Conversion Rate Optimization: 9 Ways to Increase Your Website Conversion Rate, Leads and Sales
Increasing website conversion rate is the ultimate goal of every website.
Whether you have a marketing website or an e-commerce website, you want your visitors to take some desired conversion action on your website.
Website conversions help you convert your website visitors into leads and customers and increase sales.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion rate optimization is the process of making website improvements to increase the number of website visitors who complete a desired conversion goal or action on your website.
What is a Website Conversion?
A website conversion occurs when a customer takes a desired action towards a specified goal on your site.
When customers visit your website, they can take one of several conversion actions such as:
- Buy a product
- Fill out a contact form
- Request a quote
- Sign up for a newsletter or email list
- Download an e-book or whitepaper
- Subscribe to a service
These website conversion actions help you connect with your website visitors and convert them to customers and leads and increase sales.
What is Conversion Rate?
The conversion rate of your website is the number of times site users complete a desired conversion action divided by the number of visitors.
Conversion Rate=(number of times users complete desired conversion actions)/(total visitors)
9 Effective Ways to Increase Your Website Conversion Rate
Conversion rate optimization of your website can increase the customer conversion rate. The conversion rate is impacted by your website design and performance.
Here are some effective ways to increase your website conversion rate.
1. Your Website Should Have Responsive and Mobile-friendly Web Design to Reach Mobile Users and Increase Conversions
It’s a mobile-first world. The majority of online users are using mobile devices to access websites.
Your website must be mobile-friendly and have responsive web design to perform well on mobile devices and reach mobile users.
A responsive website will scale in size and adjust its layout to fit the size of the user’s browsing device. A responsive website has a flexible design that performs well on devices of all sizes. It will adapt to fit the size of the users browsing device whether it is a mobile device, tablet, laptop or desktop.
Responsive web design is recommended by Google.
Here are some interesting mobile usage statistics from Google,
- In 2015, the number of search queries on mobile devices on Google in the USA exceeded those on desktops.
- It is estimated that 85% of customers begin their search for new products and services on the internet.
- 94% of people in the USA who own smartphones use their smartphones to search for local information.
- 82% of smartphone users search online to find local businesses
Since the majority of online searches are made using mobile devices, a mobile-first business model is being adopted by large search engines like Google. Having a Mobile-friendly website is a search ranking factor on Google. It improves your website search or SEO (search engine optimization) rankings in the search results pages.
To further emphasize the importance of a mobile-friendly website, this year, Google started rolling out their new mobile-first search index. The mobile-first search index uses the mobile version of your website as the primary version for crawling, indexing and ranking for the Google search results pages.
To reach mobile users and increase website conversions, your website must be responsive and mobile-friendly.
If your website is not mobile-friendly, it is time to upgrade to a mobile-friendly website to reach the increasing number of mobile users and increase your website conversion rate.
For more information read our article on Mobile Friendly Websites: How to Reach Mobile Users & Increase Conversions .
2. Your Website Must Have Fast Page Speed to Increase Conversion Rate
Users, on both mobile devices and desktop computers, expect websites to load fast, really fast or they will click away to the next site.
According to Google research:
- 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
- The recommended average website page speed should be 3 seconds or less.
- To be fast loading, the recommended web page size including all images should be 500KB or less.
This image below shows how the bounce rate increases as the page load time gets slower.
When visitors click on your website, they will have to stay on your website long enough until the web page loads completely before they can engage with your site.
A fast loading web page will keep the visitor on the website to read about your products and services, or shop online.
Increased visitor engagement with your website will lead to increased conversions, leads and sales. It also positively impacts your SEO (search engine optimization) rankings and improves your search rankings.
Large slow-loading images are one of the main reasons for slow web page speed. All images on your site must be optimized and compressed to a small file size to load quickly. Images can be compressed with tools like Photoshop. Images should also be saved in jpeg format.
A fast web page speed is of critical importance to e-commerce websites as it directly impacts revenues. Studies have shown that as page load speed gets faster, sales and revenues have increased.
Your web page speed must be optimized and kept near optimum levels to keep visitors from abandoning your website. A slow web page speed will cause customers to abandon the website and click away. This increases the bounce rate and negatively impacts your SEO rankings.
A web developer can help optimize your website to improve your website page speed.
For more information, read our article on Speed Matters: 4 Reasons Why Page Speed Impacts Website SEO Rankings & Conversions.
3. Your Website Must Have Good Web Design and Navigation to Increase the Conversion Rate
Your website must be professionally designed to increase brand awareness, customer trust and conversions.
Your website should be well designed with a good layout. It should have your brand colors and logo for consistent branding. The fonts used must be appealing and easy to read on mobile devices as well as desktops.
Site navigation is very important. The navigation should be easy to find and use.
The products and services pages should provide detailed information and clearly state the benefits to the customer. There should be plenty of images that are clear and of high-quality and fast-loading.
Content should be written from the consumer perspective with high-quality images and clear calls to action.
The website should be kept up-to-date and user-friendly. It should not have broken links and out-of-date information and content.
Customer perception of your website will affect their trust and likelihood of doing business with you.
A well-designed website increases website conversions.
A poorly designed website will cause customers to abandon it and never come back.
4. Your Website Should Provide a Positive User Experience to Increase Conversions
Your website must provide an optimum user experience to users on both mobile devices and desktops to increase conversions.
Your website should have:
- A large font size for easy reading on a mobile device. The user should never have to pinch and zoom or scroll sideways to read the content.
- Clear Calls to action which are clearly visible.
- Buttons that stand out from the colors of the background and are large, visible and easy to use.
- High-Quality Images that are quick-loading, optimized and compressed
- Navigation that is easy to use and locate.
- Very fast loading web pages and images.
5. Display Testimonials and Social Proof on Your Website to Increase Conversions
Include social proof, testimonials and reviews on your website to increase customer trust and conversions.
Display social proof on key pages throughout your website not just on the home page. Product and service pages, About pages and Contact pages should all display awards and trust symbols.
Examples of social proof includes:
- Customer Testimonials
- Customer Reviews
- Business Awards
- Brand names and logos of large partners
- Names of large media publications that have featured your business
- Relevant business and professional memberships
6. Keep Contact Forms Simple With Minimum Required Fields To Increase Conversions
Your website needs to have simple contact forms with essential fields only for visitors to contact you.
While it may be tempting to collect a lot of information from visitors including business names, addresses and phone numbers, studies have indicated that its best to keep requested information to a minimum.
When visitors are forced to provide a lot of personal information that they are not comfortable with, the likelihood of them abandoning the site increase.
Contact forms that request only names and email addresses have been shown to have a higher conversion rate than longer forms. So, it’s best to limit the number of required fields on your contact forms and request the minimum information from your visitors.
You can always get additional information from your visitors after they contact you.
7.Create Dedicated Landing pages for Your PPC Ads to Increase Conversions
When you run paid search marketing ads such as PPC (pay-per-click) or Google Ads, you need to create dedicated landing pages for each ad.
When your target customer sees your Google ad and clicks on it, the landing page they are directed to on your website will determine whether they convert to a lead or customer.
The main purpose of your landing page is to convert visitors to leads or customers.
Here are some ways that PPC landing pages must be optimized to increase conversions:
- Design your landing page to be specific to a PPC ad. Do not send visitors to your home page when they click on a PPC ad. They need to be directed to a specific landing page with specific information about the product or service being advertised.
- Have a compelling headline. The text on the landing page should match the text on the ad.
- Display relevant fast loading images.
- Have a simple form on the landing page to collect information.
- Have compelling and large call-to-action Buttons.
Website visitors who click on your PPC or Google Ads are already interested in your products or services. They are targeted customers. Proper optimization of your landing page will increase customer conversions.
For more information, read our article on 11 Tips To Optimize Your AdWords Landing Page For Conversions And Mobile.
8. Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Increase Website Conversions
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a marketing strategy of optimizing websites to improve their rankings in search engines. SEO helps to increase the quality and quantity of organic or free traffic that your website receives from the search engines.
SEO increases your visibility in the search engines by helping you rank on top pages for relevant keywords. SEO optimization of your website also enables you to attract targeted traffic to your website based on keywords that are relevant to your business.
SEO helps attract visitors to your website at the time they are searching for your products and services. Since these visitors are already interested in your products or services, they are more likely to convert to leads or customers.
As mentioned before, estimates indicate that 85% of people begin their search for new products and services on the internet.
Proper SEO optimization of your website will help you attract targeted customers and increase your website conversions.
For more information, read our article on 11 Reasons Why You Need SEO.
9. Track website data with Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Your business website must have Google Analytics tracking turned on to track useful information about your website visitors, site traffic and conversions.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are free tools from Google that enables you to collect a lot of useful information about your website visitors and website performance.
Google Analytics will help you track how visitors interact with your website and provides:
- information about the number of site visitors
- your website bounce rate
- which geographic locations your visitors are coming from
- how your visitors find you
- pages your visitors are landing on
- pages they are exiting from
- how much time they are spending on your site
- how they travel through your site
- Conversions
Google Search Console will help you track website performance including:
- Keywords your visitors are using to find your site
- Pages visited
- Crawl errors on your site that show broken links that need to be fixed
- Incoming Links into your site
- Index status – how many pages are indexed by Google
- Sitemaps
Tracking your website data is essential for visibility into what is going on in your website. This insight can help you improve your website, fix problems and increase your conversions.
Conclusion
A lot of time and effort goes into digital marketing and search engine optimization to attract your target visitors and increase traffic to your website.
Once your target visitors are on your site, these are some effective ways to provide a great user experience on your website to convert them to leads and customers and increase conversions.
A fast loading website with responsive and mobile-friendly web design along with the other web design strategies listed will help you reach more of your target customers and build trust. Visitors will then complete desired actions on your website to convert into leads and customers and increase your website conversion rate.
If you need any help with optimizing your website to increase conversions, please contact us at https://goldmangodesign.com in Plano, TX.
Recognition
This article was selected as one of the Top 25 Digital Marketing articles on the UpCity Blog for the week of 10/26/18. We are so honored!
Top 25 Digital Marketing Articles- Week of 10/26/18 |UpCity
References
- Moz,Conversion Rate Optimization,
- Think with Google, How People Use Their Devices: What Marketers Need to Know, September 2016
- Smart Insights, Search Engine Statistics 2017, Search Engine Statistics 2017
- Google, Understanding Consumers Local Search Behavior, May 2014, Understanding Consumers Local Search Behavior
Related Articles
- Gold Mango Design, Mobile Friendly Websites: How to Reach Mobile Users & Increase Conversions
- Gold Mango Design, Speed Matters: 4 Reasons Why Page Speed Impacts Website SEO Rankings & Conversions
- Gold Mango Design, 11 Tips To Optimize Your AdWords Landing Page For Conversions And Mobile
- Gold Mango Design, 11 Reasons Why You Need SEO
Gold Mango Design LLC. helps small and medium businesses reach more customers with web development and digital marketing services. Our digital marketing services include Responsive and Mobile Friendly Web Design, WordPress Web Development, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Google Ads Marketing. We are located in Plano, TX right outside Dallas. Contact us at https://goldmangodesign.com
