Increasing Rankings with a High Quality Contact Us Page
After reaching your website, you want your visitors to contact you. This is typically the #1 action webmasters want people to take.
While there are different perspectives on conversion optimization, we consider a “Contact Us” page to be one of the most important aspects. Having a high-quality page that considers what search engines are looking for is vital to increasing business.
Your objective in this chapter is to understand and utilize the key elements of creating a high quality and effective “Contact Us” page.
Key Elements to a Contact Us Page
Obviously, it’s important to include basic contact information if you have a physical location: company name, address and phone number (aka NAP). This is the minimum amount of contact information that should be included. Many businesses stop there.
Here at Orange Fox, we encourage you to go above and beyond the minimum. Instead, we encourage you to aim to have the best information possible to yield the best results from both conversions and search engines.
Each industry is different, but most businesses should have the information we outline below.
Mandatory
- Description of your business – This is different than your “About Us” page. It focuses on explaining to potential customers or clients why you are the best choice for them. It shouldn’t take up the entire page (2-3 paragraphs should be fine), but it should help them understand that you are the solution to their problem.
- Map – If you don’t have a physical location that the public can visit, this is less important. It is nice for visitors to know you are a real business. If you are working from home because an office doesn’t fit your industry, you do not have to include a map. It’s up to you.
- Locations – If you have multiple locations you will want to either list each address and phone number on the contact page or simply link to each location’s page from another area of the site.
- Service Area – If you only work in certain areas or cities, make sure to add that to your site so search engines know where you serve. If your customers come to you there is no need to include this.
- Hours – If you have certain hours that your business is available make sure to let visitors know. If you are open 24/7/365, let them know that too.
- Strong Call-to-Action – Frequently businesses forget this important step. Tell your visitors to give you a call or ask for a quote. If they are on your contact page, most likely they already want to contact you. This is an easy trick that increases your number of leads by just telling people what to do as a next step.
Recommended
Social Media – Another way to show you are a legitimate company is by showing that you have social media sites that you are active on (you are active on social media, right?). Having an active Facebook and Google+ are vital. If you don’t have those set up, go do it now! Post at least once a month to show activity. Weekly is better, and more than that is ideal. YouTube is the next most important social media tool, because both search engines and visitors love videos. In addition, they help visitors to “know” you even if they’ve never met you (assuming you or someone from your business is in the video). Other important sites are Twitter, Yelp, Tumblr, Pinterest… the list goes on and on. Keep these active as much as possible or they may have an adverse affect to your business.- Contact Form – Depending on when a visitor is on your site, they may prefer to request a call back instead of calling you on the spot. In these cases it will create another way to convert a visitor into a lead. There are a number of great plugins to use for this. Most of them free or cost little. We also advise using a captcha service with your form to decrease spam (which may or may not be an issue with your website).
- Email Address – Another great way for visitors to contact you is by having your email address on your site. Unfortunately some spammers scrape the web for email addresses and sell it to other spammers. There is no simple way around this that doesn’t also make it more difficult for real leads to email you. We recommend using a specific email address for this page (also for sites like Yelp and Yellow Pages) so if it does get spammed, it will not clutter your e-mail. Another option to hide this from spammers is to have the e-mail address set as an image; this makes it more difficult for visitors to contact you, but with a short email and domain it might work well for you.
Social Media – Another way to show you are a legitimate company is by showing that you have social media sites that you are active on (you are active on social media, right?). Having an active Facebook and Google+ are vital. If you don’t have those set up, go do it now! Post at least once a month to show activity. Weekly is better, and more than that is ideal. YouTube is the next most important social media tool, because both search engines and visitors love videos. In addition, they help visitors to “know” you even if they’ve never met you (assuming you or someone from your business is in the video). Other important sites are Twitter, Yelp, Tumblr, Pinterest… the list goes on and on. Keep these active as much as possible or they may have an adverse affect to your business.Optional (but Helpful)
FAQ/Help – The second reason that people might be visiting your contact us page is to answer a question. While earning a lead on the phone is important, it’s also nice to answer simple questions without requiring them to call you. This can either be a short FAQ or a link to a FAQ/Help page with more answers.- Advertise – If you sell ad space on your site you may want to have information on your contact us page.
- Live Chat – If you would like to increase conversions, this can be a great add-on. Having a live chat option like the one offered from Live Chat Inc., has been shown to increase conversions over a typical “opt-in” form. Ideally you will have someone live available for your visitors. If not, they will have the ability to leave a message. If you respond promptly you have a higher chance of converting the visitor in to a buyer!
FAQ/Help – The second reason that people might be visiting your contact us page is to answer a question. While earning a lead on the phone is important, it’s also nice to answer simple questions without requiring them to call you. This can either be a short FAQ or a link to a FAQ/Help page with more answers.You’ve met your objective in this chapter of understanding and utilizing the key elements of creating a high quality and effective “Contact Us” page.