You’re a small business and you have a website. On your website you probably have at least one of the following items:
- A general contact form on your “Contact Us” page asking for the visitors contact info.
- A newsletter opt-in form allowing your visitors to sign up for your email newsletter.
- An appointment request form allowing your visitors to book a time with you for a consultation.
- A whitepaper download containing some valuable information that you’re giving away via free download.
- A shopping cart and multiple products your visitors can purchase from you online.
What do all 5 of these things have in common? They’re all examples of website conversions.
Conversions are everything that’s important to a small business website.
Without conversions a website is just a brochure. And what often happens to brochures? Sometimes they’re picked up and result in a call, but most of the time they get a single glimpse and then they’re tossed in the trash and are never looked at again. Don’t let that be your website.
To avoid a high bounce rate, you need to take a pragmatic approach to your website. Give it a good website conversion audit:
- Spend some time looking at the design as it can have a major impact on your conversion rate. Does your website look old or unprofessional? Are things hard to find or pages difficult to navigate? Consider hiring a professional web designer to build you a clean, user-friendly site, for your customer's convenience.
- Review your call outs and calls-to-action on each page. Are they strong and compelling? Are they consistent with your marketing message? Consider using different colors for your buttons.
- Tap into consumer psychology. Educate yourself as to what people really want and use their triggers to get them to take action.
- Make sure your website doesn’t contain these 6 conversion killers.
When someone lands on your website from the search engines or a referral link, they are then considered to be a visitor on your website. That’s the first step in the conversion funnel and considered to be the widest part of the funnel, the top. As the visitor peruses your site, they take in more information about your company and your products and services. They’re moving their way down the funnel and this is when more people fall off during the process. Either they didn’t find what they need, they’ve gotten distracted, or something else came about.
Finally, the leftover visitors at the bottom of the funnel make their way into one of your conversion buckets. Either they’ve read one of your valuable blog articles article and decided to subscribe to your newsletter or download your whitepaper. Or maybe they’ve read a product review and decided to buy one of your products. Either way, you need to make sure you’re tracking all of these conversions.
Why? Tools like BoostSuite use this website conversion data to tell you how to get more of the good visitors (the ones who become subscribers, leads, and customers) and less of the bad visitors (the ones who leave immediately).
Have you done anything to your website in the past that has helped or hurt your website’s conversion rate? Was it something as simple as a color change, or did you completely redesign your site? I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below!
