Top 10 Tips to Improve your Website Conversion Rate

It always pays to spend some time and effort on improving your website conversion rate.  It not only will generate more leads for your business (or orders, subscribers etc.) but it also makes you more efficient in the long term.

There are many things you can do to optimise your site and improve your conversion rate but let’s start with these 10 top tips.  Contact me for more ideas on improving your own site.

1. Grab Attention: With shorter and shorter attention spans, you only have about 5-7 seconds to grab and retain the attention of your visitor before they decide whether to bounce or not.  It is therefore imperative your messaging is clear and impactful not to mention relevant based on the source of your visitor.  Always test different versions to see what works the best for your visitors (see tip 6).
2. Understand the User Journey: Research and map out your user journey for your website.  Ensure you have content for different sales stages and/or types of prospect which are clearly signposted to help visitors find information relevant to them.
3. Clear Navigation:  Make your navigation as simple and easy as possible.  While you may know the logic behind your site, your visitor won’t.  Spell things out, use drop downs to showcase what is in a section and enable visitors to click straight through to what they are interested in.
4. Explicit Call to Action: What is your website objective i.e. what do you want a visitor to do in terms of a conversion – is it a demo request, free trial, order, phone call, start a chat, newsletter/blog subscriber, download a piece of content etc. There are merits to each option and what you present to a visitor may be different depending on how they found you and the stage in their buying journey (see tip 2).
5. Social Proof: Having social proof on your site provides independent endorsement of you and your product/service credibility, reassuring visitors you are a trustworthy company.  Prospects will want to know you have customers representative of them as an indication of suitability for their own business.
6. Test, Test and Test Again: Whether it’s headings, colours, wording, button positions, page layout etc. ensure you have a continual programme of testing.  Not all tests will be a success but you will learn something from every test to help further improve your website performance.
7. Mobile Optimisation: Nowadays most websites will usually see half of their traffic coming from mobile devices.  Most content management systems will have mobile friendly templates which ensure your site is readable and optimised for the small screen, but you should always double check your pages to ensure they look as good as possible.
8. Quality Content: As I have mentioned in a previous post, quality marketing content is of utmost importance and will help showcase your expertise.  Quality content gives you the opportunity to ask for contact details before sharing it with a prospect.  In return you are able to nurture them earlier in the sales process.
9. Video Marketing: Video is the most engaging form of marketing content and can really help bring alive your content for visitors. From customer testimonials to product demos video marketing can improve engagement and ultimately conversion rate on your site.
10. Website Speed:  Visitors won’t wait for pages to load, and will quickly get fed up with a slow, cumbersome website.  It’s worth spending a bit of money for a technical specialist to review and optimise your website speed. A fast website not only enhances the user experience but also will improve your SEO optimisation.

As the above demonstrates there is a lot you can do to optimise your site.  If you need expert help in prioritising and actioning any of the above tips, contact me today.