A website exists for ONE reason only: to get your customers to take action.

The action may be a phone call, a purchase, a registration, a download, or any other measurable action.

It never ceases to amaze us how much effort and resources businesses put into getting traffic to their website with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Google AdWords and social media strategies (Facebook, Twitter, etc), but how little effort goes into improving their conversion rates.

Do you know your own conversion rates? 1%? 8%?

If you were trying to fill a leaky bucket, would you try to get more water in the top, or plug the holes first?

For most websites it is FAR easier and MUCH cheaper to increase your conversion rates from 1% to 2% than to double your traffic!

Here are 5 tips to massively boost your online success:

1. Set Baseline & Targets

Like anything in life, if you want to improve something, it is critical to accurately measure where you are today, and then set some very specific goals – WITH timeframes.

If your conversion rates are 1% today, it’s not unrealistic to increase this to 2% in 30 days. Or maybe from 3% to 4% (that’s still a 33% increase!). But whatever it is, get very clear, and set some goals. (You may even get more granular and focus on conversion rates by channel, e.g. paid traffic or organic traffic.)

2. Set aside ‘x’ hours per week/fortnight

Whether you’re an employee or are running your own business, everyone is always” far too busy”. The only way you’re going to make progress is to plan for this activity as part of your regular workload. It’s probably no surprise that just leaving this as a “I’ll do it when I can” item is not going to get you very far. If you’re delegating, build the responsibilities into their job function.

3. User Testing

You and your team are most likely buried in the detail of your website and not able see the wood for the trees. A fresh pair of eyes can provide much insight.

There are testing services where you can get short videos of a tester interacting with your site and recording their answers to the questions you’ve asked.

The feedback is extremely fast, low cost, and insightful. It can be very revealing getting a person (ie a tester) to answer some questions, such as:

• Is it clear what services we offer?
• What do you think is unique about us?
• What are your overall impressions of our website?
• Would you do business with us if you were a potential customer? If not, why?
• Is our navigation clear and simple to use?
• How could we improve?

4. A/B Testing

A/B testing is very simple. You send half your traffic to one web page (page A) and the other half to another webpage with different design elements (page B) and then measure the difference in conversion rate. Gains can be massive.

There is a lot of information on the web as how to go about this form of testing. Once you’ve done a bit of A/B testing, you can then move onto multivariate testing, where you vary individual elements. See Google Optimiser for further information.

5. Advanced Analytics Tools

A tool like Google Analytics is an incredibly useful (and free!) tool. And anyone who is serious about conversion optimisation should understand its powerful functionality. However, there is a limit to what it can do.

There are some amazing services on the market that can also be of huge value. One in particular (which we have partnered with) is www.clicktale.com which records a video of REAL visitors interacting with your website. This gives you amazing insight into how your visitors move around your website. It can reveal things that you could never find out with Google Analytics. Pricing starts from about $100 per month (no contracts).

So there you have ‘em. Five tips to send your website conversion rates to the moon.

If you can stop focusing exclusively on your traffic, and plug the holes in your website, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results!

By Philip Shaw

Learn about our Adwords Training & Management Solutions.

Tags: conversion, online, SEO, tips, website