When you’ve spent time and resources on an effective marketing plan and driving traffic to your website, you need to be sure that your site isn’t going to let you down. If the number of visitors to your site is increasing but you’re not seeing a boost in conversions, you need to take a look at ways in which you can improve and optimize your site.
In this article, we’ll discover how you can start converting customers as soon as they land on your site.
1. Target your personas
Your site needs to be focused on your target audience to convert them into customers. To do this, you need a clear understanding of who you’re trying to reach and what they’re interested in and engaging with. You should also know what their buying process looks like, and what’s likely to persuade them to choose your product or service.
With these personas in mind, you can tailor your site’s content to connect with them as soon as they land on it.
For example, this can inform the benefits of your products or services that you highlight, it can help you to understand what content is important to include on your home page and you can use it to create specific blog content targeted towards different personas.
2. Make sure it loads quickly
One of the first things you need to look at if you want to boost conversions is how fast your website loads. There’s little point in spending time on updating and redesigning your site if it loads too slowly or doesn’t work properly. Visitors aren’t going to stick around - they’re just going to click back to search results and find one of your competitors.
Large images and videos can make a huge difference to how quickly your site loads, so even if they look good, try not to use too many. You should also try reducing the file size of your images so that they’ll load quickly.
3. Easy navigation
Make it easy for visitors to find their way around your site and find the information or products that they are looking for. If it’s difficult for them to find the right page, it’s going to increase your bounce rates and affect your conversion rate.
For most business websites it’s a good idea to use global website navigation — one menu with links to pages that’s identical on every page of the website. Keep it simple and easily accessible across the top of the page, and make sure it includes all the pages that your visitors will want to visit.
Don’t overload your menus with too many options and add a search bar so that visitors can look for something specific. It’s also essential that your menu works well on a mobile device, so consider that in your design and test it out.
One example of an effective menu is on the Gousto site. They have four options across the top that cover the important things that someone visiting the site will want to look for.
4. Clear call to actions
Getting the call to action (CTA) on your site just right can boost your conversion rate as well. CTAs prompt visitors to take a specified action, which helps them move towards either finding out more information or making a purchase.
For a CTA to be effective it needs to stand out clearly on your site — it should be a button that contrasts in color to the rest of the page with a font size that’s larger than other text and easy to read.
Make the text of your CTA actionable, providing a clear benefit to the visitor, and make it really direct and inspire a sense of urgency that compels them to click on it right now. It’s also a good idea to test out different wording and positioning for your CTAs to optimize them for your visitors.
A good example of a CTA is this one from FurnitureBox. It’s giving a clear instruction (SHOP NOW) that’s easy to pick out in a green button against the red background. It even has an arrow indicating motion, compelling the user to literally move to another page.
Better CTAs will help you to engage your visitors and encourage them to interact with your business.
5. Social proof
Social proof can be an invaluable tool for converting visitors to your website. Adding some testimonials or feedback from your customers to your homepage can add credibility to your business. It will help convince visitors that you are offering the right products or services for them and that others are finding great value and benefit from your business.
6. Live chat
Adding a live chat to your site allows visitors to get an answer to their questions or issues almost immediately. If someone can’t find what they’re looking for or has a concern that’s preventing them from converting then live chat is an opportunity to guide them through to becoming a customer. It’s a valuable way to build trust with visitors and increase engagement with your brand.
7. Track and optimize
It’s essential to keep track of your website conversions and the impact of the changes you’ve made. A tool like Google Analytics is going to help you identify who’s visiting your site, how they’re behaving when they’re on it, and when and where they are leaving your site without converting. Set up some key performance indicators (KPIs) so that you can monitor how much improvement you’re seeing and what further changes you need to make.
Overall, you need your website to engage and persuade visitors to convert. Following these tips will help you to increase conversions, but optimizing your site is a long-term process and you need to be continually reviewing and improving your approach.
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