We all want good organic rankings that will drive visitors to our websites and we all want content or products on those websites that will engage and entertain our visitors. But all of this alone will not make a business profitable. To generate revenue we need those visitors to convert to customers.
Too often businesses focus on rankings and visits when the most important Key Performance Indicator is Conversion Rate. How many people are actually putting their hands in their pockets and buying what your business is offering?
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Clearly, then, having a good online presence and being found by customers in organic search or paid search is not enough. The website has to perform the essential task of making sure visitors buy. And to ensure they do this there has to me a seamless flow from the landing page through to the point where a visitor takes a revenue-generating action. That means one of the first tasks for any business entrepreneur is to decide what the main objective of the website is i.e. what actually constitutes a conversion.
A conversion could be any of these calls-to-action (CTA):
- Purchasing a product
- Downloading a PDF
- Filling out a contact form
- Requesting a callback
Once you have established your goals then you can calculate the Conversion Rate, which is simply the percentage of visitors to the website who complete an action. And once you know your current CR that puts you in a great position to improve it.
3 Ways Of Improving Conversion Rate
It’s worth noting that conversion rates vary widely across different industries so instead of trying to ensure a “good” conversion rate simply aim, instead, to improve the CR you currently have. Very few websites have perfect CRs so there will always be room for improvement.
1. Use The Best Calls-To-Action
Talk to your web developer and your SEO consultant so that you can develop a unified approach to the best type of CTAs for your industry. The developer will know what works well in terms of flow and usability on the website and the SEO expert will know which visitors, from which sources, will be the best targets for a particular type of CTA.
Together they will be able to resolve any issues with a low conversion rate by ensuring the wording of the CTA creates an emotional trigger within the target audience; and the size, position, and colors used will ensure visitors are easily and naturally drawn to take the desired action.
2. Understand Visitor Behaviour
However, even using best practice for the style and placement of CTAs is not totally foolproof. Whilst visitors tend to view the left-hand side of a web page more than the right, this behaviour is very dependent on the design of the website. To remove any uncertainty about where CTAs should be best placed you can use heatmap software. Heatmaps are the best tools for understanding how real-life visitors interact with a web page.
Heatmaps generate an image showing which areas of the page visitors spend the most time on. This will help you understand where to place a CTA, such as a button, for maximum benefit in converting visitors to customers. They can also be revealing in terms of sections of a page that visitors particularly like or dislike, enabling business owners to capitalize on the content or images potential customers prefer.
For those with WordPress websites the heatmap plugin HotJar is a simple way to find out more about visitor behavior. Once you know that then obvious solutions for improvement are likely to present themselves.
3. Optimise Landing Pages
There’s no need to redesign a whole website to improve conversion rate but redesigning the main landing pages could be time and effort well-spent.
Some of the important factors to review are:
- User experience on mobile devices – with more and more people using a small screen for browsing the internet your main web landing pages need to work well on a small screen to avoid deterring potential customers.
- Page loading time – pages that are slow to load are much more likely to result in visitors abandoning your site than almost anything else. Use Google’s free tool PageSpeed Insights to check how your landing pages stack up.
- Cluttered layout – is there simply too much on a page so your important messages are not getting through? Try adding more white space, tabs, or accordions as a quick and easy solution.
- Too many CTAs – a web page cannot be all things to all people. Decide the main goal for each landing page and ensure your CTAs are only aimed at completing that single goal.
These are just 3 ways that you can start improving conversion rate to ensure that when people visit your website they want to take, and can easily take a revenue-generating action. Conversion Rate Optimisation can be a long, slow process but the sooner your start the sooner you will see the benefits.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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