Whether your goal is to inform, connect, engage or sell, your website needs to convert visitors into users to be successful. So, how do you get more conversions from your site visitors? The answer isn’t as straight forward as change this to that, or remove this add that, but here are some elements to review on your site and possibly tweak, change or add to increase your conversion rate.
Determining Your Conversion Rate
Depending on your site goals your conversion rate may be to checkout and purchase a product, enter contact information in order to download white papers, or even just create a login or account. First determine what the goal of your site is and what a conversion means to you. The take the number of visitors and divide that by the number of conversions and this equals your conversion rate. Some people use the total number of visitors including new and returning visits, others use only unique visitors, it doesn’t matter which you prefer to use, what does matter is that you use the same number every time you calculate your conversion rate.
Eliminate Entry Barriers
The most basic way to define how to increase your conversion rate is to diagnose, hypothesize and test your user actions. If you can determine why visitors don’t convert into users here are some areas you should examine, or better yet ask an honest friend to examine and give you feedback on. The goal is to give visitors a proposed value for converting to users on your site and to use urgency as a reason for them to convert now rather than later.
Is your Call-to-Action clear? Is it dominant? And most importantly, does it provoke a response? This does not mean to make your call-to-action red, huge and at the top of the site, but rather to make sure that it is large enough to read, and consistent with your industry. It should create a sense of urgency, and there should be no guessing done by the user to interpret what response needs to happen.
Are your graphics relevant? Are they high quality? Does the volume reinforce the written content on the page or distract from it? Your graphics should be visual aides for your site, not your entire site. While people are more likely to look at a picture than they are to read words, this just means that they have to be powerful enough to catch attention. A common mistake is using too many graphics and not enough verbiage for the people that you create interest with.
Can your website be easily used? Can a user find the information they are looking for? Does it work on any device? An ecommerce site should always have products cross categorized to ensure that they are easily found, for information sites it’s about breadcrumbs to ensure that users can find their way back without having to go back to start. Today, with more and more interactions happening on mobile phones and portable devices it needs to be as easy to use on these than on a desktop computer. The most important areas of your site that should be easily accessible from any page or area are the navigation, registration, contact and payment areas.
Does your site build trust? SSL icons like verisign are great for building trust on ecommerce sites, other icons like the Better Business Bureau are ideal for professionals. Regardless, you will want to have a privacy policy readily available for users. Establishing trust is just this simple to users, otherwise they are hesitant to give out personal contact information or purchase products. Customer testimonials are also great for building trust, be sure to link back to the site they were originally mentioned, otherwise your great testimonial may have a negative perception.
Is your website relevant? If your site isn’t relevant for the keywords, terms, titles, and meta tags you are using, then visitors might be mislead when finding your website. These visitors will ultimately negatively effect your conversion rate, and your search engine rankings. Don’t stuff keywords or terms for the sake of ranking higher, it won’t help you in the long run.
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