As marketing is now shifting towards the digital marketing spectrum, businesses are focused on driving more traffic to their websites in hopes that they convert into leads or even sales. With that being said, why should you optimise your website for conversions?
If one new customer has an average lifetime value of $10,000, by increasing your website conversion rate of 1%, and assuming that you get 10 new customers a year, that will be an additional revenue of $100,000 per year.
Optimising your website for conversion will help with SEO and this will help to improve your website rankings and in turn achieve more traffic for your website, this eventually drives more leads and customers for your business.
Overall, having a better User Experience (UX) on your website would also increase the dwell rate and reduce bounce rates, these are vital areas where SEO scores are being measured.
With that being said, remember that your key objectives would always be to:
- Keep users engaged
- Enable them to find relevant content and information
- Keep them on your website for as long as possible
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
Conversion Rate Optimisation, or CRO, is the process of improving your website to increase the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website such as leads, sign-ups or purchases. CRO involves different actions or tactics like content enhancements and workflow improvements that would result in increased leads, sales or lower acquisition costs. However, to truly achieve CRO, you would first need to focus on improving your website’s conversion rate.
Conversion rate basically refers to the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on your website. A high conversion rate would generally infer that your website is appealing to your target audience due to it being well-designed, relevant and structured effectively. On the other hand, a low conversion rate could be due to various factors such as the website design or technical performance.
Building Blocks of Optimisation
There are various areas of your website that can greatly benefit from optimisation, these include:
- Technical (e.g ensuring no broken links, remove errors)
- Content (e.g. blog page, pricing page, call to action offers)
- Web Structure (best practices for organising information, search bar for better navigation, keyword tags on blog)
- User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX)
Technical Fixes
Ensuring that your website pages have no broken links and errors is important and this would potentially affect whether users are able to complete the desired actions. Examples of such technical issues that may affect the journey and experience of your website visitors include:
- Slow loading times may also deter visitors from completing a sign-up form or purchase.
- Hyperlinks not working or redirected to non-existing pages (Broken links).
Enhancing Content
Content holds a huge bulk of the reasons why websites have either good or low conversion rates. Therefore, it is important to find out and understand what types of content would be relevant to your target audience and has the most engagement.
1. Add CTAs within your website content
Adding in Call-To-Actions (CTAs) into your website pages and blog articles is generally considered a best practice. This is to help entice and guide users to take your desired action on your website.
2. Create and optimise blog articles
Creating blog articles opens up the opportunity for conversions, especially when the article is relevant to your target audience and aligns with your desired actions. However, if you already have existing blog articles, you may also consider optimising them by updating it or adding text-based CTAs.
3. Adding relevant information for your target audience
Content is the most important factor and hugely affects whether your website is optimised for conversions or not. It is very important to include content that is relevant to your target audience as this would affect most parameters such as bounce rate, dwell time, clicks and your desired action.
4. Adding images and videos on to your website pages
Text content alone is not sufficient to engage users in today’s day and age. Rich media such as pictures and videos are essential in enhancing the content on websites. In addition, they can be used to help entice users to take your desired action on your website. For example, infographics and charts can be used to convey specific CTAs.
Improving Website Structure
The website structure is another important factor that affects the conversion rate of your website. When your website is hard to navigate or information is difficult to find, it would likely deter users from staying and increase the bounce rate. Hence, having a good structured website with easy navigation would help you retain users on your website and increase the conversion rate.
With that being said, there are a few ways that you can improve your website structure. These include:
- Using a search and filter function would help website visitors to find relevant content and information easily.
- Creating keyword tags on your blog would enable users to easily find useful information on your website.
User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX)
The User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) of your website also contributes to whether it is optimised for conversions or not. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that your website is easy to navigate and presents content that would retain your visitors.
One way to assess and analyse whether your website has a good UI or UX would be to implement heatmaps. Tools like Hotjar allow you to be able to analyse the behaviour of your website visitors. This would include the places they click on and how far they scroll on a page. In addition, heatmaps reveal the much bigger picture of your website’s UX and conversion rates.
Conclusion
In order for you to ultimately increase your conversion rate, you would need to analyse your website and assess which areas require improvements. However, it is important to take note that improving your website for conversions also requires A/B testing and experimentation as every website and industry is different from one another.