Turning Your Site Into A Lean, Mean Converting Machine

When you’re looking to attract people to your website, it’s important to know what your purpose for getting them is. Does your use for them as soon as they hit your home page, or do you need them to go a step further? For most online businesses, the goal is more than just grabbing clicks, it’s getting them to convert to customers. Here are a few ways to improve the conversion power of your website.

Make sure landing pages land

Whether it’s through PPC advertising, SEO, or whatever other methods, take a look at the routes your customers take to get to your site. It’s important to ensure that you have effective landing pages that are going to fit their expectations of what they will see when they visit the site. For instance, if they click on an advert for a specific service, they should be taken to a page dedicated to explaining that service and leading closer to the point of conversion.

Test what does and doesn’t work

There are a lot of things that can potentially improve the conversion rate of your web pages. Placement of different kinds of content in different plages, pop-ups, form fields (or a lack thereof), calls-to-action, and so on. But how do you know which are going to really work best for you? Deepak Agarwal takes a closer look at the concept of split-testing. Effectively, you should be testing versions of the site with small differences in design to see which performs better. You can intuit what might be better to some degree, but it’s always better to have data to back your ideas up.

Be there to support

Think of the path of conversion as a literal path. You want to make sure there are no barriers in the way. Your website can create barriers through poor navigation and lacking design, but customers can create their own barriers, too. Improving design can knock the former type down, but the latter can be trickier. Often, it requires human intervention, which is why it’s always a good idea to have some form of live chat support on your website. You can reach out to them, ready to knock those barriers down and to help them find the path to conversion.

Use your ads more effectively

Not all of the conversion-boosting tips worth implementing are based on how you use your website, either. You have to think about the tools you use to bring them to your website, too. In the case of your PPC advertising, this advice from Peter Kowalke shows how valuable targeting can be. You can use social listening (also known as social monitoring) to find individuals who are on social media speaking about things related to your business, having your ads appear to them. The better your ad targeting, the more likely you are to hit those who are more likely to convert.

The tips above apply mostly to conversion, but they highlight an important part of all digital marketing. The methods you employ need to match your goals if they’re going to be effective.