You can have the best marketing plan. Your website can rank number one with Bing, Google and Ask. You can utilize pay per click, SEO and carefully review and manage every aspect of your advertising, and you still might not have paying customers. These steps, while crucial for getting visitors to your site, won’t guarantee you can convert them to paying customers. You must implement a conversion strategy to ensure that your visitors are not just X’ing out of your site – they are performing a specific action.
Before implementing any conversion plan, online business owners should take a hard look at their internet marketing strategy. Specifically, does the strategy result in targeted visitors that are interacting with the site. Ideally, the visitors should be targeted –people that are predisposed to purchase your product or service. Targeted traffic is generally obtained through the careful use of optimization techniques, particularly keyword-rich, relevant content.
Search engine optimization plays a huge role here. The key towards conversions is having visitors to convert in the first place. Developing an optimization plan and investing time and money into it is critical for receiving the visitors that you will hopefully convert to customers.
Converting the maximum number of visitors or Conversion Optimization
begins and ends with the use of Analytics. The fact is that NO ONE has optimal results on day 1 and all websites require tweaking, reconfiguring, repositioning on a continual basis to actually optimize conversions.
Analytics involves the careful understanding of visitor interaction and behavior on each and every page of the site to determine which pages are engaging, which ones are losing potential buyers. Analytics can be as granular as you wish it to be; you can even track the exact pixel that was clicked on the site and the actual source of that click i.e. the keyword source and the website / search engine … while this might seem like too much information, it is surely not when you are making assessments as to what is working and what is not working.
Conversion is simply the act that the website owner / developer wishes for the visitor to take before leaving the website. This may be a product purchase, a lead form, a new subscription, a phone call, or a “contact us.” Regardless, optimizing the number of these that occur is what Increasing your Conversions or Conversion Optimization is all about.
It is the analytics that guide your decisions / management of your conversion strategies. Conversions result from engagement of the visitor, clear navigation paths that follow logic but also engender anticipation, even excitement. With analytics, all of this is measurable so that you can optimize the conversion path or funnel to maximize the percentage of visitors that actually convert (conversion rate).
Of course, at the outset there are basic considerations that you must always pay attention to:
1. Site navigation – the navigation on your site must be user friendly. Avoid using fancy effects and instead focus on streamlining your site’s navigation. Pay particular attention to links – even one broken link can send a potential conversion packing.
2. Website Design: While the layout and design of your website should be attractive, avoid the pitfall of ‘more is better.’ Avoid clutter, and make it easy for potential conversions to do just that – convert.
3. Great Content – Throughout your website, your content should be clear, concise and informative. Product descriptions, blogs, and knowledge bases should all be carefully reviewed. They need to be well written, proofed and edited always with an eye on maximizing the visitor experience.
It is equally important to make it easy for visitors to convert. The actual purchase process should be easy to find and even easier to complete. Whenever possible, utilize a one page checkout for Ecommerce sites. Avoid multiple forms and redundant information requests. These are both sure ways to lose a conversion. Accept multiple payment methods – as many as feasibly possible. Make it simple for people to pay you. And please use an SSL (Secure Socket Layer); if you don’t have one, you will only be optimizing your abandonments.
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