look at the highest exit pages, see if that was a logical finishing page, or if they might have left because they were confused or scared off by something.

To find the Exit page,  go to Behaviour > Site Content> Exit Pages on your Google Analytics Account Page.

Your website designer will be able to help you with Google Analytics as well.