Don’t Leave Your Website Visitors Alone and Confused


Filed under: Website Copywriting

Are you leading your website visitors astray?

Are you visitors ever finding themselves alone, on dead-end pages, with nowhere to turn?

Is your website making your visitors wonder, “Where should I go next??”

If you’re working hard to get people to your site only to confuse or frustrate them once they arrive, all that hard work is going right out the window.

Dead End Pages

“Dead end” pages in websites fail to give visitors a sense of where they should be going next or what actions they have the option of taking.

Let’s take a look at your website.

Let’s say you provide an interesting, thorough company overview on your site’s About Us page. Great. But if that’s all you provide, you’ve got yourself a dead end page.

In other words, after a site visitor reads the content on your About Us page, he’ll arrive at the bottom of the page with no suggestions as to where to go next, what else he can learn, or what actions he might want to take.

To make sure your About Us page isn’t a dead end page, you need to provide visitors with options and gentle guidance toward other areas of your site. Perhaps place a link at the bottom of the page that suggests they now review your Services page to see all the ways in which you help people like them. Or perhaps add a bold button to the page’s sidebar that tells visitors to fill out your convenient online form to schedule an appointment with one of your brilliant consultants.

By suggesting next steps, actions to take, and other content to review, you’re making sure this page isn’t a dead end page.

“Where am I supposed to go next?”

Don’t let your visitors read through a section of your site’s information and then wonder, “Okay, so … now what? Am I supposed to order this product? Where are the other links? How do I get to the other pages with those photos? Do I have to call in for a consultation? Do they even have an office location near me?”

Text and easily-noticed buttons and links that use verbs to tell visitors what they should do next are called Calls To Action, or CTAs.  Calls to Action help prevent your website’s pages from becoming dead ends. They help your website’s visitors flow through your site and move from page to page intuitively and effortlessly. They help visitors understand what they can do, how they can take action and what the next step could be.

Examples of Calls To Action include…

  • “Call Now! (970-789-7899)”
  • “Download our List of Snow-Loving Flowers”
  • “Watch our demo video”
  • “Schedule your appointment online”

By providing a bit of gentle guidance via links and Calls To Action that tell your visitors what to do (e.g., Call Now!), you can show people around your site and increase their comfort levels while encouraging them to take the action(s) you want them to take.  Your visitors will feel less disoriented and be less likely to leave shortly after their arrival.  Your hard work getting people to your site won’t be wasted.