The Importance of Internet Trust with your visitor

If you don't have it from your visitor you will never make a sale. That much we can pretty much well guarantee...

The HOME Page is THE MOST IMPORTANT WEB PAGE on your site.

You agree with me for sure - then why do most home pages not reflect this? In by far the majority of cases they contain meaningless images, hard sell, company information and the like.

The most important reason for any home page is to give people who visit your website the following compelling message:

By coming here you, Mrs Searcher, will find what you are looking for. It will make you thinner, richer, happier, healthier or the envy of your neighbourhood, or a non ego-centric benefits rich statement something like that. The home page will then present appropriate links to that sought after information.

This a far better approach than the more familiar (let's be honest)...

We are the biggest, best, and world famous. Our contribution to maximising the return to our shareholders situated in the largest corporate headquarters in Sandton with a board of directors including...

So unless the headline on your home page clearly, unambiguously and quickly presents the right message then chances are the visitor will leave. And by looking at your logs you will be able to see how long the average visitor spends on you site.

Take one of my websites in June - there were 8,650 unique visitors and the average time spent on the site was 183 seconds. Yet and this is the challenge that I face in the ongoing quest to improve traffic and conversion to sales ratios - only 29.7% spent more than 30 seconds on the site. This is just not long enough to do a sufficiently convincing job of creating trust in the eyes of a searcher.

The home page was viewed twice as many times as the next most popular page so this is where web page design improvement must start. Once an improvement is made it will be necessary to check to see if the average time on the site increases and make more changes to this home and other pages as necessary in attempt not to waste these valuable visitors.

In a study of the most successful headlines ever used in advertising about 40% of all headlines contained the words YOU or YOUR. None of the top 10 ever included ME, I, or WE.

It might sound very basic this yet even when when we know this "secret" we continue to use the words I, We, Me far too much. It is difficult not to and in "real life" we can frequently get away with this ego-centric approach but on the web - no it does not work and never will.

Other Home Page Opportunities

Animation in general is distracting and does not work on the Internet as it does in real life. Notice I keep using real life and everybody knows exactly what I mean yet the Internet is now also real life and just not yet considered to be so by many.

There is a sign on the way to Johannesburg International Airport that has a guy apparently hanging onto the billboard for dear life and there is another showing a woman covering her breasts because her bra has apparently been lost. The bra is shown and made from metal or plastic on another part of the billboard. Now there is no doubt that these billboards attract attention if my own experience is anything to go by but for the life of me I do not know what the point of the billboards is because I just look at the attention grabbers and not the message.

Offline marketers know that while driving to the airport you and I are NOT LOOKING for ads so they MUST attract your and my attention to have any chance at all of convincing you of a message. This is how all offline advertising works ... it is geared to attracting attention. This is more commonly known these days as DISRUPTION advertising and the majority of consumers are starting to react negatively to the unwanted bombardment

This is a fundamental difference between Internet marketing and real life (there I go again; I mean offline marketing). When a person searches the web they already know what they want and they are not looking for an attractor (or more to the point, a distraction) as described above so a flashing light show, moving cartoon or whatever only serves to annoy the visitor. They want more information, an email address, contact numbers or whatever. They do not want meaningless (in their minds) images and words. And they want it quick.