Getting traffic, but no sales?

Invigorate your blog with these three simple tips. 

Why is conversion on your website so important? 

Let’s say you are currently converting 2% of the people who visit your blog into customers or enquiries. If you can tweak your website and double that to 4%, that will mean you will have twice as many customers without needing to have any extra visitors to your website. That means twice as many customers for no extra advertising cost!

Sometimes just a few small changes can bring major improvement in conversion rates. 

Check out these simple tips to get the most out of every visitor to your website:

TIP 1: Remove the guesswork from your blog

It’s your job to convince your visitor to take action on your website and turn into a potential customer. Before working out how to do that, you need to know what you want that visitor to do. 

There are the more obvious things:

• Call you
  
• Fill in a contact email form
  
• Send you an email
  
• Make a purchase
  

You can assume that at least 80% of the visitors looking at your site are interested in the type of services you offer, so why aren’t those 80% of people getting in touch with you?

Let’s say that 10% of the people who visit your site are getting in touch – that leaves 70% who are interested in your services that are not contacting you. You need to put yourself in these people’s shoes.

What is that 70% thinking? Why are they on your website?

• Are they not convinced that you’re the best person for the job? Is there not enough trust there? (Credibility)
  
• Are they not in the right part of the sales cycle? Are they not yet ready to become a customer but only looking for information? (Lead Magnets)
  
• Do they want to get in touch but can’t figure out how to? (User Centric Design)
  
• Something else?
  

To be as effective as possible, your website should be focused on capturing as many visitors as you can. This is what is going to increase your profits without increasing your advertising spend.

TIP 2: Always, always, always establish your credibility.

Here’s what it comes down to for your website – your potential customers need a good reason to trust what you are saying. 

You can say that you are the: 

• “best plumber in New York City”; or 
  
• “provide the best floral photographs for weddings”; or 
  
• “offer the most delicious double roasted coffee in the world”. 
  

The problem is that all those competitors’ websites your potential customer is visiting before and after your site, say the exact same thing. Your customer is looking for the best solution to their problem. You need to tell them why they should listen to your assertions. 

Here's how you can show your credibility: 

Your company's credibility should revolve around your brand story. On how well it solves your customers' problems and any resources that outline company's expertise. 

Remember, the majority of your customers aren't going to meet you face-to-face. So what can you do to help them ease the barriers in doing business with you and their belief in your company to deliver what you promise. 

In addition to your regular “About us” page, have a page called “Why us / Our story” (or similar), as well as also having a reviews/testimonials page or section. 

To make this even more effective, you could organize your website so that the top bullet points of what achievements make you worth listening to are above the fold on every page (“above the fold” just means that it is viewable on your visitors’ browser window before they scroll down).

Be specific about your accomplishments:

• Do you have any third party recognition? Any awards?
  
• Do you have reviews or testimonials that real previous customers have written? 
  
• What specifically have you done for other people or businesses? 
  

How did you help them succeed? (89% of people you helped found love; you helped ABC business go from 20,000 in profit to 150,000 in profit; 87% of your customers came from word of mouth from other customers; etc) 

Your potential customer needs to know exactly why they should trust what you write on your website. They want to hear the stories of how you helped someone just like them. 

TIP 3: Make it easy to buy

You don’t need a whole new website to add more calls to action. Instead, you can add different levels of engagement – a path for how each all your visitors to be engaged. 

There are a many different actions that can be recorded, such as:

• joining an email list 
  
• taking polls, surveys, etc.
  
• visiting multiple pages 
  
• downloading white papers, reports or fact sheets 
  
• participating in conversations on your social media channels 
  
• sharing your content via social media, bookmarking or email 
  

For people to engage with your website, you need to give them a path to follow. Re-read your web copy and make sure that what you’re asking them to do is obvious and specific.

People will appreciate it when the information they are trying to find is clearly defined. You website is of no use if the visitor does nothing. Your goal is to simplify the process as much as possible and make sure that once someone has decided to take the action, it’s very easy to follow through. 

Here are other strategies you can use to turn your website into a customer machine:

• User centric design, layout essentials, avoiding stock photography, no flash introductions and responsive design
  
• Increase the hosting and site speed
  
• Being socially integrated
  
• Blogs, interactivity and fresh content with your opinion
  
• Capturing more visitors details - Lead magnets
  
• Getting to the point quickly and instant gratification
  
• Copywriting essentials
  

Conversion optimization is not a one-time task. For your website to continuously produce results, you need to create a system of ongoing testing and improvement. It should feel like a habit rather than a singular process. Start mapping out the big picture and reverse-engineer the process to achieve your major objectives.

Let’s get a conversation going. Maybe we can even discuss some example recommendations in the comments section of the article.