Every single day the internet is used by 4.2 billion people around the world.
That’s well over half of the world’s population online.
Such gargantuan figures should be music to the ears of anyone hoping to attract traffic to their website. After all, every single one of those people could one day end up on your site.
As we all know though, earning traffic is only one half of the battle for businesses. From a business perspective, those eyes are somewhat useless unless they’re becoming clicks, subscribers, customers, and so on.
In other words, you have to find a way to turn web traffic into conversions. Understanding website conversion and how to make it happen is essential for the online endeavors of your business.
Want to find out how it’s done? Let us help.
Keep reading to discover everything there is to know about website conversions and how to increase them on your site.
What Do We Mean By Website Conversions?
Let’s take a quick first look at what we mean by conversion.
Your website is said to ‘convert’ when a visitor takes you up on an offer there. It could be anything, but it will pertain to your particular goals. A conversion might mean that someone subscribes to your newsletter, becomes a new customer, or enrolls to your latest e-book, or webinar.
That’s where the conversion rate of your website comes in. This is the proportion of visitors that convert to any particular offer. Calculate it by dividing your number of conversions by the total number of visitors you’ve had. Multiply that figure by 100 to give a percentage.
You want this number to be as high as possible! Higher percentages mean you’re converting well. Low numbers demonstrate that you’re website isn’t converting. And that means you aren’t succeeding as a marketer.
How to Measure Web Conversions
We already know how to calculate your conversion rate (CR).
However, you first need to know how many people are on your site and how many people convert on a goal. Google Analytics (GA) will tell you both. Hopefully, you’re already familiar with it. Don’t worry if you aren’t though. It doesn’t take long to get up to speed.
Use the Goals feature in GA to set your goals for your site. These goals will then automatically track the CR for the activities you want to assess. For every goal, you’ll need separate landing pages that visitors see upon completion of it.
Be sure not to send any other traffic to the pages set up for a particular goal though. This will mean your data gets skewed.
Skewed data means you won’t get an accurate picture of what’s working and/or what needs to be improved.
Here’s a handy conversion rate calculator to help.
12 Ways to Increase Your Website Conversions
Now we know what web conversions are and how to measure them, let’s turn to how to increase them.
Remember, a high conversion rate is critical to the success of your business. There’s no point in having high levels of traffic if it doesn’t better your business somehow.
It’s your job as a marketer to understand, assess, and maximize your conversions. With that in mind, check out the following 12 tips to increase your conversions. Congratulations on bringing people to your site. But now the work really begins.
1. Work Out Your Site’s Current Performance
The first step to better conversion rates is knowing where you currently stand.
We’ve already mentioned how Google Analytics will help. Look for pages that are currently converting and those that aren’t. Clues to better performance can include your bounce rate, click-through rates and the average time visitors spend on each page.
Remember that you need your visitors to hang around. Your chance of converting dwindles when traffic bounces soon after arrival! The longer you can keep someone on your site, the better.
2. Update Your Pages Accordingly
New up, your underperforming pages need to be updated.
There will always be a reason certain pages perform better than others. It is rarely (if ever) down to luck. It may be a structural problem, aesthetic issue, a missing call to action, and so on.
Updating and optimizing old and underwhelming pages will increase your chances of converting on them. Remember, the longer someone stays on your page, the more conversions you’ll get.
Bring old blog content up to date. Add new content. Put your best blog posts on your homepage. Actions like these will help keep people on your site for longer. And that means a higher rate of conversion.
3. Test Your Site
The only way to reliably increase your conversions is to test your website at every opportunity.
This isn’t a one-time thing. You need to test over time and, ideally, with every decision you make regarding your site. Color changes, layout changes, content alterations, and so on, could all be tested to see how it affects conversion.
Start now!
Your goal is to understand what makes your audience convert. You achieve that by testing your decisions. You want to A/B test your website and decision making as much as possible.
Create two landing pages that are exactly the same bar particular things. You might change the color or text of your call to action. Perhaps you use different fonts or photos. Then test the effectiveness of them in terms of your particular goal. See which one works best and make changes to your site in line with this.
Over time you’ll optimize your site to be a well-oiled conversion machine!
4. Keep it Above the Fold
This is an incredibly simple way to instantly increase your conversions.
Your conversion content should be above the fold of your site.
What do we mean by ‘above the fold’? Only that your highest converting content should be in sight without the need to scroll down. Those opt-in boxes, offers, and so on all need to be visible from the outset.
There’s no way you’ll convert if a visitor can’t see how to do so. Putting such content low down on your site is like a shop paying for a poster and putting it in a back room. It makes no sense. In an ideal world, the chance to convert would follow the visitor as they scroll.
5. Incorporate Testimonials
Your website will convert well if your potential customers trust you.
There are numerous ways to achieve this. Including testimonials on your site is one of them. Have satisfied customers, or subscribers, write a short testimonial to place on your pages. This will add credibility to your offer, and will often help someone decide whether to convert.
You could consider incorporating reviews onto your sales pages too. There’s nothing quite like a positive review to convince a lead to convert. Think about Trip Advisor or Amazon. Customers often base their purchases and visits on reviews and ratings alone.
That’s serious power that you can leverage on your website.
6. Use Calls to Action
You need calls to action on your website.
A call to action is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a statement that instructs a visitor to act in accordance with your goal. Examples include, ‘Click here to subscribe’, ‘Enrol below’, or ‘Head to checkout’.
Why are they important? Essentially, people need to be told what to do. Otherwise, they’re far less likely to do it.
Calls to action are a great thing to alter and test over time. Simple changes can have big results. Try changing the color of the button, or the text, and the placement on your pages. Likewise, positive calls to action tend to perform better. For example, ‘Hell yes, sign me up!’ would be a good bet.
7. Keep Things Simple
Your website conversions will benefit from keeping things simple.
It is in your interest to keep your design simple and easy to navigate. Any distractions away from your converting content can have a negative impact. A well-structured page that looks clean and sleek has a better chance of keeping a visitor’s attention.
Avoid cluttered, overly busy pages.
8. Keep Things Running Quickly
A fast website is a central part of converting.
That’s for two reasons. Firstly, you’ll recall that conversions increase as people spend longer on your site. It’s also true that people will click away from your site if it takes too long to load. Secondly, the time your pages take to load is now a part of SEO.
It is a ranking factor with Google. In other words, the faster your site loads, the higher it’ll rank on SERPs (search engine results pages).
That means more traffic, and more leads to (potentially) convert.
The bad news is that people literally have attention spans less than a goldfish’s now. The quicker your site loads the better. Indeed, Google recommends that your pages should load in one second! That’s seriously quick. Any longer and people begin to click away.
9. Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience is another crucial way to earn conversions.
Begin with an imaginary ideal customer/audience member. Picture their demographics, profession, likes, and dislikes, and so on. Imagine what they want to see on your site and what would make them convert. Then structure your website accordingly.
You can use Google Analytics to tell you about who visits your site too. GA gives you crucial information about age, location, gender, and so on. This info is absolute gold. It means you can shift and shape your conversion content to fit your audience.
The language is often particularly important. Use familiar language that appeals to your audience. Again, test, test and test some more to see what works.
10. Make Converting Easy
People don’t need much of an excuse to decide against converting.
That’s why you must make it as easy as possible to convert on your offer. Make your forms streamlined and easy to fill out. Avoid having too many compulsory sections to fill in. Don’t have endless pages to navigate. Allow people to save their details for future. And so on.
Any unnecessary effort will only increase your chances of losing the conversion.
Amazon is great at this. The ability to one-click buy allows potential customers to act on impulse. They simply don’t have the chance to second guess themselves. They see something they want and buy it in a matter of milliseconds.
Take a similar tack with your quest for conversions on your site.
11. Make Converting Risk-Free
Remember how your site should make it as easy as possible for people to convert?
Well, in a similar way, those conversions should come without risk. Sales should come with money-back guarantees. Subscribers should be able to opt out at any time. And so on.
Such guarantees make it easier for someone to convert. They know there’s no risk attached.
12. Don’t Oversell Yourself or Your Product
We’re all more internet savvy than we used to be.
In the past, marketers could get away with intense, hyped-up, sales language. These days it doesn’t work. People are tired and untrusting of anything that seems too good to be true. Hyperbolic language will turn people off your product.
This approach seems disingenuous and makes it harder to build trust with the visitor. Be positive about your offer, without going overboard.
Time to Get Converting
There you have it: everything to know about website conversions and how to increase them.
Website conversions are central to the success of the online side of your business. Traffic is useless if it isn’t growing your business somehow. A high converting site indicates successful marketing.
In this post, we’ve seen what we mean by website conversion and how we measure it. Hopefully, you now have a better idea of how to increase it too.
Remember, start by assessing the current state of affairs. From here, update underperforming pages and regularly test the various components of your site to see what works best.
From here, be sure to keep your conversion content above the fold, build trust through testimonials, and use creative calls to action. Keep your website simple and fast-loading. Know your audience, ensure it is straightforward and risk-free for a lead to convert, and try not to oversell your products.
Keep all these tips in mind and you should be converting better in no time!
Want help with your marketing endeavors? Be sure to contact us today.