optimizing-your-site-for-conversion

Optimizing Your Site for Conversion

by

Your business website is up and running, but are you optimizing your site for conversion of these visitors into leads? Follow these steps to make immediate improvements.

Craft Content for Conversion

Having a clear picture of your company’s strengths and the value your service or product gives clients is essential for creating website content geared for conversion. What does your business offer clients that’s different from all others in your industry? That’s your unique value proposition. Leverage that message to create website content, including landing page copy, videos, and images. Written copy is always essential from both user and search engine perspectives, but other types of content can help with conversion rates as well:

  • Offer Compelling Visual Content: A video or still image on your landing page can increase conversion by up to 86 percent, says Wishpond. Videos and pictures promote social sharing and can offer more information at a faster pace than body copy. Choose clear visuals that deepen your site’s experience for visitors. Include smiling faces and your employees interacting as a team; serve content that visually represents the results you can give clients.
  • Make Content Consumable: Large blocks of text with no images or subheadings turn visitors off, which may cause them to leave your site for a competitor. Break your content up using subheadings, bullet points, and short paragraphs to encourage visitors to engage.
  • Build Value, Not Spam: Visitors don’t want to see a laundry list of benefits flanked by Clip Art images and excessive exclamation points when they visit your site. Move visitors to conversion through clear content that communicates your unique value proposition. Cut everything that doesn’t support this effort.

Use a Strong Call to Action

Creating a call to action (CTA) that turns the value you build with content into qualified leads takes careful consideration and often continual fine-tuning. Whether it’s an email sign-up form or the submit button on a “Contact Us” page, its CTA needs precise language to trigger visitor buying actions. For submit buttons, you’ll want to go with a color that doesn’t clash with your site’s overall aesthetic, but also stands out to attract attention. Changing CTA button color to stand out on your landing pages can boost conversion by as much as 35 percent, according to Content Verve.

Keep CTA phrasing simple: two or three words that give visitors a simple task to complete.  Avoid dull language that spurs little action like “Submit” or “Register Now.” Adding value to the CTA with language like “Get Started Now” or “Get Your Quote” gives visitors incentive to click because they can see you’re giving them something for their time investment. This wording makes completing your desired action the next clear step for visitors to take while they’re on your site.

Build Effective Contact Forms

Launching your site without a contact form isn’t a viable option, that is, if you want a successful online arm of your business. So, you need one, but how you present that form and the information you demand from visitors when they submit has a significant impact on conversion rate. If you’re trying to get detailed information from visitors through a contact form, you’re not going to see high conversion. Reducing the required fields in the form to three to five can increase conversion by up to 120 percent, says Unbounce. Here are some other points to remember:

  • Careful with Phone Numbers: Demanding that visitors give you their phone number on submission can cut conversion by 5 percent. Ask for an email address instead to boost form completions. You can always get a phone number later.
  • Place Form Prominently: A contact form that sits below the fold on your site isn’t going to attract much attention. Visitors need to see it above the fold, so they don’t need to go hunting for it. The more work you make visitors do to contact you, the less likely they are to do it.
  • A/B Test Button Copy: Conduct A/B testing using varying versions of contact form copy and form fill requirements to see which has the highest conversion rate over time.

Testing and adjustment of contact forms is an iterative process. As your business grows and services or products change, you may need to tweak their language to bolster or support conversion.

Leverage Promotional Offers and Incentives

Special giveaways and discounts work well to attract brand attention through social channels. While the strength or value of the giveaway is critically important for conversion, new research shows that the time and day your team makes potential lead targets aware of these offers is just as important. Data from Retention Science shows promotional emails sent on Tuesdays and Fridays have the highest conversion rates at 28 and 26 percent. Emails sent in the afternoon convert at a 38 percent clip because recipients are more in a buying mood than users who receive emails in the morning or late at night.

Worst Converting Days: Saturday and Sunday, according to research, have the worst converting chances with open rates and CTR in the single digits. If you want to attract business through a promotional offer, your marketing dollars are better spent during the workweek.

Track All Website Visitors

Install analytics tracking code on your site so you can see all incoming sessions from search engine results pages, views by device type, and visitor location. You’ll be able to see conversion rates for your landing pages and contact forms in close to real-time, while also measuring the percentage of new and returning visitors. All this data is vitally important to improve conversion. For example, if you notice more users visiting your site from tablets and smartphones, you’ll want to test your contact form on these devices to make sure it works as planned across all their various screen sizes. Seeing conversions rise dramatically for one landing page over others? Dig into that page to see if it has content that converts better than others. Adjust the content to avoid duplication and add it to your other pages.

Optimizing your website for conversion is a job that won’t ever reach its finished stage. Watch the data come in and make changes as necessary. Understand that you can’t convince every visitor to contact you, but that doesn’t mean you should stop trying.

Want to make this whole process easier? Call today to learn about marketing automation to improve your lead generation and conversion rates.