Attracting traffic to your website is always going to be the goal for any business. While attracting traffic to your site is great, it doesn’t mean a thing if that traffic doesn’t convert. Finding the best way to get visitors to convert is always going to be a challenge, however, there are steps you can take to make sure all your ducks are in a row and give your traffic the best chance possible to convert.
No matter what your conversion is, be it to have visitors purchase a product, fill in a form or provide their email address, these few tips will be a great way to ensure you are on your way to increasing conversions.
1. Assess Your Website
Your first step is always going to be assessing your website. Take a few hours to go through all pages of your website and think about how a user would view it. Starting from the top, is your website hard to navigate? If it is this can be a huge contributor to visitors bouncing. Are there any problem links, broken links or pages linking to places they shouldn’t? Again, if information isn’t easy to find or access then traffic will bounce.
Also, make sure that any images you have used are displaying correcting and are not broken. You would be surprised the impact that images can have on a website. If images do not look professional or are not displaying properly users will not feel confident in your website, therefore, will be reluctant to give you what you want, a conversion.
While you are scanning through your website pay attention to site loading times. If your site is slow to load or has trouble loading certain pages this is going to be a problem. Visitors will abandon ship if they feel a website page takes too long to load, more than likely moving on to a competitor with a website that loads within a few seconds. Don’t give your competitors a chance to steal your hard earned traffic, get your site speed up to scratch and watch your traffic start to increase.
Some great free tools which can help you tell how fast your website loads are Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom Website Speed Test. Utilise these tools and you will be give all sorts of technical analysis that can help improve your loading times. Surveys are another great way to gain feedback from those who are actually using your website. Check out Google Forms, Survey Monkey or Qualaroo.
2. Assess Your Content
Content plays a huge role in website conversions. Throughout the whole website, you need to ensure that your content stays consistent to your product and brand. Keep in mind that users will generally only read the first few words of content before they lose interest and move on. Take full advantage of this opportunity and make headlines strong and relatable to what users want. Sometimes this can take a while to perfect but once you find the sweet spot you will notice the difference.
If your website is very content heavy then see if there are areas you can scale back. Think about what you really need to tell your readers, do you need to include all of that fluff or can you remove certain parts to make your message stronger and less heavy for readers. If you find that you can’t remove much information then make sure content is broken up in a way that makes it easier for people to read. A good way to do this is through the use of images. A good web designer will also we able to provide you with a design that works with your content to showcase it in the best way possible.
Finally, make sure you have not made any text heavy on buzzwords or industry jargon. The use of buzzwords can make your content seem less professional and more gimmicky while at the same time diluting your message. Using industry jargon will alienate your audience and make the content hard to understand. Take a step back and see if you would understand what your website is talking about if you weren’t in the industry.
3. Make Your Message Strong Across Platforms
As a brand, you will more than likely be advertising across several different platforms. In most cases, this will be through your website, PPC, SEO and Social Media. All of these are great ways for you to increase your chance of conversion however, you need to make sure that your message is clear and consistent across all forms of advertising.
As a potential customer, your readers will want to know exactly what you are about, what you are offering and what they will get if they purchase or sign up. Make your messaging clear and strong but ensure the user knows what will happen once they click on your ad, social link or find you in the search results.
4. Make Your Call to Action Obvious
This is something that many websites and brands get wrong. You don’t want to over- complicate the situation and make your call to action hard to find or disappear within your copy. This is another time that you will need to take a step back and put yourself in your audience’s shoes. At the end of the day, you want to make a conversion so why make it hard?
Give your user tunnel vision, show them what you want them to see. If you want them to “click here” then let them clearly see a “click here” button or link. If you want them to “subscribe” then show them what to do. Don’t forget the overall point of what you want your reader to do.
Where possible use buttons rather than links, links are easy to oversee whereas buttons stand out and attract the eye. You can also play around with button colours to see which colour helps increase conversions.
5. Make the Conversion Process Simple
There is nothing worse than when you buy something online and you have to go through 12 steps just to get to the payment screen. Or, when you are asked to fill out a form but you have to give your whole family history. While you may think you need to ask all this unnecessary information, you really don’t. If you are selling a product, get the process down to three or four steps. If you are using a form to gain conversions then shorten the form as much as possible.
By making the process so much harder you will find conversion rates are affected as carts are abandoned in search for an easier way to buy or forms remain half filled and users get worried about giving away so much personal information. There are ways you can get additional information after a conversion is made.
Re-thinking your conversion process to be simpler will change your whole conversion challenge into something much easier. You will benefit from it in the long run and your customers/readers will be much happier to use your services or products again.
While there are still many other factors that can be changed to help increase your overall conversions these five steps are a good start. Taking the time to look at your website and online marketing strategy with a new perspective will make all the difference to your conversion rate.
If you feel lost and don’t know where to start then contact MMX today. We can help you increase conversions and your overall online marketing strategy for the better. If you just have a question, we are always available for a chat!