HubShout | Online Marketing Solutions

I wanted to create a thread to discuss what elements a site needs to convert well. This is part art and part science and each type of business will have different answers (i.e. a plumber site will need different attributes to convert well than an e-commerce site).

I found a site during my travels that is not a customer site. It has many elements that I think are important to converting visitors into sales. it is a garage Door repair company so it is a typical client that anyone of us might have.

Maryland Garage Door

Things I liked.

Aesthetics

1) Clean and modern looking. It flows well.

2) It pops. The use of best price guarantee badge, the "new" image over the price matcher button and the font for the phone numbers on the top right all work together well to create an interesting visual.

3) Easy to read Buttons and widget squares. Text is easy to read too. Nav bar is solid, it mentions residential and commercial.

Layout

1) Contact form is above the fold

2) Phone numbers are above the fold. In fact the whole site with the exception of footer info and brand badges are above the fold. The reality is that 90% of visitors do not scroll down.

3) Multiple conversion points: Everything drives towards a conversion. They have multiple discount offers, a free quote offer, a same day service offer, a 24 hour availability statement and a best price guarantee.

4) I like the "Door imagination system". A great way to increase time on site and engage the customer.

Nice... But what about yellow highlight text and testimonials? You know, like, "This system helped me earn $3,290 / week, from home, here's proof!" LOL

Wow. This site really is a conversion built site. I really do like everything about it. Even down to the colors. Cool and not very harsh on the eyes. Doesn't drive people away. Made me want to dig deeper.

I will have to move their grade down to a B+. A testimonial would be a great addition. I would also like to see them brag about any awards,recognition,professional affiliations, and or BBB affiliation.

A nice button/link to their local search pages would be good.... say... Google+ Local or Yelp! pages.... Other social media widgets (FB or Twitter) would be nice to see as well. I like to have all the information just a click away, I don't want to spend a lot of time searching for it, especially if i'm comparing companies. If you have reviews on independent sites like Google, yahoo, Yelp!, Citysearch......(etc, etc...), people will be more likely to trust them since they typically are honest to both sides of the conversation. And... There's my plug for local search and reviews. Agree? Disagree?

I agree with Matt. They are doing a lot of things right. It is clearly very well thought out with a clear objective in mind. The only thing I would add, is that they should consider hierarchy in how the information is included in the design.

Test

It has two dead links on the hompage, almost no readable copy, and no alt tags on all the images.

Right. But those seo factors don't matter too much for conversion.

Don't you need visitors before you can convert them to customers? How is ignoring the most basic of onpage seo helping drive visitors?