Your Contact Us page may not be the most interesting page on your website but it is one of the most critical. A quick look at your analytics will show your Contact Us page is one of the most visited pages on your website, so treat it with the respect it deserves.
For service-based businesses, it’s often the final page your visitors will go to before they get in touch with you. Don’t leave them with a bad experience or worse still, put them off completely from picking up the phone or sending an email.
How can you stop your Contact Us page from putting the brakes on your business?
Contact us page essentials
First of all, include these essential elements:
Contact form
Make it simple and hopefully deter the spammers by using a form. (Note – there are various plugins and apps you can use to deter spam but they don’t always eliminate it completely). The key fields will depend on your business but I would recommend keeping it as short as possible otherwise you can put people off, especially when we are guarded about our personal data. The minimum fields will be something like this:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Company (for B2B businesses)
- Comments
These fields will help you understand who is contacting you, do a little research on the person and possibly qualify the lead. You could also add phone number, website or any other custom fields that are specific to your business.
You should also include a link to your privacy policy and comply with GDPR regulations if you intend on using their data in any way for marketing purposes. Make that clear upfront.
Forms are a useful way of measure the conversation rate on your website and can be tracked in your analytics.
Your address and location
The contact us page should list your business locations. The question of whether you put your full postal address depends on whether you welcome clients to your premises, or if you are a smaller business and perhaps work from home. My recommendation would be that if you operate in a business premises, make your address available. It you operate at home and don’t want to share your home address, at least mention the town and county (this really helps with local optimisation – more on that below). I don’t know about you, but I go to a contact page to authenticate the business, and if I can’t see where they are located, my trust decreases as I wonder what they are hiding from.
Phone Number and Email
Make it easy for them to get in touch and if there are different departments or people that are key contacts, be sure to include all of them so visitors can quickly find the right information.
Social Media
Social media is another way for people to engage with your business, so make it easy for them to find you. For many websites, you may well have your social media links in your header and footer anyway but it won’t do any harm to include links within the main contact us page.
Supercharge your Contact us page
Once you’ve got the essentials on your contact us page you need to think about supercharging your page so it helps both attract and convert clients.
Call to Action
Bearing in mind it’s one of the most visited pages on your site, use it to your advantage by adding a clear call to action. Not everyone going to the contact us page is going to fill out the form. They might be looking for your business email or address, and you should provide more value than just those two things. It can be as simple as adding a call to action to read your blog. Others could be to demo your product, download a how-to guide or watch a video. Calls to action make visitors stay on your website, which is a great ranking signal to the search engines.
Blog Content
By including a list of recent blog articles or popular articles on the contact us page., it shows visitors some of your thought-leadership and provide them with another option if they don’t complete the form. Like the social media links, this may well be in the footer already.
Optimise the page for your location
This is particularly pertinent for local businesses that target geographic locations. Use the Contact Us page to list the areas you operate in – that might be both where you are based and where you service your clients. If you don’t list the areas, then it’s hard to optimise your website and rank on the search results for that location. And it’s frustrating for your site visitors who are trying to work out if your business is local to them.
It sounds really obvious, but I’m always amazed at the amount of websites I see that have no mention of where the business is located or which areas they operate it.
I hope that’s given you some useful ideas to improve your Contact Us page. If you need any help with your website content and strategy, please get in touch with me.