Seven Ways To Improve your Conversion Rate

Having the world's greatest product or service does not guarantee the success of your website. When you build a website you deal with many different (and sometimes conflicting) considerations.

Your Prime Consideration is this: Your website must convert visitors into customers. If it can't do that, all other design considerations are irrelevant.

What you can do to improve conversions:

Design your website for Speed.

People are in a hurry, and you've only got seconds to capture your visitors interest and get their attention.... so your pages need to load as fast as possible.

The average person is not impressed with your design talent. They came to your website for their own reasons, and it is your job to give them what they want as quickly as possible.

Minimize your load time by using small images, and compress them if possible. If you must use flash, streaming video or animated files to demonstrate your product don't do it on your home page.

Visitors can (and will) enter your website from almost any page, but the majority will enter from your home page -- so make that page load faster than all the others.

Spinwave has a free online image compressor that can reduce .gif and .jpeg image file sizes up to 30%.

You need to understand your Target Audience.

Know who you are marketing to and make certain that your website caters to their needs. It is critical that the tone and content of your website reflects the values of your potential customers.

A 'no-nonsense' professional website is appropriate if your visitors are business professionals, but a relaxed and informal design is better if your visitors are entertainment-seeking young adults.

The important thing is to know who your market is and build your website to reflect their expectations and preferences.

Make your website Simple and Consistent.

You know where all your pages are and how they relate to each other, your visitors don't. Give them the simplest, easiest navigation menu that you possibly can and a good site-search feature so they don't just leave in frustration.

See the Menu Design page for more info about that.

Make your website design consistent on all pages and sections. Nothing is more distracting to a potential customer than feeling like they accidentally went to another website. If you're lucky, they click 'back' and figure it out -- if not, you loose a sale.

Define and maintain your website Focus.

I'm assuming that your goal is to sell your product or service. Stay focused on that and ignore all the other "Latest and Greatest" crap that will distract or confuse your visitors. Murphy's Law, as applied to the internet, states that "If anything can distract my visitor, it will."

Make sure that your content conveys only the message you want your visitors to get -- and that it leads them through the sales process without hiccups or roadblocks.

If you offer several different but related products, create a unique page for each one instead of trying to sell them all from one page. This may best be done by using sub-domains instead of paying for different hosting accounts.

For a beautiful example of a very focused website see the Endless Pools website, their goal is simply to get you to order the free DVD (Which does all their selling for them) and it performs that task very well.

Build your Credibility.

You can't sell anything if your potential customers don't trust you. You can't meet them face to face, so you have to show your trust-worthiness in other ways.

Most obvious is simply to provide legitimate contact information and a privacy policy. Add links to your privacy statement and contact page from every page on your website -- and especially from any page that asks for personal information.

Provide both anonymous feedback forms and regular email forms so your potential customers can ask questions. Be aware that some people will use them just to see if there is a real person at the other end before they decide to buy.

Customer testimonials, a believable guarantee, a clear return policy and using a well-recognized payment processor will all add to your perceived credibility.

While we're on the subject; proofreading, spell-checking and links that all work right will make your website seem more professional and that helps build credibility too.

Be an Expert.

The internet is not about marketing -- it's about information. People search for information about whatever is on their minds at the time. If they are searching for something related to your website theme and you provide good information, then they see you as an expert.

You can become an expert, or at least an authority, on your topic simply by writing articles related to the subject of your website. Once you are seen as an expert, your opinions carry much more weight and people are more likely to buy.

Lastly, do some real-world Testing.

As I stated earlier, you know where all your pages are and what they are about -- what you need to do is get some other people to visit your website and give you an unbiased critique.

That's the key word: Unbiased. Your friends and family can't do that for you even if you ask.

How you accomplish this depends on your circumstances, but when I was putting my sister's website together I went to the library and paid four strangers five dollars each to visit her website from the library computers.

I gave them each some basic goals to accomplish (find the printable catalog, visit three online catalog pages, find the ordering information, read the FAQ's, etc.) and then I just watched how they did it.

Afterwards, I asked them for their general impressions about the website layout, navigation, overall design and colors.

That experiment was an eye-opener for me! The resulting changes included a more muted color scheme, larger text and some minor navigation changes. The end result was a better, more user-friendly website that has resulted in several large recurring orders for my sister's business. Orders that I'm convinced never would have happened without the website as it now is.

Simple, helpful, fast and focused.
  These simple rules will go a long way toward the improvement of your website -- but most importantly, they will help turn your visitors into customers.

To Your Success!
Tim

By Tim Brown © 2006. About the author: Tim is the webmaster at http://BLT-Web.com, where webmasters can find free tools, advice, tips and other useful resources designed to help them build a successful website.

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