How To Improve a Website for Better Conversion
To succeed in e-commerce, you need a lot of quality elements working together. You need a stellar website complete with a homepage and smooth navigation, and excellent products or services.
You’ll also need an effective marketing campaign (including social media and SEO strategy for rankings) to bring people to your business in the first place.
But bringing people to your website is just the start. Once your target audience visits your website, you need to convert them into paying customers. Without the right elements, your visitors might click away before making a purchase or signing up for your service.
Today, let’s break down how you can improve your website for better conversion and improve profits across the board.
Why Does Conversion Rate Matter?
“Conversion rate” is one of the most important metrics you can track for your online business, but many e-commerce entrepreneurs aren’t fully aware of what conversion rate is or what it means.
In a nutshell, conversion rate compares how many total visitors you have on your website versus how many of those visitors turn into paying customers or “convert.” You can also use the conversion rate to track the proportion of visitors to subscribers, visitors to email addresses received, and anything else.
Conversion rate matters because simply measuring how many people visit your website isn’t very effective. If 1000 people visit your website, but none of them purchase, your business isn’t exactly booming.
In comparison, a website with 50 visitors and 50 paying customers is much more successful, even though fewer people ended up on that site’s landing page.
As you analyze your conversion rate, you can use it to:
- Predict the behavior of your target consumers or the outcome of marketing campaigns
- Optimize your website for improved sales from website users
- Optimize your marketing copy, advertisements, or other elements for more success
- Build and boost your brand to new heights of success
In summary, conversion rate matters a great deal. The higher a conversion rate you can get from your website, the better your website is at “converting” website visitors into paying customers.To that end, understanding how to improve your website for better conversion should be a top priority. Let’s take a look at how you can optimize your website for increased conversion step-by-step.
Step 1: Collect Data and Analyze
Before you do anything else, you should collect as much data as possible and analyze the results. In this way, you'll avoid making assumptions or incorrect estimations. Rely on data for your decision-making as much as possible, and your conversion rate will be much higher.
What exactly should you track? It’s a good idea to collect some specific metrics from your visitors:
- Traffic
- Traffic sources (i.e., does the traffic come from paid advertisements, Google searches, links from other websites or a blog post platform, etc.?)
- The abandonment rate for specific web pages—this marks where people usually click away from your website
- The “click-through” rates for your advertisements and marketing campaigns
- Your average order values
- Average time spent on your site before making a purchase
You must gather this information before you try to optimize your website. You can use Google Analytics or certain plugins for this. When you gather the data described above, you’ll better understand how people interact with your website and where you can fix things for website improvement.
Here’s an example:
- Say that your marketing campaign is on fire and people always click through your ads to your website’s landing page—so far, so good
- However, once they get to the landing page, they click away within 30 seconds without purchasing a product, filling out a form, or proceeding through the rest of the site
- This tells you that your problem isn’t with your marketing; it’s with your website’s landing page
- Something needs to be done with the landing page to make it more attractive, easier to navigate through, improve page load time, readability, better site mobile experience, and so on
Step 2: Compare to Competitors
Your next step should be to compare your website directly to your competitors. After all, you want to do better than your rivals in your niche or industry. With that in mind, perform your own case study and take a look at their websites and webpages and:
- See what they are doing that seems attractive or effective
- Is a competitor’s landing page or website layout superior to yours? Maybe you need new graphic designers
- Write down some ideas about how you can improve your landing page or website based on the results of your competitors
This isn’t to say you should directly copy your competitors. But by analyzing your competitors, you’ll know the benchmarks you need to overcome to win over your shared customer pool.
Step 3: Refocus on Your USP or Value Proposition
Next, refocus and redefine your unique selling proposition of value proposition. If you haven't done this already, do it now!
A USP is essentially the factor that separates your brand from the competition in your shared niche. It can be budget-friendliness, bespoke product creation, a reputation for quality, a unique feature, or anything else that your competitors don't offer.
Many e-commerce business owners don’t know how to find their brand’s USP, so they end up floundering when comparing themselves to the competition. Take some time to figure out and refocus on your USP before optimizing your site.
In doing this, you’ll be able to focus on the parts of your brand that are most successful or attractive when redesigning and improving your website.
Step 4: Optimize Website Layout and Design
Now it’s time to start optimizing your website for conversion rate! There are many, many ways you can do this, but the core principles to remember are these:
- Always keep things as simple as possible — an easy to navigate, intuitive website is superior to an overly complex and difficult to click through the website (especially if the user is on their smartphone and not a desktop browser or laptop)
- Place important things at the top of the screen, where people expect to find menu items, important pages, and so on
- Put social media icons (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) at the bottom of the website
- Always have a contact information page (phone number or email) in case your customers have questions
- Make it easy to click through to make a purchase, sign up for an email newsletter, or otherwise convert from the landing page on
How To Optimize Your Landing Page
Your “landing page” is the page your customers land on when they are directed to your site from an advertisement or a Google search. The landing page should have compelling, converting copy (more on that below), and it should be an attractive representation of your brand and its digital domain.
With that in mind, make sure your landing page is:
- Visually attractive—hire a web designer to give your landing page (and the rest of your website) a facelift if need be
- Understandable
- Has a button that immediately leads visitors to a sale page or signs up page
Why is it important to have a button that leads visitors to a place to convert? The fewer clicks it takes for a visitor to convert into a customer or subscriber, the more likely they will convert overall. It’s just a matter of minimal effort.
Imagine visiting two websites to shop for bespoke apparel, and one of them has a landing page with a button that says, “Click here to start your design!” Odds are you'll be more likely to click on and stay with the website with an easy-to-follow conversion trail as opposed to a website that requires you to do investigating of your own.
If you successfully optimize the landing page for your website, you’ll do wonders for your conversion rate by making the user experience more seamless and streamlined.
Improve Additional Pages
While your website’s landing page is undoubtedly the most important on your entire site, your other pages must also be improved and optimized. Specifically, you or a skilled web developer should:
- Eliminate any broken links on the pages (i.e., links that don’t lead anywhere)
- Make sure that your existing links funnel customers seamlessly to different locations that make sense
- Make sure that each webpage is very easy to navigate through and that its buttons are in logical locations (especially the page where they purchase a product and make a transaction)
- Make sure that each webpage has attractive copy and visuals—no page on your site should look amateurish or cluttered
By improving the overall user experience of your website, you’ll make your brand a more enjoyable place for visitors to find. Do this, and they will be more inclined to make a purchase or subscribe and convert into a customer.
Bonus Tip: Remove Unnecessary Form Fields
There’s one other thing you can do to optimize your site and improve conversion: Get rid of any unnecessary form fields.
Form fields are things like:
- Sign-up bars
- Search bars
- Info requests
Anything that requires a visitor to type in information is a form field. Keep these to a bare minimum wherever possible. If customers feel they have to put in a lot of information to navigate your site, they may quickly become tired and click away from a competitor.
Step 5: Improve Sales Copy
As touched on above, you should ensure that your website has excellent, sparkling sales copy from start to finish. "Sales copy" is usually a good proportion of all the text on your website, ranging from headers to body text to marketing vocabulary and so on.
The best example of sales copy, and its impact on a prospective convert, is product descriptions. Imagine that you run an e-commerce store and sell software products to B2B buyers. In that case, your software product descriptions need to be as attractive and engaging as possible. They directly sell your product to your target audience (more on this in Building Blocks’ free classes).
If the sales copy is flat and uninspiring, you won’t convince visitors to convert into paying customers. If the sales copy is persuasive, on the other hand, your target audience will be more likely to make a purchase or at least contact you for more information.
Go through every single line of copy on your website and make sure that it is:
- Concise
- Persuasive
- Informative
- Not overly “salesy”—people are too attuned to that to see it as genuine
If you aren’t the best at writing, don’t sweat it. There are lots of freelance copywriters or digital marketing agencies that can handle website copy for you. Naturally, this will cost something out of your web development or marketing budget.
But it’s well worth it in the end.
Bonus Tip: Add Testimonials or Reviews
Testimonials or positive reviews are a great way to add to your web copy without creating text yourself. Plenty of studies show online shoppers are unwilling to buy from an unknown or untested brand without positive reviews.
With that in mind, you may be able to improve your website’s conversion rate by adding testimonials and positive reviews on your landing page, on your FAQ or “About” page, or elsewhere on your business website.
Try to find the most positive reviews written about your brand so far on resources like Google Reviews, Yelp, and so on. Then copy those reviews and link to their sources on your website so that curious visitors can confirm that the testimonials are legitimate.
This is basic human psychology. When someone visits a new website and doesn't know whether they should buy a product from that site, seeing satisfied customers does a lot to generate trust and build brand reputation.
Step 6: Use Multimedia Elements
While website text is very important, multimedia elements are also crucial to improve your site’s conversion rate across the board. Multimedia elements are videos, images, and graphs.
In short, they’re anything aside from regular text lines or paragraphs. Multimedia elements are important because many humans are visual shoppers and learners.
Imagine visiting a restaurant’s website for the first time when deciding whether you want to place an online order (in other words, you are deciding whether to convert into a paying customer!).
The restaurant website has a beautifully designed menu page with clear images of each food item, including appetizers, entrées, and desserts.
Odds are you’ll be impressed with the website design and, since you can see what the food looks like before ordering, you’ll be more likely to place an order even though you haven’t visited the restaurant in person.
In comparison, imagine visiting a website with a bland, basic menu with no pictures of the food. Who would order from a restaurant online without knowing what the food will look like? (Hint: no one).
Multimedia elements are great for building trust and showing people what they can expect from your brand before they make a purchase or subscribe.
When To Use Graphs
Graphs can be powerful multimedia tools, especially if your brand is more technically focused or if your target audience is educated. However, be sure not to overuse graphs. Graphs can clutter up white space on the screen and take up a lot of space on your website overall.
You should only use graphs when:
- You have statistics you can use to back up the graph imagery
- The graph adds some value to a visitor’s understanding of your product or service
Graphs can do a lot to build trust and convert visitors into customers, but only if they are used correctly.
Step 7: Improve Page Load Speed and Optimize for Mobile Users
These days, about half of all Internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Therefore, e-commerce brands that want to thrive in the competitive economic environment must optimize their websites for mobile users.
This will assist with conversion rate; many mobile users will close out of a webpage if it doesn’t load within one second. You can’t get a visitor to convert if they don’t stick around on your website.
There are many ways to improve page load speed for your desktop users and optimize your website for mobile users. Here are some basic ideas:
- Compress your images and other multimedia content—this will also increase webpage load speeds for desktop users
- Use Google's mobile testing tool to see if your website is currently mobile-friendly
- If it isn’t, the tool will recommend how you can improve your site’s mobile performance
- Increase font size
- Improve page loading speed by using a CDN or content delivery network
- Remove unnecessary content and especially multimedia files (i.e., videos or images for products you no longer offer)
- Above all else, make sure that your website is very easy to navigate through with a small screen—to test this, visit your website on your mobile device and make changes appropriately
By optimizing your site for mobile users and boosting page speed, your website will be an even more comfortable and enjoyable place to visit. Add some quality products and services, and your conversion rate is much more likely to improve quickly.
Bonus Tip: Remove Pop-Ups and Distractions
Lots of website owners these days incorporate pop-ups and other distracting elements into their web experiences. For example, they might have a pop-up ad immediately appear before every visitor who stops by their site, asking them to subscribe.
This is usually not a good idea (at least not for mobile users). It slows down the user experience, prevents them from entering the conversion funnel starting at your landing page, and may even annoy your visitors so much that they click away from your site without seeing what you have to offer.
To improve your website's conversion rate, get rid of pop-up ads or input fields that appear. Pop-up ads, of course, might be a viable marketing tactic elsewhere, but not on your actual web storefront.
Step 8: Analyze Metrics and Continue Adjusting
Doing all this hard work and making all these improvements to your website is just the start. Improving your website’s conversion rate, search engine optimization, and keywords, search ranking/search results, and other metrics never really stops. You never want to decrease your effort in these areas.
As you make your improvements and adjustments, be sure to continually analyze the metrics mentioned above, such as visitor times, visitor traffic sources, and abandonment rates. As you do this, you'll likely find that your conversion rate is increasing. But you'll also probably find other ways in which to improve your website for even better results.
This constant tinkering and iteration will, over time, make sure that your website is the best version of itself it can be.
Conclusion
Ultimately, improving your website’s conversion rate is more than possible with the right strategies and tools. Consider each of the tips above and integrate them in conjunction with one another for the best results.
With Building Blocks, you’ll learn how to apply your site’s visitor data to improve your eCommerce site. Block 19 of the Masterclass covers the analytics behind your visitor’s behaviors and how you can use this information to optimize your site for better conversions.
Visit Building Blocks today for more information on our Master Class or to enroll now.