How to make your website convert
It’s easy to get excited about website visitor numbers. After all, you’ve created your site with the aim of being found online, so the higher the visitor numbers, the better your business must be doing, right?
We all wish it was only that simple!
But it’s not just visitor numbers that you need to be aware of. The real key to success is keeping track of the number of conversions that your site generates. A conversion could be any meaningful interaction with your company website, whether that’s adding an email address to your newsletter subscriber list or filling in a contact form to get a callback or a quote, it could even be making a purchase on your website. No matter how beautiful your site looks, and no matter how inventive your SEO strategy, if your visitor numbers aren’t translating into plenty of conversions, then your website simply isn’t fulfilling its purpose. Increasing conversions from your website visitors take time, but there are plenty of steps you can take to ensure a positive outcome. Here are a few ideas that we think can work for your website…
Does your website look professional?
Your business website acts as an open store, displaying your goods and services to their best advantage – or so it should do! But loads of businesses try to save themselves some money by choosing a DIY build, you can choose a cheap web design package providing the web design company offers SEO services as part of the package. Because web visitors aren’t concerned about the look or the design of the website they visit. Visitors come onto a website, check if it has their requirements which they can purchase from you or enquire for your services and that’s it right? In fact, most web visitors expect the websites that they interact and engage with to be professional, and of the highest possible quality. A research study conducted by Stanford University discovered that a high-quality website is of prime importance to almost half of those surveyed.
Still not 100% convinced? Consider this – almost 40% of web visitors will leave a website altogether then never return if they believe it to be unattractive. So if you think your website could do with a bit of an overhaul, read our guide on how to plan your perfect website.
Analyse your website data
Analytical tools offer huge insights into the way a website visitor behaves on your website – or not, as the case may be. So take time to study the data, finding out which pages attract interest, and which pages have the highest bounce rates (If you want to know more on what bounce rates are, simply give us a call and we’ll be happy to help). Your aim is to increase the amount of ‘sticky content’, that visitors spend time on, as they’re then much more likely to complete your desired interaction. Remove or edit & update pages with high bounce rates, replacing them with fresh, relevant, and engaging content. Review your headlines and use A/B testing to trial different wording for your headings, to find out which ones give you the best results.
Eliminate the gobbledygook
It’s easy to get caught up in fancy semantics when you’re preparing your website content. You want to prove that you’re an expert in your industry, but you won’t win many new customers if you blind them with language that they don’t fully understand. In trying to prove your authority and competence, you could inadvertently be alienating the very people that you’re hoping to attract! Have a clear idea of exactly who you’re addressing your web content to. The aim is to speak directly to your audience and providing relevant information, using words and images that they’ll be able to relate to. So get rid of the technical words and the complicated sentences, and let your core message sing out.
Show how reputable your business is
Anyone can put a simple business website, then claim to be something they’re not, how do you prove that you’re an honest, reputable, and trustworthy company? If your website visitors aren’t sure that you are who you say you are, why would they interact with your website? There’s a number of ways in which you can gain trustworthiness, the most essential one is to provide full contact details, so your potential new customers know exactly where to find you as well as knowing how to contact you, there should be a dedicated contact page on your website for this. Make sure that you have valid SSL certification for your site. You should also display any awards and certificates prominently so that web visitors can see for themselves that your business is reputable.
We also suggest that you include an ‘About Us’ or ‘Our Story’ page, display all the relevant information about your business and team here. Web visitors like to see that are real people behind your brand, they’ll be much more likely to go ahead with a purchase if they can see more relevant information about the business.
Minimise distractions
When you’re promoting products and services that you’ve invested in, and that you’re proud of, it’s easy to go a bit over the top. But if you want your prospective customers to complete a sale, you need to keep their minds firmly focused on the end goal, this again goes back to providing the relevant information for the visitor and not for yourself. This is particularly true of landing pages. When a visitor arrives on a landing page, the chances are that they’re looking to purchase and have got the money in their pocket. All they need to do now is to navigate your checkout system. So don’t put any distractions in their way. Make their purchasing journey as simple and easy as you possibly can, so they don’t have time to change their mind part-way through the process.
Do you really need customers to register?
Loads of websites ask customers to register with an email address and password. The aim is to make it easier for them to return to the site and make more purchases in the future, but it can backfire. New customers may not want the commitment of registering with your site, whilst previous customers may struggle to remember their login details. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t offer a registration option, but think very carefully before implementing one, to make sure it offers your web visitors a genuine advantage. And keep monitoring the system, to make sure that it’s not frustrating potential purchasers.
Check your website speed
If you’ve been reading our blogs or even following us on social media, you’ll already know that fast-loading pages are an absolute must, if you want to attract web visitors. Digital technology has made us impatient, so pages that take more than three seconds to load are considered to be wasting our time, causing us to click away to alternative sites. All these points have an effect on your SEO services across your website as well as your rankings on search engines. I bet you didn’t know that every second spent waiting for a web page to load, leads to a 7% loss in conversions? That’s even more of an incentive to ensure that every page across your site loads at lightning-fast speeds!
These are just some of the steps that you can take to encourage higher conversion rates across your website. But here at Bemunchie, we’ve got many other various methods for persuading web visitors to interact with your website, simply contact us to find out more
