When creating a website that provides a service or sells products it is essential to put a lot of thought into how to highlight the unique selling points (USP) that will make you stand out from the competition and how to clearly display your websites call-to-action (CTA), whether it be a contact button, phone number, web form or similar.

Highlight Your Unique Selling Points

What makes your website stand out from the crowd? If you are creating a business website, do you offer very competitive rates or prices on services and products, do you provide items that no other website stocks, can you offer tools that will help potential customers make decisions? If your website is a forum or a blog, what is the unique information you are providing for visitors, why should they register and revisit your website rather than go elsewhere?

Once you have your USP, think about how you are going to display them on your website so that they are instantly available to encourage visitors to make the bite, for example if you are offering free delivery, don't leave it until checkout for this to be displayed, add it to the product page or even the website header. Can you target certain USP towards the most relevant pages within your website? Can you highlight your USP off-site within search engine listings or other ads?

Clearly Display your Call-to-Action

Once you have done the hard work of attracting visitors to your website who are ready to sign up to a service, purchase a product, register for your forum etc., it is important that you clearly display your CTA and make it obvious to the visitor how they should proceed. Also, make it easy for them. If they have to complete a form, make it as short as possible, don't include unnecessary fields in the initial sign up which could be requested at a later date. Offer the option for you to call them rather than just a phone number, people can sometimes be put off be having to make the first contact unannounced.

Again display a targeted CTA for relevant webpages and make them stand out from the rest of your website design by using bigger fonts, buttons or contrasting colours. Put your CTA in a prime location above the browser fold and make it constant throughout your website so that visitors become familiar with it.

Track your Conversions

Once you have set up your webpages with your USP and the CTA, it is then important to track how well each webpage converts. Using something like Google Analytics you can track the visitors journey through to conversion (a sale, completion of contact form, registration etc.) and over time discover which combination have the highest conversion rate. Understanding these results will help you adjust webpages to maximise conversion throughout your website and help you gain knowledge for future projects. Other website statistical packages which will do the same job are available such as Index Tools, Stats Counter and Omniture.