Your website is the most important component of your marketing efforts. It’s often the first place where people come to learn about your company, and it provides an important opportunity to tell your story, convey your brand, and educate potential customers about the products and services you offer. In other words, your website provides the most powerful tool at your disposal to grow your customer base.
While many people focus their energy on increasing their website traffic, this isn’t necessarily the most important success metric to drive new business. While you certainly need to attract visitors to your website, simply driving traffic won’t necessarily equate to new customers. It’s important to convert these visitors. For this reason, the more important metric to focus on is your conversion rate.
What Is Website Conversion Rate?
Website conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors who take your desired action. This can involve just about any action that you determine will help grow your business, including:
- Making a purchase
- Filling out a form
- Signing up for a newsletter
- Downloading your gated content
- Requesting a demo
- Scheduling a consultation
Your website conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of conversions (desired actions taken) by the total number of visitors, then multiplying by 100 to get a percentage. While the specific number varies by industry, the average website conversion rate is approximately 2%. This means that for every 100 visitors, you can expect to convert two customers. By improving your conversion rate, you can increase the number of customers you generate with the same traffic you already have. This allows you to get a better ROI on your digital marketing efforts.
Conversion rate is one of the most important success metrics to track since it helps you measure your website performance, identify areas for improvement, and potentially increase sales or leads without having to increase website traffic.
The following strategies will help you increase your conversion rate so that you can steadily grow your business.
Optimize Your Website’s User Experience and Design
A poor user experience or an unattractive website design can cause visitors to leave your website prematurely, reducing the likelihood that you’ll get them to take your desired action. Taking steps to optimize your website design and website usability will help you provide the best possible experience. This will keep visitors on your website longer and play a significant role in your ability to improve your conversion rate.
The following steps will help you improve your website design and user experience:
- Remove distractions and unnecessary elements
- Ensure clear and intuitive navigation
- Make the website mobile friendly
- Improve page load speed
Remove Distractions and Unnecessary Elements
A cluttered web page can make it hard for visitors to know where to focus their attention. In these situations, they may not be able to determine what you want them to do. Therefore, it’s important to remove any elements from your web pages that can potentially cause distractions and make it more challenging for visitors to take your desired action.
Keep the organization of your pages as simple as possible and create a visual hierarchy that helps guide the attention of your visitors. In addition, remove any unnecessary links, pop-ups or navigation options that can potentially divert people’s attention away from your intended goal for the page. Finally, make sure all your calls to action (CTAs) on the page are prominent, clear and a primary focus of the page.
A busy or cluttered page can negatively impact your conversion rate. Taking the steps to remove these distractions can significantly improve your ability to achieve your desired outcomes.
Ensure Clear and Intuitive Navigation
Another step you can take to improve website usability is to streamline your navigation. Visitors come to your website looking to access specific information, and it’s important to make it as easy as possible for them to find it. Having a clear and intuitive navigation will help users find the information they’re seeking or to purchase the products they came to your website to buy. When users are able to find what they need as easily as possible, it will increase your conversion rate.
You can also add a search feature to your website. This will allow people who know exactly what they are looking for to go directly to the page providing this information. When you reduce the challenges users experience finding what they need, they’re more likely to stay on your website until they convert.
Make the Website Mobile Friendly
More than 60% of website traffic now comes from mobile devices. If you aren’t providing a good experience for these mobile users, they’ll leave your website much faster, and this will significantly reduce your conversion rate. It’s critical to have a mobile friendly responsive website. When you build your website with responsive design, it ensures all the elements of the page will be correctly formatted for the specific device it’s being viewed on. This provides the best possible user experience on all devices and will help you improve conversions from mobile users.
Improve Page Load Speed
Your page load speed plays a critical role in the user experience your website provides. More than 40% of people will leave websites that take more than 3 seconds to load. This will drive close to half of your traffic away before they even engage with your website. By improving your page load speed, you’ll be able to prevent this issue, and you’ll also keep people on your website much longer. This will help significantly improve your conversion rate.
Write Compelling and Persuasive Content
Your website content plays an important role in your ability to improve conversions. When your content provides value to your visitors, it will help you increase conversions by:
- Building trust with your audience
- Establishing yourself as an industry thought leader
- Providing a better experience for users
- Allowing you to educate your audience on the value your products and services will provide to them
You can further optimize your high-quality content by writing it in a compelling and persuasive manner:
- Create strong headlines
- Highlight key benefits and unique value propositions
- Use action-oriented language that creates compelling CTAs
Add Social Proof
The Internet has revolutionized the way people evaluate the products and services they purchase. More than ever, people rely on the insights of others to evaluate a company’s offerings. Your online reputation plays a critical role in your ability to improve your conversion rate, as 89% of consumers look at online reviews before making a purchase.
For this reason, it’s important to include social proof on your website:
- Include links to Yelp, Google, Trustpilot, or any other sites where customers have left reviews
- Add testimonials and reviews to every critical page on your website so that visitors can see this social proof while they’re evaluating your offering
- Display trust badges and security seals on your website
- Showcase the logos of well-known clients and partners on your website
Without this social proof on your website, your conversion rate will most likely suffer.
Simplify Forms and Checkout Processes
Forms are an important conversion element to add to your website. However, the way you structure your forms will play a critical role in how often users fill them out. No one likes to fill out long, complicated forms that have a lot of required fields. Often, asking for more information than is necessary for your sales team to close the lead will make people hesitant to fill out your forms, decreasing their effectiveness.
You can improve the conversion rate on your forms by simplifying them. Make sure you only ask for the essential information needed to accomplish your goal. Shortening your forms will reduce hesitation among your website visitors. In addition, the less time it takes people to fill out your form, the more likely they are to complete the process.
The same logic applies to the online checkout process with eCommerce websites. You should always keep your checkout form as short and simple as possible to encourage people to complete the purchase. Limiting your form to the customer’s name, address and payment information will provide the best user experience. In addition, you can implement the following best practices to increase the likelihood that people will complete the purchase process:
- Add a progress bar to the checkout so users know where they are in the process
- Enable autocomplete for any fields where it’s applicable
- Offer a guest checkout option
Offer Live Chat Support
Often, a website visitor may not convert because they had a question or concern that they couldn’t have answered while they were on your website. You can often nudge these individuals off the fence by adding live chat support to your website.
If you have the resources, you can have live chat support manned by your team, providing website visitors direct access to live customer service agents. However, this often isn’t realistic. You can also use automated chatbots to address many of the questions and concerns of your website visitors, providing a much more cost-effective solution. This live chat support can alleviate many of the concerns of your visitors, helping you push them over the finish line and get them to convert.
Webolutions Can Help Improve Your Conversion Rate
As Denver’s leading digital marketing agency since 1994, Webolutions has the experience and expertise necessary to help you improve your conversion rate. Our transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach has been constructed to help you grow your business smarter, faster and easier. As part of this approach, we’ll work closely with your team to learn about your target audience and the unique benefits your customers/clients experience. This information will be used to help improve your conversion rates.
At Webolutions, we take a data-driven approach to conversion rate optimization. Our team will gather comprehensive performance intelligence data that will help us understand which aspects of your website marketing are generating the most conversions and which are struggling to achieve your goals. Based on this data, we’ll make customized recommendations that will help fine-tune your website’s performance and increase conversion rates.
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions provides comprehensive digital marketing services to clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.
