It’s the question at the heart of many businesses across the world: how are you turning the visitors on your website into customers? It all boils down to the conversion strength of your website.
In this piece, we’ll talk about what conversion optimization means and how to use this science to ensure that your website is set up for success.
First, What Is Conversion Optimization?
In the simplest terms, a conversion is the same as making a sale. Whether you’re selling software, shoes, or roofing service appointments, when a customer says yes to whatever it is you’re presenting them, they just “converted” on your offer.
The conversion rate of your website is equal to the number of people who make a purchase divided by the total number of visitors to your site, but a conversion can be something different depending on the context.
Let’s say you get a website visitor who clicks a link in an email that takes them to a landing page. That page alone won’t be tasked with driving the final conversion, especially if it’s part of a campaign to a colder audience. Maybe the call-to-action on that page is a button that triggers a phone call. The conversion rate for that page would be the total number of unique phone calls divided by the total number of page visitors.
So, let’s get back to the point. Whether we’re talking about the entire or site or an individual page, when you optimize your website for conversions, you’re making changes with the goal to guide site visitors through the ideal customer experience and turn them into buyers.
Tips For Optimizing Your Website
Here are a few steps you can take to test, improve, and retest the conversion strength of site:
Step 1: Define the Objective of a Page
Conversion optimization is all about breaking down the different ways a site visitor can navigate your site and become a customer. The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that your website doesn’t hinder the journey. Are there links to buy a product or start a free trial on every page? Is it clear to a site visitor what they need to do to take steps toward becoming a customer?
If you don’t understand the steps involved in the journey from cold prospect to customer, how can you set your website up to facilitate that process?
Step 2: Research Conversion Best Practices
Fortunately, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to taking the steps to increase your website’s conversion rate. There are documented changes in every industry, on every different type of web page, that are proven to produce results. It all comes down to what works for you. Here are some changes you can make:
- Changes to on-page elements: You can study changes in button placement, colors, headlines, text, images, icons, and more.
- Changes to the back end: These tweaks are less straightforward — a change in targeted keywords that brings more qualified leads to your website, for example, or minor changes in your back-end code that improves page speed.
Step 3: Compile Data
The best way to test changes you make to your website is to implement them and run split tests. Split testing means showing one version of a page to one random group of site visitors and a slightly different version to a second group, measuring which version of the page is more effective in driving conversions.
This can be an ongoing process. Pick one or two changes and test them against the current version of the page. If it improves your conversion rate over time, make the changes live. If it doesn’t, you can go back to the drawing board.
Of course, this is a long-term process, and understanding where to implement changes can be easier said than done. If you’re ready to seek help from the experts in conversion optimization and digital marketing in general, contact us and start a conversation about your needs.
