You can spend a lot of time fine-tuning your pay-per-click campaigns, all for the promise of getting potential customers to your website. However, if your site isn’t customer-friendly , visitors will desert it faster than you can blink.

To convert visitors to paying customers, make your site easy to use, easy to read, and optimized for conversions. Here are five smart ways to accomplish these goals.

Tip 1: Make your main offer as plain as day

Whether you are selling a product or a service, or simply encouraging people to subscribe to your newsletter, your main call to action should be highly visible. Don’t make customers work hard to buy your products or contact you. To make it easy for people to do business with you, try these strategies:

  • Place your offer “above the fold.” If you’re not familiar with this term, it means in the top portion of your website, where readers don’t have to scroll to see it.
  • Make the action button pop. Your “Buy Now” or “Sign Up Now” button must stand out clearly from the surrounding text. Try using a bright color that grabs the reader’s attention.
  • On long webpages, include the action button multiple times. If your landing page is a long sales letter, for example, place the action button at the top, middle, and bottom of the page. Many people will read only part of the sales letter and then skip down to the end to buy.
  • Display your phone number prominently. If you’re selling a service and want people to call you, don’t hide away your number on your Contact Us page. Display it prominently on each page—as part of the header graphic, for example.

Tip 2: Use standard website navigation

By standard, I mean use either a navigation bar across the top of the page just below the header image, or on the left side of your webpage. Using unusual or unfamiliar layouts can cause readers to perform mental gymnastics to find what they’re looking for. Rather than expend the effort, many people will simply abandon ship.

Tip 3: Use the same layout and design on each page

Keep your website style consistent. Don’t switch up colors, themes, layouts, or navigational styles from page to page, as this will only confuse people as they move around your site, and it will make your site look unprofessional.

Tip 4: Make your content easy to read

Be sure your content is easy to read and understand, or people won’t stay around long. To create reader-friendly content, try one or more of these techniques:

  • Use black text on a plain white or very light-colored background. Black on white is the most readable combination of text and color. You can also use other dark text colors on very light-colored backgrounds. Avoid placing text on a patterned background, which is very hard to read, at best, and outright annoying at worst.
  • Use a font size that’s large enough for everyone to read. Twenty-somethings can easily read small print, but many people over 45 start losing their close-up vision. If readers can’t read your content, they’ll be gone in a flash!
  • “Chunk” text into small units. On webpages that contain oceans of text, it’s best to break it into short paragraphs, which are easier for readers to scan than paragraphs that drag on and on and on….
  • Group related information under headings. A simple trick to make your content more reader-friendly is to use headings. Headings help break up the monotony of large blocks of text, and they allow people to scan for and quickly find the information they want.
  • Utilize bulleted lists. Lists help make content easier to scan. Anytime you have three or more related items to discuss, consider whether a list format, like the one you’re reading now, would be more reader-friendly than a paragraph format.
  • Emphasize key words and phrases with bold text. Use a stronger font to make words and ideas really pop, just as I’m doing in this list.

Tip 5: Hire a writer or editor

A good editor can not only help you make the content on your site easier to read (tip 4 above), but they can also make it more polished and professional. Potential customers will judge you by the words they read on your webpages. If they find errors in spelling or grammar, they might judge your site, and your products or services, as unprofessional and sloppy.

An editor will also help craft your content so that it sets the right tone for your business: friendly and engaging, yet professional and trustworthy. Sometimes just tweaking a few words on a page can make the difference between putting off potential customers or reeling them in.

Now take action

There you have it. Five tips for making your website friendlier to potential customers. Now it’s time to take some action. Here are your next steps:

  1. Visit your own website, just as though you were one of your customers.
  2. Choose one or two of my tips to implement right away, and then, do it.
  3. Track the results. See if you get more inquiries, sales, or signups as a result of the changes.

Time you invest in making your website customer-friendly today can pay off handsomely with more people calling you for your services or buying your company’s products.

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