Does Your Website Convert?
Is your website converting?
Setting up your website is one of the initial steps of an Internet marketing campaign, but the success or failure of your website is dependent on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don’t have any idea what you would like your website to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything.
If you expect visitors to your website to perform some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product, there are some steps you can take to make sure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven’t been doing any out of the ordinary offline promotional activities.
If you find that thousands of visitors have come to your website this does not necessarily mean that your website is successful. Usually,
you want those visitors to actually do something on your site. The number of visitors to your site who made a purchase is usually called the site conversion rate, and it is one of the most important figures in determining the success of your website..
To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 4,000 hits to your site, but only 50 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this percentage, just take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that result by 100.
If your website is designed to get your visitors to fill out a form or sign up for a newsletter, make sure to also figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually purcahse something. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.
If your conversion rate is poor you may want to consider how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible? Does the visitor have to jump through hoops to get to it? If it’s too difficult to get to, the customer may just give up and move on to another website. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.
It also makes sense to have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.
It is important to check your conversion rate before embarking on an SEO campaign to get a higher search engine rank. You can use pay per click advertising to check the conversion rate of specific keyword phrases. This can save you time upfront as you do not want to end up optimizing and promoting your website using a keyword phrase that does not convert well for your product or service.
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Tagged with: Website Conversion
Filed under: SEO Tips
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You know, it?s much easier to build good relationships, build evangelists and have them help you market/sell your product/service! Sure it might require that you give a lot of yourself (and knowledge) over and over again and often times for free? But when they evangelize, boy do they evangelize and refer people to you almost without even thinking about it! And that?s?well, that?s just magic.
You are right in what you have said. I was only thinking this the other day but I think I will now dig a little deeper. Not sure what the last guy meant though!
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WowI hadn’t never thought the apparently simple ways Google works. The affair is that while a spider indexes your page countless times, it still takes a tonne of effort on your part in order to get your site to become intriguing to Google. I guess this adds to my knowledge of search engine optimization!
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