After following our tips in The 3 Dos and Don’ts of Website Optimization, you are now well on your way to leveraging search engines to drive traffic to your site. Now it’s time to take a new look at your website with fresh eyes and turn those hits into sales.

With consumers using the internet to find products and services far more than yellow pages or other traditional methods, your website design is more important than ever. .Before you ever get a chance to talk to a potential customer, they’ve already formed an opinion of you and your competition based on your websites.

Clean, not Cluttered
The very first thing to look at is to make sure your site has a clean, professional look. For customers searching online, your website is the first impression they have of your company. You want to instill confidence in the customer. Here are a few key mistakes to watch out for:

• Text color: at most you should have three colors of text. One for your body text, one for headers and/or bold text, and one for links. Many sites use less than three colors of text. These colors should fit within the overall color scheme of your site and not be jarring.
• Background: your background establishes the color scheme and presentation of your site. It should not be remotely distracting – remove background images and stick with a single color or a very subtle pattern. Generally background color should be subtle. Blue would be a bad choice, while a light pastel blue or dark blue could work well.
• Simple, logical formatting: imagine your website is a newsletter or brochure. Separate your body text into paragraphs, do not center body text, use one font size for all body text, and another for headers. Don’t jump around between sizes or type styles – it looks amateurish.
• Easy navigation: the navigation bar of your site should be simple, clear, and in the same place on every page. Research shows that if users have to click more than three times to get someplace, the majority will never go there.
• Remove distractions: music, animated gifs, and scrolling text have no place on your website. They are distracting and project an amateur image. You are a professional company and don’t need silly frills to differentiate yourself.

Sell Your Products
Don’t just post a picture of your inflatable with its name. Put a brief description under each one. Tell your customers how large it is, what some of the key selling points are and what the best applications and age ranges of the inflatables are. Don’t think of your inflatables as a list of inventory, but rather as products that you are trying to promote sell. Consider including related product links to get your customers thinking a little bit bigger.

Use Images and Videos
Every product you have should have clear, quality images of the product, and the more the better. This is probably the most important sales tool you possess. A page listing several products should have one image of each product on that page, and a link (usually the image itself) to access more images.

Images are even better if they show the product in use. Check with the manufacturer and see if they offer 360 degree 3D animated views. Better yet, see if the manufacturer offers videos of the product in use! Cutting Edge Creations will be releasing videos of dozens of its products by the IAAPA show this year. Just be sure any videos you have on your site shows the product used correctly to manufacturer’s guides, including tethering.

List Prices
Your website should list your rental prices for each unit. Some amusement rental companies make the argument that they want customers to call for prices to build a relationship with them, but research has shown that if you don’t list prices, most customers will never call you! Consumers believe that not listing prices means you are very expensive and trying to hide it.

Imagine you were looking for a product online and had three or five websites to glance over. If one of them didn’t list pricing but the others did, would you even bother calling the place without prices?

Be Easy to Contact
From every page of your website, your contact information should be no more than one click away. Once a customer has a question, or decides to call, you can still lose them if they have to search around your site to find out how to contact you.

Describe Yourself
Take every opportunity to describe and humanize yourself. In our industry you’re selling yourself and your service as much as a product rental. Don’t limit this just to an About Us page (which you should have as well) but also toss little tidbits here and there on your other pages. For example, a product description could say “…and since Widget Rentals thoroughly cleans and sanitizes every inflatable after every rental it will show up to your yard looking just as good as our pictures.”