Increasing My Conversion Rate–Where Do I Start?
Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Website Effectiveness Consulting at Apogee Search, to discuss the best strategies for increasing conversion rates.
SEO and PPC efforts can drive qualified traffic to your website, but in order to justify the time, effort, and expense, the site must be able to convert that traffic into either a lead or a sale. Alissa explains that different websites experience different obstacles, such as building trust, brand recognition, or simply experiencing high abandonment rates, and therefore require different solutions for improving conversion rates.
The best place to start analyzing your conversion rate is to look at entry pages with the highest traffic, such as home pages or high ranking landing pages. Alissa believes that these pages are extremely important in forming the right first impression with any visitor or potential customer to your site. If visitors are only spending a brief amount of time on these pages and you are experiencing a high bounce rate, consider using bullet points, bolded text, and more compelling headlines that grab every visitors’ attention and gets your message across in a clear and concise manner. If an individual is spending a great deal of time on your website then leaves without completing any sort of action, consider adding more calls to action to guide them into the conversion process.
Alissa states that lead form optimization is also an effective way to increase conversion rates on your website. In order to increase the amount of lead forms that are submitted with complete and accurate information and avoid abandonment, it is important to ensure that your forms are simple to complete, establish more trust with individuals, and only ask for information that is necessary and beneficial in obtaining a lead. Improving the conversion rate for eCommerce lead forms is slightly more involved. The amount of steps required in an eCommerce website can make conversion optimization seem daunting. Alissa separates problems with eCommerce purchases into three buckets:
- Customer’s ability to find the product they want
- Process of adding products to the cart
- Process of purchasing the product once in the cart
Web analytics data can help you identify which of these steps is causing problems. These common problems can be resolved by working the individual into a pipeline, increasing the persuasion on the pages, inserting more calls to action, and discarding unnecessary requests for information that may deter an individual from completing the process.
In general, analytics tools like Google Analytics can help you pinpoint problems, while usability analyses, best practices lists, and case studies can help you identify possible solutions. However, replicating a method that may have worked for someone else is not guaranteed to work for you. Testing different solution ideas is crucial for ensuring an improvement in conversion rates.
