When business owners come to us wanting to increase their sales, their first instinct is usually to draw more visitors to a website or social media presence. They want to invest in things like internet advertising, search engine optimization, or social promotions.
This is almost always a sound strategy, but it isn’t necessarily the first or only idea you should follow. That’s because you can sometimes make bigger gains – and save some money in your marketing budget – by exploring conversion optimization.
Conversion optimization is all about getting a high percentage of leads or sales from the traffic coming to your website. So, if you already have a steady flow of visitors coming to your pages, you can use it to turn more of them into leads and buyers. Or, if you use search engine optimization, pay-per- click, and social media campaigns to drive additional traffic to your site, it’ll be even more effective.
To give you a better sense of the way conversion optimization works, let’s look at some of the details that are involved…
Defining Conversions and Conversion Steps
Before you can optimize for conversions, you have to have a good definition of what a conversion actually means to you. Is it a website lead, an online sale, a phone-an appointment, or something else?
In some situations you might have multiple steps that usually take place on the way to a successful conversion. In those scenarios, it’s a good idea to map out the journey buyers take and see if you can streamline the process from start to finish
Looking for Gaps in Your Pipeline
One of the most important parts of conversion optimization is finding where gaps, bottlenecks, and obstacles live on your website. These are the places where prospects stopped taking forward momentum.
For example, you could discover that some of your landing pages aren’t convincing visitors to submit their contact details, or that a high number of prospects are abandoning your website before checking out with the items that are in a shopping cart. Whatever the specifics, you want to do what you can to eliminate anything on your site that’s preventing you from generating leads or making sales.
Making Incremental Improvements
It isn’t enough to simply identify any weaknesses on your website or sales funnel, of course. To actually improve conversion rates you have to make improvements.
The most reliable way to do this is typically by testing one concept or element against another. So, you could change headlines, images, or offers (these as examples) on one of your pages and see if it outperforms the old version. If you follow this process again and again over the course of months you’ll inevitably find that conversions will reliably increase.
The Bottom Line on Website Conversion Optimization
If you aren’t getting the kinds of results you expect from your website, the problem could be that you don’t get enough traffic, that you aren’t generating conversions, or both. The best way to find the answer to the question – and to get access to the solutions you need – is to schedule a free consultation with the Biondo Creative team in Yardley today!