In order to make it in the modern business world, businesses must establish a strong online presence. However, simply moving your business to the online realm won’t be enough if you wish to reach success.
Instead, businesses also need to find a way to attract more customers to their online storefronts – their websites. So, creating a good-quality website will be your starting point.
After you’ve managed to secure a good business website, you will need to make sure that it performs the way it should. What this means is that if your website doesn’t help you encourage visitors to convert to customers, it’s really not doing a good job.
The conversion rate of your website relates to your website’s ability to attract customers. It also determines your website usability, helps build trust in your brand, helps you assess the relevance of the incoming traffic and much, much more.
But in order to understand how to improve your conversion rate to bring maximum results, you will first need to understand what conversion rate is.
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What is the conversion rate?
Simply put, a conversion rate is the rate at which your website visitors convert to customers. Now, this doesn’t only apply to eCommerce businesses and the number of visitors that end up making a purchase.
It can also apply to any action performed by visitors that’s being encouraged by the website or business itself.
So, any time a website visitor performs the desired action – makes a purchase, subscribes to a newsletter, submits a form, or engages with your business in any sense – your conversion rates will go up.
How to improve conversion rate?
Considering everything that we’ve mentioned previously, it becomes clear why there is not one single solution that will help you improve your conversion rates – as they themselves don’t relate to a single business aspect.
According to leading San Diego website design companies, there are numerous factors that will contribute to improving and optimizing your conversion rate.
Here are just some of the tried-and-true ways you can improve your website’s performance so that it encourages your visitors to take the desired action – thus boosting your conversion rate.
Define your website goals
Before you start looking for ways to improve your conversions, you first need to determine the goals that you’re trying to achieve with your website. This will help you get a better grip on your conversions which will – in turn – help you optimize for them more easily.
Your website goals can literally be anything – making a purchase, subscribing, etc. – so once you set them, you can start measuring visitor behavior against them. Keep in mind that you need to set clear goals for every page of your website and track how well it manages to encourage your visitors to achieve those goals.
Gather and analyze visitor data
When it comes to boosting and optimizing your conversion rate, there really is no room for guesstimating. What you should do instead is base all of your decision-making on hard data.
Tracking and analyzing data will help you stay on top of your website’s performance. Not only that, but it will also help you better understand your visitors and learn more about their preferences and the overall on-page behavior.
In order to achieve this, here are some data points you need to pay special attention to:
- Website traffic and traffic sources
- User behavior on landing pages
- Bounce rates for specific pages
- Click-through rates
- Repeat customer rates
- Customer feedback
With the help of this type of data, you’ll be able to get a clearer picture of your visitors, which will help you better tailor your offer to suit their specific needs and interests.
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Analyze your competition
Competitor analysis is extremely important in the business world. Not only can it help you determine which tactics seem to be working for your competitors, but it can also enable you to gain a competitive edge.
Therefore, learn about your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and use that knowledge to the quality of your offer compared to theirs. Since modern consumers research their options before deciding to commit, they will most likely compare your offer to the ones of your competitors.
Needless to say, if you’re aiming for success, you need to make sure that your offer comes out as the best possible choice.
Check your conversion funnel
By paying closer attention to your current conversion funnel, you’ll be able to gain a better understanding of where exactly the root of the problem is.
Follow your visitors’ journey through your conversion funnel and see where the majority of them choose to bounce off. This will offer more insight into the exact area of your conversion funnel you need to make changes to, so that it no longer deters your visitors.
If, for instance, the problem lies in your checkout page, you’ll need to find ways to optimize it for better performance. Some of the ways you can achieve this include removing unnecessary redirects, implementing better security or making the entire checkout process more seamless in general.
Put your value proposition front and center
Your value proposition offers a concise way to explain to your visitors how they will benefit from interacting with your business. That’s why you need to make sure you put it front and center.
Make it obvious from the get-go to your visitors how your business – in particular – will bring more value to them.
Use your headlines, videos, images and other forms of content on your website to clearly convey this message and make sure you include your unique selling point (USP) in them as well.
Ideally, you should be able to present and explain your USP in ten words or less.
Optimize your page layouts
If you’ve made repeated efforts to improve your conversion rate yet it doesn’t seem to yield positive results, it may be a good time to pay more attention to your website itself.
Closely inspect your landing pages and analyze how your visitors interact with and behave on them.
If necessary, consider changing your page layout and reorganize and redesign them to better match your visitors’ behavior. Here, you can rely on useful tools, such as mouse tracking, scroll maps and click maps that can help you better optimize your pages.
Improve your website’s sales copy
Naturally, you need to make sure that your sales copy works in your favor and that it is able to attract visitors and encourage them to convert to customers.
So, if you feel like your sales copy no longer performs well, you should make some necessary changes. First off, check your headline and see if it needs any improvement.
The fact of the matter is that more visitors will read your headline compared to those that will read the entire copy.
Therefore, you need to make sure that your headline itself is engaging enough to prompt visitors to find out more about what you have to offer.
Encourage trust with reviews and testimonials
Trust plays a key role in any relationship. If you don’t give your visitors a reason to trust you, they most likely won’t.
Luckily, you can encourage trust by displaying customer reviews and testimonials on your website. This will not only make you seem more credible – to both customers and search engines alike – but it will also positively affect your SEO efforts.
Needless to say, all of these will positively affect your conversion rate, which is your goal, after all.
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Enable seamless site navigation
The easier you make it for your visitors to navigate your website, the more likely they will be to do just that.
When visitors land on your website, they’ve come there with a purpose. So, you need to ensure that you make it easy for them to find what they are looking for.
If your visitors need to go through a sea of clicks only to find your product page, for instance, you can rest assured that the majority of them won’t appreciate such a hassle.
Therefore, make sure that your website is user-friendly, the navigation is intuitive, and removes (or minimizes) any potential friction your visitors may face.
Improve loading times
The loading speed of your website is another factor you need to pay special attention to. Simply put, in this day and age, there really is no room left for slow-loading websites.
Modern consumers like to be able to access the things they are looking for quickly and easily. So, if your website takes “ages” to load, you can rest assured that your visitors will simply bounce and move on to the next one.
This is particularly true for mobile users, so you need to make sure you keep them in mind as well.
Ideally, you should aim at a two-to-three second loading speed – or less – as this is usually the mark where bounce rates tend to rise.
Test everything before going live
In the end, before you go live with any of the changes you’ve made to your website, you first need to test them out.
That way, you will ensure that all of the changes you did work properly and don’t cause any additional issues that could compromise your conversion rate.
Christopher is a digital marketing specialist and a freelance blogger. He is focused on new web tech trends and digital voice distribution across different channels. In his free time Christopher plays drums and Magic: the Gathering.
