How To Design Your Services Page To Turn Visitors Into Converts

Everywhere you turn these days, you hear and see the buzzword “SEO.” Although search engine optimization is a very effective method of obtaining traffic; without further tweaking, it can leave you at a loss for what to with the newfound streams of traffic that are heading to your website.

 

This is where the landing page comes into play. Also known as your services page, it must be fashioned in a specific way that maximizes conversions from the incoming traffic. The basic goal is to turn visitors into customers, the same way a land-based business tries to turn window-shoppers into inside-the-building shoppers.

 

Targeted Traffic Streams

 

There are several methods you can use to spruce up your services page; the first, Google Adwords campaign management, is essential to improving your return on investment. By using highly-targeted long-tail keywords, you can significantly reduce the cost of acquisition of traffic. In essence, a proper campaign practically ensures that your website visitor is already a prospective customer.

 

In the following, we’ll take a look at a handful of methods that can really super-charge your landing page to capture the incoming traffic and convert them to loyal customers.

 

First Things First: Page Speed

 

If your website is slow, then almost nothing else that you do matters. From metrics such as Google Analytics and published reports on customer trends, we’ve seen that visitors simply leave slow websites without completing a transaction. If your services page is slow, then you’re giving your competitors a gift.

 

In particular, you have to pay attention to mobile – given that a huge percentage of people buy things using their smartphones and tablets these days. The primary consideration for the mobile platform is website responsiveness; your pages must resize according to the dimensions of the viewing device, so that the user experience is a positive one.

 

Another change you can make is installing a content delivery network to speed up loading times. This has long been known as a metric that Google uses to improve your ranking in the search engine results pages, so it has double benefit.

 

Page Design and Superb Content

There’s competition out there, and it’s growing more fierce by the moment. The content on your services page must be direct and engaging; it has to be something that you, yourself, would want to take the time to read if you were in the market for that particular service.

 

This means making sure that you do not flood your page with keywords with an eye towards solely satisfying search engine requirements. Write for human readers; make scant use of long-tail keywords – just enough to unmistakably denote the topic of the page. Always keep in mind that your content is there to fulfill a need; think of it as answering the questions that are likely to be asked by people who are searching for your services.

 

This can mean you need to spruce up your offering with video, easy-to-digest infographics and a robust comment-response attitude.

 

The Landing Page is Essential

 

Since the inception of websites, there has yet to be a more consistent converter than a well-structured landing sales page. Once you have your products and services well mapped-out, you need to provide a way for your visitors to access it – this is the basic purpose of a landing page, in fact. We’ll take a look at the most important elements of this page in the interest of conversions.

 

1. Make sure you have a bold headline that points to an action. It should be clear, concise, and have your primary long-tail keyword embedded naturally in the header content.
2. Right beneath the header, you should list how your services benefit the consumer. This is different – and much more powerful – than merely denoting the features. By touting the benefits, you do more work for the consumer by telling her how the features are helpful instead of making her try to figure out which ones she needs, and doesn’t need.
3. Keep the focus on the content that’s on the current page. This means no navigation links or distracting ads. You definitely should not have ads on your service page.
4. Video is very effective because humans are not natural readers. Besides, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a thousand pictures.
5. At or near the end of the content, make it easy for the reader to share your service page on their social media networks using icons and links – visual icons are better.

 

In a similar vein, make sure to employ high-converting structures on your page – this sometimes takes a trial and error testing process, and more advanced methods such as A/B Testing, to settle on the best one for you. Some of these influential elements are on-page testimonials from reputable business and sole proprietors who have used your services, as well as technical security seals that show your level of PCI Compliance (assuming you do enough business to warrant a level higher than the first one. These have been proven to increase conversion rates.

 

The All-Important Call to Action

It is well-known in the business world that you cannot merely provide your audience with all of the information they want to know. Even if you do this perfectly, but neglect to direct them to an action, then you’ve failed insofar as your service page is concerned. People need to be told what to do; and there are several ways you can leverage this desire.

 

• Tell them to subscribe using a webform beneath the main content
• Provide them something as a result of the subscription – even if you just capture their email, you’re now building a subscriber list
• Employ coupon codes if applicable

 

You can think of many more such actions specifically tailored to your service. The point is to get the visitor into the sales funnel in some way, even if you don’t make the actual sale today. Sometimes, just getting them to download a white paper or ebook is a victory, and steadily builds your pool of customers.