subject: Some General Tips On How To Improve Website Conversion Rates [print this page] If you have an online business, then you have to make sure you can do everything you can to improve website conversion rates for your domains.
It's surprising how many people think that simply having an online presence is all it takes to access the online market - that's just not the case.
Here are a few basic tips to keep in mind if you want to improve your website conversion rates, no matter what the website and what your criteria for conversion:
Make your website accessible, clear and easy and understand
If people get on your site, they need to be able to find your conversion metric easily. They won't go looking for it - they'll just leave if they can't find it. So, your basic site design should be geared up to making it immediately clear to the hypothetical user how they can do this - and just as important, you should make it clear why they should convert.
Illustrate the benefits of buying your product/registering their information/etc as succinctly as possible and make sure that they can get back to your most important pages easily. You can do this with a simple site map, or through a navigation toolbar, or through an interactive menu; don't rely on people clicking "back" to get back to a page and don't think for a second they'll get back on the start of the trail to get to the mid-point.
Cater for a wider audience
Whilst fancy technical features like flash or javascript can add lots of appeal to your site - driving traffic there, increasing user time on your page, etc - the more complex your site the higher the chances that on some people's PC, it just won't work.
Using semantic HTML coding you can ensure that your site and the important aspects of it can be accessed on a wide variety of hardware and software set-ups; it's often extremely easy to present people with a simple "HTML or Flash" option at the initial gateway. In recent years the growth of the smartphone user base can also make it worth optimising a page for mobile devices (smaller screens, no mouse, possible lack of flash support, etc).
If people get an error message or see lots of inactive objects on your page, then you've damaged your chances of netting a conversion.
Target an audience and make yourself visible to it
Finally, it's not all about what's on your webpage - it's also about how people get to your website. There's a huge variety of ways you can do this, from direct advertising to link-swapping with community sites or even just through the (impossible to bottle) word-of-mouth buzz generated through social media campaigns or by strong hosted content. Some of these methods allow you to target specific audiences; you can take out banner/display advertising on other websites or online content networks and target users based on their viewing history.
You can take out paid search ads and reach people looking for a certain thing via Google, Bing, etc. Or you could invest in search engine optimisation, appearing higher in the natural, non-sponsored results for certain relevant queries by optimising your site to hit those keywords specifically.
Gather data
In the simplest terms, its about taking a holistic approach - considering all of the aspects and making sure that each of them works with one another. You can get some hard figures on how people use your site, how they reach it, and all other kinds of data, by hooking your site up to a package like Google analytics. Study your data and test new approaches; don't expect results instantly, but don't continue with something that's obviously not working.
