SEO builds traffic, conversion rates determine profitability!

So you built a site, you did the marketing work required and you are getting some good traffic, but sales are not happening! The promises of the online revolution are eluding you! You can get tons of hits to your site via successful SEO or Ad-word campaigns or Link Building, but what if they come and they don’t buy anything? What if all your SEO efforts and the resultant traffic is not converting to dollars? No traffic is bad, but traffic and no revenue is not fun either. Well my friend, it’s time to work on your site with an eye towards conversion  rate! Do you have a call(s) to action? Can your visitors easily understand what you want them to do? Can they find the widgets they want to use, and can they easily access them? Perhaps, most importantly, do the feel comfortable acting upon your calls to action? Hopefully you understand why all this is important, but in case its being a long week, consider the following.

Improving your conversion rate can make a dramatic difference quickly!

Let’s say you make an average of $50 every time a particular form on your website is filled out. The form could be for a reservation or a request for follow up or any number of things, but when people heed your call to action, you can directly track a correlation with revenue. Right now your site converts 1% of all visitors, so effectively you make 50 cents for every visitor that shows up. If you made improvements to your site that increased the “conversion rate” to 2.5% suddenly you are making $1.25 per visitor. Suppose you have 10000 hits per month; that change to your site generated you an immediate $7500 extra in month 1 and will keep doing so each month thereafter. Such a change would quite possibly not have cost very much at all. Let’s say $1000 for the sake of argument.  If you had invested that same $1,000 in SEO instead and conversion stayed at 1%, you would need to get 15,000 additional visitors from SEO to break even. That’s asking for a lot, in fact, probably more than is possible in one month. Good SEO takes time. Yes, good SEO lasts, unlike PPC which stops as soon as your ad budget is spent.  Properly done SEO invariably provides a good ROI, but attending to conversion issues, works immediately and compliments your SEO efforts wonderfully. The sooner you work on improving your sites conversion rate, the more money you make and the more SEO you can afford to invest in. Keep in mind that what is considered “good” sight design and function changes over time so you need to keep your site refreshed and current and you always be working to see what improves conversion, because you can double conversion rates almost immediately with the right change but to double SEO takes time. Not convinced? Consider this. Last year we worked with a customer in the hospitality sector and identified a conversion rate issue. We knew from analytics their site had a problem and when we identified it and made the right changes they saw a 2400% improvement in conversion of traffic to revenue – and it started the next day. For this customer that represented hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit, and provided significantly more funds they could use to improve their marketing. Having positioned the importance of conversions here are some considerations to ponder as you start to work on your site to improve conversion rates.

Factors that affect your conversion rate – a lot of it comes down to psychology!

Basically your website has two kinds of conversions:

1. On-page calls to action (a type of micro-conversion) which are things like “add-to-cart’”, “buy now” buttons and or some type of form submissions, such as “like us” on FB etc.
2. Revenue-driving conversions (the ones that support your business goals) which are things like e-commerce sales and quote-request lead for your sales team.

Conversion rate hinges not only of technical factors but also some often overlooked physiological factors some of which are:

1. Value proposition – Not surprisingly, the viewer has to feel there is value in taking the action you request. Value Proposition is the sum of all the costs and benefits of taking action. Are you accurately creating an overall perceived benefit in your customer’s mind? What do they think the price of the action is? Are they willing to pay it?
2. Sense of Urgency – Why should your visitors take action now? Is it a limited time offer? Are there only 10 slots available? Why decide now as opposed to waiting? What can you do to offer better incentives, offers, tone, and presentation that will move customers to action immediately?
3. Relevance – Does what you are offering match your visitors expectations? How closely does your value proposition match their needs? How does it help you develop more customers? Does it? How do you know?
4. Anxiety – Are there elements on your page (or missing from your page) that create uncertainty in your customer’s mind? Is there a phone number and address? Do you look like a legitimate business? Are their testimonials or evidence of happy customers? Fear and uncertainty about what taking the action might invoke are impediments. Good design can deal with many of these issues and includes use of colour, positioning and other elements.
5. Clarity – Is the customer clear about what you are offering? Look carefully are your, main message, and call-to-action? What is the first thing you see on the page? Does it distract them from your main call to action?

Boosting your conversion rate is a fast effective way to more revenue.

You can and should, work hard on your SEO and on-line marketing to maximize the amount of traffic to your site. The ROI from working on conversion rates and improving your site design can be astounding! There are great tools out there to help you understand what works and what does not and to see when you make changes to your site, what is happening with your visitors? Be clear about what you want to accomplish and keep working the problem. As with SEO,  your site design and web site usability should never be considered finished. Conversion rates can usually be improved, often dramatically. If you are interested in finding out how your site stacks up and what can be done to improve it, call Guaranteed SEO at 1-866-588-8282. We will be pleased to help!