Why You Should Drop Everything And Put A Widget On Your Website
Since website design was put into the hands of the consumer (and ecommerce has been made easy with platforms like Shopify), everyone wants to know the other side of it: How the heck do you get people to buy your stuff?
The internet is filled with expensive guides and courses you can use to learn how to do SEO and generate traffic in order to generate more sales. But that’s not always the right place to start. If you have any kind of traffic that isn’t converting, then getting more traffic isn’t going to help matters.
You need to focus on converting your existing traffic first – and you can do that by using widgets.
A widget is a basic embeddable application
In the world of website design, the term “widget” is used to describe a stand-alone application designed to be embedded into a webpage in order to display special content. For example, Yelp provides users with widgets they can embed on a website to display their rating and reviews. Widgets are generally embedded by copying and pasting a snippet of JavaScript into the HTML of a page.
Here are three ways the simplicity of widgets can help you increase conversions:
1. Display dynamic location maps
Nothing frustrates people more than not being able to find the address or a map on the website of a business they want to visit. Since most people use GPS or their smartphones for navigation, sometimes all they need is your address and a quick glance at a map.
If you don’t make it easy for customers to find you, they’ll find your competition. Thankfully, widgets make it easy to add interactive maps to your website where visitors can not only see where you are but get driving directions with a couple clicks.
Here’s an example of a sidebar widget in action, displaying an interactive map from Google to help customers find the business location. This widget is created and provided by Google and embedded into the website using JavaScript.
2. Widgets can enhance navigation usability
Your website navigation is your website’s biggest asset. Even if you’re selling the best product in the world at the lowest price possible, if your visitors can’t easily navigate your website, they’re probably going to leave and you’ll miss out on sales.
Over the years, website navigation has (thankfully) evolved into a standard drop-down menu with sub menus, like these 8 examples here. This type of navigation allows visitors to mouse over main options to reveal a selection of sub options without having to load multiple pages just to get to their destination. But drop-down menus can work against you if they offer visitors too many options.
If your website has hundreds of pages, it doesn’t make sense to overload your visitors with all of the options on the main menu. Instead, you can give people general navigation options and then use widgets to display a dynamically generated hierarchy of links as they navigate through your site.
For example, if you’re a local business serving multiple cities in multiple states, you can provide the user with the option to select their state. Once the user selects their state, a widget can be used to dynamically provide additional navigation to select their city based on the state they’ve selected from the previous menu.
3. Distributing testimonials across your website
Testimonials are important to add to your website if you want to provide social proof that people love your products. And while many people tend to create a single page to collect all of their testimonials in one spot, there’s a much better way.
Distribute your testimonials across all of your pages
For best results, you should always put your testimonials in front of your visitors without making them work for it. A great way to do this is by using a widget that will dynamically display testimonials automatically across the pages of your website – including your homepage.
Just because you have a main menu link titled “testimonials” doesn’t mean anyone is going to click on it. Some people will, but most people won’t. By using a widget, you can be sure they’ll be visible to your visitors, no matter what pages they visit.
If you want to allow your customers to write reviews and testimonials while visiting your page and have them automatically show up on your website, you can use Testimonial Robot and even get your rich snippet ratings to show up in Google.
Widgets boost conversions by enhancing user experience
Widgets are simple and have a limited function; yet, they can be one of the most powerful assets to your website when used to their full capacity. They make it simple for you to display necessary information like maps and testimonials without having to deal with complicated code.
When you use widgets to enhance your user experience, your content will become irresistible – that’s how you’ll see more conversions.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
