When poker players have a “tell” — a facial expression or movement that gives away how they are going to play the hand — they are guaranteed to lose. The same holds true for an e-commerce website’s home page. If the page has a tell — something that sends a signal to visitors that the company is unreliable or untrustworthy — the company is going to lose sales opportunities, left and right.
But there is one important difference between a poker tell and an e-commerce tell. With a poker player, only one tell is usually involved. But with an e-commerce home page, 10 or 20 or 30 tells could be involved, any one of which is enough to send website visitors off to the competition. Fixing one or two tells is not enough; the company must fix all of them.
Remember that website visitors, like poker players, are looking for tells. Eliminate every signal that says “don’t buy,” and visitors to your site will end up buying, or at least will be impressed enough to consider a purchase later.
The infographic below, E-commerce Home Page Features to Boost Conversions, gives small e-commerce businesses a step-by-step, visual blueprint for eliminating all the tells. The good news is: if you bring your home page up to the highest possible standards in this way, you will put yourself very far ahead of competitors that don’t realize they have tells, as well as those competitors that know their sites have weaknesses but lack the time, energy or budget to fix them.
In addition, fully optimizing your website puts you on a level playing field — or should we say poker table? — against even the largest of your competitors. A well-designed, informative site with superb navigation conveys that your business is competent, customer-focused and reliable.
To learn more about how to deliver a great user experience to visitors and enhance SEO performance to attract more visitors, review the infographic below, presented courtesy of Straight North.