Revenue Journal®

A lot of entrepreneurs obsess over their search engine marketing and Adwords campaigns, to make sure that they get a high listing when someone goes searching for their type of product. Nothing wrong with that, but given the endless demands on the typical business owner, there's a tendency to focus on lead generation at the expense of conversion.

It's the easiest thing in the world to think that your website is "good enough," and that it is not a barrier to the sale. You're used to it, it makes sense to you, and you get enough sales to believe that it is doing its job. There's only so much time in a day, and once your website is "done," it's easy to just assume it's working hard enough for you, and focus your attention to lead-generation campaigns.

Meanwhile, the expectations of your customers continue to rise, it's easier than ever to find plenty of alternative choices while doing a search, (especially using something like Google Products), and a lot of companies - including your competitors - have started to figure out how to answer customer questions more effectively. That's the real secret of website success, and not only from a conversion point of view. The more information you have about your products on your website, the more likely it is that your site will be picked up by a search engine.

Every successful sale has one thing in common, regardless of the product or service being sold. The questions asked by the customer are all answered to the customer's satisfaction. If your site answers all the questions the customer has, without digging, the customer will stay - and is much more likely to buy. If your site fails to answer a question, or it's just to difficult to find the answer, the customer will click away in a nanosecond and all that effort you put into your search and online advertising will have gone to waste.

Here are some of the questions that your site must answer in order to keep the customer moving towards the sale.

1) Does your site look professional? Even the most die-hard online shoppers will hesitate to give their credit card information to a site that looks unprofessional. They'll pop in, see "amateur," and pop out. With all the website design and template options available, there really isn't any excuse for a messy-looking website.

2) Is there enough information about the product on your site? Skimpy product descriptions are frustrating and raise doubts about your product. Today's web customers know exactly what they want, and the more specific you are, the more sales you will make.

A recent search for portable battery for a laptop led me to this site, partly because they come up so high in all the search results. But note how this particular page has basically no information about the product. How much does it weigh? What size is it? What kind of connections does it accept?

Here we have unit costing $900, and they only have a one-sentence description that doesn't even begin to answer the customer's questions. This site, on the other hand, had a complete product description, many pictures, and a compatibility check section. Guess who got the order?

3) Does your site include educational material? You have a lot of knowledge about your product, floating around in your head. Your customers could learn a lot from you, if you would just write it down and post it. Even pages describing "how to buy [your type of product]" can be useful for your potential customers, especially if you're selling something complex or something people only buy once or a few times in a lifetime.

4) Once the person has decided to buy, is the next step obvious? Here's a product page that has a lot of useful information, but there's no way to buy. If you don't take orders over the web, say so - and make sure your phone number and hours of operation are located where the shopper would expect to find the "Add to Cart" button. Of course, one has to wonder why a company would have so much information on the web but not offer to sell their products on the web.

5) Make it easy for the person to contact you with a question. A lot of sites make it impossible to contact a real, live human being. This is a big mistake. Make sure your contact information is either on every page or one click away from every page. While it seems obvious that you should make yourself as available to your customers as possible, it's amazing how many sites don't do it. I guess they're hoping the orders will come in without them having to do much work. That dream died years ago.

6) Make sure your sales staff considers web leads important. One of our clients is working hard on improving their conversion rates. Their inbound lead program is pretty healthy, but they're not satisfied with the number of sales they're closing. A thorough examination of the situation has convinced them that their salespeople didn't think web leads were as "hot" as phone leads. But what could be hotter than someone who is in the very act of making a purchase?

That's what people are doing when they shop on the web. They want to make their decision as efficiently as possible, and go back to whatever else they normally do. The company that is ready to answer their questions, no matter how they are asked, is the company most likely to make the sale.