Have a lot of visitors to your website? Great!
Do you know how many of those site visitors go on to buy your products or services? No? That’s not great.
Of course the number of people visiting your site is important, but the number of people taking action based on what they find on your site probably is more closely tied to your success.
How can you improve your site’s conversion rate? I suggest a four-step process:
- Set goals. Clarify what you want to accomplish with your site. Are you selling online, generating leads for sales people, responding to customer issues, or something else? Your goals determine what you should measure.
- Measure and analyze. Track visitors, pages visited, links clicked, referring sites, and other information that tell the who/when/what/why of your site visitors. We use and recommend Google Analytics, which is free and chock-full of useful statistics and analysis tools. It’s also tied in with other Google services like AdWords, so you can see the effects of ad campaigns you run.
- Make changes and test alternatives. If you discover that the site is doing what you want it to and meeting your goals, you can leave it as it is. But if your bounce rate is high (meaning people arrive on the site and immediately leave without looking at additional pages) or if visitors are responding to your calls to action, you’ll want to revise the site. You may want also to try a few different versions of your content — various product photos, for example, or different headlines and text — to see which combination people respond to. Google Optimizer lets you see which content creates the most response, so you can maximize your website’s effectiveness.
- Repeat. Once you’ve gone through the process of improving your site, you’re not done. As your business or organization changes, your goals for the website must also change. And the world in which you operate changes constantly. Continually evaluating your goals, measuring results, and improving your site ensures that you stay on track.
You can start measuring and improving your site right away, and continue to fine-tune and improve over time. All the Google tools I’ve mentioned are free and are supplemented with tutorials to show you how to use them.
Or, if you’re not sure how to start, or if you would rather someone work with you on this so you can focus on running your business, we’d love to work with you and set you on the right path. Give us a call.
