Website Hosting Conversion Rates - Page 2

By Staff

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Increase Conversion Rates

If you find that traffic to your site is very low, you will need to make significant changes in your Internet marketing plan to overcome this. There are many tips and tricks that can be used to improve traffic flow to your site. One of them is by “SEO”, also known as, Search Engine Optimization.

As a useful addition to you Internet marketing plan, launching an effective SEO plan is imperative to increasing traffic to your website. You can’t increase your websites conversion rate without increasing traffic to your site. After all, if you don’t have visitors to your site, there will be little for you to measure anyway.

The goal of this type of campaign is to “rank” as high as you can on various search engine results. This practice makes it easier and quicker for people to find your business on the web. With a little research on search engine optimization, you can launch and work the campaign by yourself. If this is something that you shun having to do, then hiring a professional SEO company may be the answer.

Regardless of who does this task, once it is completed, you will need to monitor it regularly to make sure that your business stays on the top of the list by tweaking your strategies where necessary.

One final word regarding strategy. Never overlook the copy on your website. Good, professional webcopy should “move” visitors to action in some way. Good webcopy is worth its weight in gold and has a major affect on the conversion rate of your website. People will not stay on your site long enough to perform any tasks, let alone purchase anything, if the copy doesn’t get their attention and draw them in.

The copy must target the campaign that you have launched online. Good, effective copy can mean the difference between riches and going bust. If you are not good at writing your own webcopy, hire a professional. Don’t leave it to chance, it is what will sell your site and your products to those who stop by to see what you have to offer.

Sale Metrics and Conversion Rates

While everyone is buzzing about the importance of conversion rates, it really is not the most important metric to determine your site’s sales success. Just about everyone who does business on the Internet worries about conversion rates and how they can improve them. Granted, conversion rates are an important indicator of how well the “performance” of your site is, but not an indicator if how well your “sales” are doing and how much “revenue” are you really generating.

Revenue Per Visitor is by and far the most important metric that can be used to determine your sales success. It indicates how much money your business is earning from each person who visits your site. To correctly calculate revenue per visitor, use the following formula.

Total sales $ (divided by) total number of visitors = Revenue per visitor.

Why is revenue per visitor more important than conversion rate?  Let’s take a look at the following example to see why.

Let’s say that you are selling two different products, a blue widget and a yellow widget. The blue widget sells for $50 and the yellow one sells for $10. Your promotion is targeting the blue widget more heavily than the yellow because it costs more, which would mean more revenue for your business but it has only a 5-conversion rate.  You start to think that maybe you should back off on the blue widget promotion and focus on promoting the yellow widget instead. After all if you double your conversion rate to let’s say 10 promoting the yellow widget, then it will be worth it, right? Wrong!

Even with the doubling of conversion rate on the yellow widget, you need to sell twice as much to double the rate. You are earning less money in the long run. It will not help boost your business revenues if you focus more on promoting the lower cost widget. It will actually hurt revenue any chance that you may have to increase revenue.

So your focus must be on earning as many dollars as possible per visitor. Remember that you can improve conversion rates without using dollars or products to do so, but focusing on conversion rates alone could mean financial bust for your business. Conversion rates and revenue per visitor should be equally monitored regularly to ensure business success and profits.

Improving Conversion Rates

When it comes to improving conversion rates, never overlook the obvious. By that I mean that even the slightest mistake made during the design and implementation of your website can cause you great pain in terms of converting visitors to customers. Take for instance the following example.

Let’s say that Tony created a website to sell Ebooks on various topics. He took extra care in the design and implementation of his website and opened for business as planned. He launched a very effective marketing campaign to drive traffic to his site and thought that all he had to do now was sit back and process customer orders. His order page contained a form that included a “coupon code” number field. In this field customers would enter a special coupon code number that was found in an electronic newsletter that people had paid to subscribe to.

One day while performing maintenance on his site, Tony decided to remove the coupon code field and the conversion rate and number of sales unexplainably soared. Tony couldn’t figure out for the life of him why this happened by simply removing the coupon code field from the form. Tony decided to conduct a little test to get to the bottom of this. So, he put the coupon filed back in the form and guess what? The conversion rate and sales declined! Again, he removed this filed and low and behold, the conversion rate and sales went up again.

Tony was able to determine that visitors thought that they were getting a cheaper deal using the coupon code and were thrilled about it, however, the only way to get the coupon code was to pay for a subscription to Tony’s newsletter. This limited the amount of potential customers Tony could convert, as not everyone who visited Tony’s site was willing to pay for a subscription to his newsletter. Tony immediately removed the coupon code filed from the form and the offer of it from his newsletter. Once the coupon code field was removed, it became a level playing field. It was no longer implied that only under certain conditions could you get a coupon code.  This caused conversion rates and sales to climb and keep climbing. Through this little test of the coupon code, Tony learned just how valuable it was to experiment with new ideas to see the various effects on conversion rates. He acquired the determination to measure his conversion rates regularly, and more importantly to realize that something so simple as removing a form field can have such a dramatic effect on his business.