Equally as important as driving traffic to your website is converting visitors once they are there. A 1% increase in your conversion rate can mean thousands in additional revenue for your business. Many conversion rate optimization improvements are subtle and can be done easily with a little bit of analysis. If you haven’t already, be sure that you install analytics tracking (i.e., Google Analytics) to your website. What is true for one website may not be true for another, so it’s best to validate each move with data.
Optimize for Higher-Converting Keywords
Certain keywords are more actionable than others. How someone is searching can give you a good indication of how motivated they are to make a purchase. Generally speaking, the more specific the search query, the higher you can expect the conversion rate to be. However, specific search terms will often have lower search volume. Understanding the tradeoff between search volume and conversion rate can help you make more profitable business decisions.
Let’s look at a hypothetical. Say you sell waterproof cases for the iPhone 4. You notice that of the visitors that navigate to your site from the keyword “iphone 4 case”, around 1% end up making a purchase. Those that use the search term “waterproof iphone 4 case” convert at a rate of 3%. Let’s take a look at the monthly search volume for the US.
Holding all other factors equal, you can look at the conversion potential for each keyword simply by multiplying search volume by your conversion rate. For “iphone 4 case”, it’s 331 sales per month. For “waterproof iphone 4 case”, it’s 444 sales per month. In this example, you can see that, despite having lower search volume, a more specific search has greater revenue potential. The takeaway here would be to optimize your landing page for “waterproof iphone 4 case” rather than “iphone 4 case”.
Test Your Messaging
It is said that you have about 3 seconds to capture a visitor’s interest before they move on. Many factors go into holding their attention, including your messaging. If it is not clear right away that what you offer is what the visitor is looking for, they will leave.
How can you test your messaging for conversion optimization? A simple way to do so is to run a short PPC campaign to understand what copy influences your target market to interact. Even if PPC ads aren’t effective for generating sales for your product or service, they can be an effective research mechanism. I recommend doing a one-month trial period with $500 in total ad spend. Don’t expect to recoup this spend. This is an investment in market research and should be treated as such. The idea being that the outcome of this research will provide a greater benefit in the long term.
For your campaign, focus on just a handful of your most obvious keywords and run 2 to 3 ads with different copy. One of the ads will most likely outperform the others by driving more clicks to your landing page. The messaging you used in this ad can then be implemented on your landing pages to convert more of your non-paid traffic. If you’re PPC campaign actually resulted in a positive ROI, then you may have just found another marketing channel for your business!
Create A Better User Experience Based On Conversion Rate
Look at your website’s user experience through the lens of improving conversions. If your website is difficult to navigate, has dead links, or is cumbersome, you won’t be converting many visitors. When looking at your site’s analytics, identity the web pages that have high bounce rates and exit rates. Why aren’t people engaging with these web pages? In some cases, maybe they aren’t supposed to. But in many cases, you’re losing out on potential business.
Reducing barriers to conversion will ultimately create a better user experience. You may have noticed that many online retailers have switched to a one-step checkout process. They identified that they were losing sales due to the time it took to complete a purchase and created a better user experience as a result.
Implementing these three simple, yet effective conversion rate optimization practices will generate more business through your website!