All business owners want more leads, and the natural tendency is to turn to paid advertising on Google or social media. But before you rush to invest in managing paid campaigns, have you made sure your website meets the parameters that will bring you new customers?
With a variety of digital marketing tools to choose from, it’s important to emphasize that your website is the first and most important digital asset you need to nurture. As such, you need to make sure that it has traffic and user traffic, but also lead conversion. In the following lines, we have summarized the most important parameters to bring you order.
The Importance of Website Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is a function of your website’s usability, brand trust, relevance of incoming traffic, and a host of other factors. To ensure you’re getting the most out of your investment, it’s not enough to just create marketing content online. Constant optimization of your website to improve conversion rates is not easy, but it is necessary.
Before anything else, what system is your website built on?
One of the most important decisions you need to make before considering a website conversion rate optimization and improvement strategy is what system you will build the website on. Broadly speaking, the different systems can be divided into 2: open source and closed source. The main difference between these two options is that in an open source system, like WordPress for example, you have more control and freedom to create the experience you want. Building a WordPress website allows you to make changes, download or add pages and elements, and create the website flow freely. On the other hand, a closed source system, like Wix for example, does not offer this flexibility.
Additional parameters to help you improve your website conversion rate
Once you have decided on which system to build your website on, it is important to pay attention to a number of issues:
1. Design that matches the business field
The website design should be in line with the business field. This should be reflected in the color palette, icons, and various elements, and convey the brand’s messages. For example, it is natural for a business that deals in garden design to use green and brown colors, while a business that deals in grooming and beauty will use soft shades that convey cleanliness and aesthetics.
2. Simple and smooth navigation
Visitors come to your website with a purpose, and your job is to make it as easy as possible for them to find what they’re looking for. Make sure your website navigation is intuitive and user-friendly to increase its usability, and thus drive visitors to convert.
Your conversion rate improvement strategies should actually remove all friction from the user experience and make it seamless for visitors to understand how to buy from you or convert in another way instantly.
3. Improve loading times
Pages that take too long to load are abandoned by potential visitors in no time. Such immediate abandonments can seriously damage your conversion rate. In fact, the shorter the loading time, the better the conversions. Reducing the loading time of website pages will ensure that fewer and fewer impatient visitors leave before the site loads. One way to improve page speed is to reduce the size of the images on the site.
4. Website content
Writing marketing content for websites is essential to improve conversion rates, but it’s not enough. Website content is designed to provide users with information about the services and solutions offered by the business. It should contain messages that are directly addressed to the business’s target audiences and provide solutions to problems or challenges that these audiences face in the context of the business’s activities.
The more accurate the messages are, the more the business’s potential customers will understand that they have come to the right place and that you can provide them with the solutions or services they are looking for.
With countless advertisers and businesses competing with you, it’s important for your audience to understand that they’ve come to the right place. If you don’t know how to tell them that, they will simply search for an answer on your competitors’ websites.
5. Collecting and analyzing visitor data
When it comes to improving website conversion rates, it is best to avoid assumptions and estimates and rely solely on data for all decision-making processes. One of the proven conversion rate optimization techniques is to constantly track and analyze website data using Google Analytics to learn more about your website visitors and their preferences. Ultimately, this data should tell you where to focus your conversion optimization efforts.
To get to know your website data, we have prepared a Google Analytics for beginners guide for you. You can start there. And in short, here are a few key data points you need to track to understand your visitors:
- Traffic data and traffic sources, where users come from to your site – from Facebook promotion, Outbrain campaign, paid Google or all of them.
- Details of user behavior on website pages
- Bounce rates for forms and internet pages
- Click-through rates for ads and marketing campaigns
- Information on returning customers and average order values
Once you have collected quantifiable data, use it to create your user persona, which is a representation of your ideal user. This must highlight all the important information about your potential customers and target users, including their interests, likes, dislikes, goals, and pain points.
A little tip, analyzing this data will also help you with other marketing activities and reveal the secrets of building a successful campaign that goes beyond the technical guidelines for a digital campaign.
6. Evaluating the website conversion funnel
Before you go out to fix what’s broken, make sure you understand in detail what a typical user journey and conversion funnel looks like on your website. This will help you gauge where visitors to the site are hesitant and dropping out, and the likely reasons why this might happen.
Keep in mind that there will be a natural drop-off at each stage of the funnel as people don’t take the next step for many reasons. You can reduce this drop-off by designing solutions for those same possible reasons to push people down the funnel and thus successfully optimize your website’s conversion rate.
For example, one of the stages where e-commerce sites focus their conversion optimization efforts is checkout, where it is known that an average of 69.23% of shoppers abandon their carts. A higher conversion rate, marginal as it may be, will be a significant contribution to addressing this important issue.
To understand and optimize your funnels, you need to assess what your website is doing to move potential customers through the defined stages. How are you leading them to conversion, and where are you losing most of your visitors? By answering these questions, you will know where to focus your efforts to increase your conversion rate.
In conclusion,
Increasing your website’s conversion rate is to improve your ROI on digital marketing. Whether you’re investing in advertising on Google, Instagram, or any other digital marketing channel, to successfully optimize website conversion rates, you need a lot more than marketing tactics and keyword research. All the parameters we have introduced above are a great place to start to improve your conversion rate strategy, and if you have gotten this far, it means you are ready to get started.
