Are you aware of the difference between visitor traffic to your website, and Conversion Rates? Consider this: no matter the number of web surfers who stop by your site, if they are not buying your product or service, are they truly doing you any favours?
Particularly in today’s world, the difference between an online retailer who is successful and one who is not can come down to the difference in the layout and architecture of their websites.
Along with utilising a friendly format, ensuring that the site is optimised for search engine crawlers will go a long way toward converting visitors to paying customers.
Ways to Optimise Your Website
Traditionally, pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns were a popular way to divert directed traffic to your website. This method of search engine optimisation (SEO) increased visibility to a company’s target market by placing the URL at the top of searches (within the top 10 results) for certain keywords. These paid listings not only take a large portion of any business’ marketing budget, but they require proper management to work most effectively.
There are more options than this, however, for today’s online retailer to capture a greater market share. Submitting your website to directories, utilising comparison shopping carts, and posting viral content are all ways to increase exposure.
Some of these methods cost nothing more than time. They are considered organic, or ways which do not require any contrivance other than providing a good, solid, optimised website that will be found by search engine crawlers.
Another way to drive traffic is through viral means. This refers to any method of bringing in visitors which is accomplished through word-of-mouth spread, so to speak. For instance, a video posted on a website with social bookmarking links next to it can result in a great deal of increased traffic if just one user shares the link to the URL. As others view the content via this sharing, they then spread it to their own contacts and so it soon crawls around the internet much as a virus would. This results in more qualified traffic to your site, and increased sales.
How SEO Results in Higher Conversion Rates
SEO marketing is involved with directing search engines to a specific landing page of your website depending on what keywords are being searched.
It has been proven that consumers utilise certain, predictable methods when they are seeking specific services or items on the internet. The landing pages you choose to be associated with valid keywords should be based on these methods, thereby giving web surfers the most pertinent results for their search and giving the e-tailer the greatest chance of converting this to a sale.
The Conversion
Part of the online marketing equation is also giving visitors content that is informative, interesting, and interactive. Online videos, user forums, blog posts, games – all of these things exhort the consumer to visit your site, and stay a while. Again, the idea is that the longer they stay browsing the content on your site, the greater the chance they will buy a product or service there.
No matter the type of products or services you sell on your website, Conversion Rates of visitors to customers is largely a result of the optimisation methods you utilise. Provide a good product, place it on an attractive website, include informative and interactive content, and make it easy for anyone to browse and buy, these are the key components to converting the highest percentage of surfers to buying customers.
Don’t forget that some customers take a while to woo. Court them through email newsletters, free e-courses, free e-books or special reports that they receive by opting to receive future communications from you. This will help you win over the browsers that want a longer sales cycle as well as help you win repeat business from customers that do buy from you.
About Sean Rasmussen
I think it is important to implement a lead-capture system into any website to help increase your conversion ratio.
SEO and SEM are great for bringing the traffic. But that is only half the battle. The other half is what you do with the visitors once they come to your site.
Thanks for sharing.
You made some good points there. I did a search on the topic and found most people will agree with your blog.
Very useful blog. I agree with the above comment. You got to use capture pages where possible. SEO is very important along with a lot of techniques, but you got to get them signing up.
Thanks, i enjoyed your information
Great ideas Sean. I will implement when I need to
Hi Sean,
I’m still learning to put the pieces together. I’m doing some of these things but not all, and I don’t think I am doing any of them properly. There’s so much to learn.
Hi Sean,
what kind of conversion rates can you reasonably expect? Or the other way round – what kind of conversion rate tells you that you are doing a good job? 1 in every 100?
Would be great to get a benchmark. Thanks
It’s not an easy one to answer Renee. It would depend on whether you are paying for your traffic or generating organic traffic. For organic, I think you could consider 1/100 to be reasonable and 5/100 to be outstanding. One thing is for sure, if you are getting zero, it’s time to have a good look at your website, content, products, calls to action etc.
Hi Sean
Yes I definitely want conversion from traffic to my site and would like to have a visitor friendly site too.
I am looking at viral marketing. I have an interest in producing videos as they have that auditory element instead of just visual.
You give many terrific options here and increasing conversion rates can be done in many ways. This will help me plan my new marketing strategies. Thankyou.
Increasing conversion rates on my site is number 1 on my list and will be working hard at achieving this. I actually have sold a couple of things in the last month so every little bit helps. I am looking forward to achieving at least a 3 in every 100 click conversion rate.