What is the point of a web­site? Depend­ing on who you ask you will get a pletho­ra of answers. Some web­sites are designed to help you show up in google, oth­ers are there for cred­i­bil­i­ty pur­pos­es, some are to sell prod­ucts and ser­vices direct­ly from the web­site. No mat­ter what your answer is, in the end, they all come down to one thing. Sell­ing! The world runs on the all mighty dol­lar, and the abil­i­ty to sell is crit­i­cal to all efforts of your business.

That being said there are tons of dif­fer­ent design trends year after year, and keep­ing up on them can be exhaust­ing. There are 7 time-test­ed meth­ods to sell ser­vices online via your small busi­ness website.

Sell Services Online? Try These Website Design Tips

Have Your Contact Form or Opt-in Above the Fold

Above the fold is the top half of your web­site. It is the first area peo­ple see. The major­i­ty of your web­site vis­i­tors will look at this area and make a deci­sion to stay or leave. That is why it is crit­i­cal that your con­tact form or opt-in is above the fold. It will get exposed to the major­i­ty of your web­site traffic.

Clear Big Picture Selling Service

We are visu­al crea­tures and 90 per­cent of all infor­ma­tion is com­mu­ni­cat­ed through our eyes. We instinc­tive­ly trust things we can imag­ine or see, even if the infor­ma­tion isn’t 100 per­cent true or accu­rate. We want to believe that the mechan­ic in grease over­alls does a bet­ter job fix­ing our car than the one in the clean over­alls. We believe he got into the nit­ty grit­ty and fixed our car, but the amount of grease on his over­alls has lit­tle to do with his competence.

Hav­ing a clear high-res­o­lu­tion pic­ture at the top of your web­site allows poten­tial cus­tomers to start imag­in­ing what suc­cess looks like. Ser­vice like life coach­ing, have a pletho­ra of pho­tos acti­vates your cus­tomers desire to do.

Fresh Looking Design

A fresh look­ing design sim­ply means not hav­ing a dat­ed site. If I look at your web­site and I can tell that it is out of date, you lost my trust. Why would I go to an accoun­tant that has a web­site from the 1990’s? Is your knowl­edge of the tax laws dat­ed to the 1990’s also?

Your web­site is the phys­i­cal equiv­a­lent of what you are wear­ing right now. Are you suit­ed up in a styl­ish blaz­er and rock­ing kicks, or are you in sweat­pants with 3‑day old spaghet­ti stains on them?

Social Handles Clearly Prevalent with Following and Activity

When I check out your web­site I am look­ing for two things. The first is all the rea­sons I should trust you, the sec­ond is all the rea­sons I shouldn’t trust you. It is my respon­si­bil­i­ty as a con­sumer to make the best choice for me, there­fore I want to rule you out as a poten­tial option.

Your respon­si­bil­i­ty is to make the deci­sion easy for me. Hav­ing your social me han­dles clear­ly present on your site allows me to trust you more. When I click over to your Face­book, Twit­ter, Insta­gram, or Pin­ter­est page I want to see activity.

I want to see you post­ing reg­u­lar­ly, engag­ing with cus­tomers, answer­ing cus­tomer sup­port. If you do all those things, then I know I have an easy point of con­tact if I need it. I know there is a human behind the busi­ness that I can speak too.

Social Proof

My father who is a long time entre­pre­neur gave me a lit­tle piece of advice, 99.99 per­cent of peo­ple do not want to be invoice #1. Peo­ple want to know that you have done this before and you are an expert. On your web­site, you want to show peo­ple that they made the right decision.

There are tons of ways to show social proof. Just to name a few exam­ples of social proof.

• Blog arti­cle social shares
• Join the 43,683 oth­er entre­pre­neurs on our mail­ing list
• 1473 reviews on yelp with a 4.4‑star rating
• Testimonials

Testimonials Clearly Visible

Tes­ti­mo­ni­als are a form of social proof but they deserve a cat­e­go­ry all on their own.

Your cus­tomers are not afraid to spend mon­ey. If they are hit­ting your web­site there is a high chance they actu­al­ly want to pur­chase. What they are afraid of though is “wast­ing” their mon­ey. Cus­tomers don’t want to expe­ri­ence poor ser­vice, poor qual­i­ty, or a poor expe­ri­ence. That is why hav­ing tes­ti­mo­ni­als of your prod­uct or ser­vice is an excel­lent way to alle­vi­ate their fears.

A cus­tomer wants to know that you have had clients just like them and know how to han­dle the prob­lems. Even though you and I both know that 99 per­cent of all clients prob­lems are the same, they think their sit­u­a­tion is special.

I can’t tell you the num­ber of times peo­ple asked me as a social media expert “I see you have great results in X indus­try but have you ever han­dled Y indus­try it is dif­fer­ent after all.”

I find this fun­ny because Y indus­try is no dif­fer­ent than x indus­try, it involves peo­ple know­ing, lik­ing and trust­ing you. But you have to alle­vi­ate that fear.

Locations

Google is the king of the Inter­net and sets the laws of the land. One of Google’s laws is the law of rel­e­vance. Google wants to show the best most rel­e­vant web­site to the per­son mak­ing the search. The more they can do this, the more mon­ey they make.

When you type “plumber near me” into Google it will show ever plumber who oper­ates near your cur­rent location.

If I live in LA, I don’t want a plumber who oper­ates exclu­sive­ly in Tal­la­has­see to show up in my results.

Hav­ing your areas of oper­a­tion will help you max­i­mize the traf­fic you gen­er­ate to those par­tic­u­lar locations.
Addi­tion­al­ly hav­ing those loca­tions on oth­er sites like Google +, Yelp, Trip advi­sor, and social medias helps too.

All in all, these 7 time-test­ed web­site trends will help you sell your ser­vice based busi­ness. Did I miss any, leave your design trend in the com­ments below.

SOURCE