Why your website is confusing
You might think that a bad website is the enemy to conversion, and you’d be right. But the silent killer is a confusing website. If your website is bad, your potential customer will leave. If it’s confusing, they’ll come away knowing less than when they arrived.
There are a few ways in which websites can be confusing. Let’s take a look at them, as well as exploring what the quick fix and the long-term fixes are.
A jumbled tone of voice
If you sound like Danny Dyer on your homepage and Queen Victoria on your About page, your customers are going to get personality whiplash. This is more common than you think when different people write different parts of the website, or if it’s an ongoing project cobbled together over the years that your brand has developed.
Quick fix: A site-wide copy audit to point out the inconsistencies so that you can sharpen them up.
Long-term sort-out: A tone of voice guide to make sure everyone who writes for your brand knows how to hit the right notes.
Mixed messages
You’re shouting about price on your homepage. But you’re also ringing the bell about how convenient, straightforward and easy to use your product is. It’s fine to have a few things you want to be known for, but there needs to be some strategy and structure in what you shout about when. Otherwise it’s a bit like being in a busy market with everyone shouting for your attention: you get overwhelmed and come away without any of the things you needed.
Quick fix: Identify how many messages you’re pushing on your homepage then try to reduce it down to one or two of the most important ones.
Long-term sort-out: A brand messaging hierarchy with accompanying copy snippets will make putting together any marketing copy, from website copy to a new brochure, easy and strategic.
Navigational nightmare
You’ve got great chat about why you and why now, your reader’s interested, but at the end you just leave them hanging. There’s no obvious clue as to what to do next or how they can take the next step on their journey with you. Clear websites need a clear user journey that’s well-signposted and easy for your reader to follow. No confusing calls to action (CTAs), calls to action that don’t feel interesting or relevant or skipping calls to action altogether.
Quick fix: Keep CTA language clear and simple, and use language you would use in everyday life, so rather than “show more” you might say “find out more”.
Long-term sort-out: Plot your website’s pages in the order you imagine your reader visiting them, then make sure you’ve clearly linked from one to the next to help your customer make that trip with you.
Too much too soon
Otherwise known as the curse of knowledge. You’re the expert in your field and you want to share all that wisdom with your reader. That’s why they came to you, right? Yes, absolutely. But it’s very common for websites to get bogged down in the process, the jargon and the technicality, and lose their reader somewhere along the way. At this stage, they don’t need to know the intricacies. And if you start dropping fancy language, they’re going to click away faster than you can say “cross-functional end-to-end synergies to optimise your holistic enterprise-level paradigm”.
The quick fix: Show your homepage to someone outside your industry and ask them to tell you what you do in a sentence. If they can’t, you’ve gone wrong.
The long-term sort-out: Develop a value proposition framework that is clear and jargon free and lets you define who you are, what you do and why, in just a few simple words.
If you’d like to chat more about writing for your business, I’d love to hear from you.