How To Improve Your Conversion Rate

Hardly a day goes by that I don't get an email from someone saying:

"Michael,I just don't know what to do. We are not getting sales, nobody issigning up, we are not making any money. What is going wrong?"

Theystart thinking about search engines, more marketing and expensiveadvertising. When what they SHOULD be doing is taking a step back andsaying:

"Why aren't the people who are already finding my website doing what it is I want them to do?"

Ifyou can get to the bottom of that problem you might not even need toget more people to your website. If you can convert a high percentageof the visitors that are already finding you into sales you won't needto devote as much time and money to marketing your site in the firstplace. So let's talk about some quickfire ways you can improve yourconversion rate.

This Visitor Will Self-Destruct in 5 Seconds..

Youhave probably heard a lot of figures and the average seems to be about4 - 5 seconds: the time you have from when somebody lands on your homepage to actually convince them to remain on your site.

You don'thave long - after the 5 seconds if people don't see what they want tosee they will disappear - forever. What happens is when I come to yoursite - I am looking to get a series of questions I have in my mindanswered as quickly as possible.

For example, I want to know;

- Why you are different to your competitors, maybe where you ship to, how many products do you have on your site?
- What sets you apart from everyone else in your region or in your industry?
- What do your customers say about you?
- Do you have any testimonials?
- Do you have any press coverage?
- Do you have any accreditations?
- What makes your product so special?
- What do you actually provide on this website?

I want to know all of these things in about five or six seconds.

Nowit is not easy, nobody is saying that it is easy, but you do need toget over these benefits as soon as you can on your homepage. One of theways you can start to do this is to actually bullet points ofinformation.

Be Ruthless With The Pages on Your Website

Takea look at your web site and pare down everything that you think is notessential. Try to take a step back, put yourself in the shoes of thecustomer, look at your website and look at every element and say;

"If I removed that - would my web site be any worse?"

As a customer would that make the experience any worse, would that give the customer less information?

Itis quite a scary thing to do. I have been down this road myself. Whenyou start to do this it turns around your whole perspective on whatyour website is actually trying to do. I have landed on some websites,as I'm sure you have, that have the opening line;

"Welcome to our home page. Welcome to ABC Ltd. We were formed in 1973 and we have 50 staff. Our core services are.."

Andit just goes on and on and on - boring long paragraphs. People justdon't read like this on the web. They just want something now, theywant it yesterday. So you need to think about how your website contentis put together.

Don't put things on your site that the managingdirector wants on there or things that you want on there or the graphicdesigner or developer wants on there. Put things on there that yourCUSTOMER WANTS.

Don't Try To Be All Things To All Men

How To Improve Your Conversion Rate

Another way you can improve your conversion rate is to try to focus on one single goal for your website or for each page.

The problem I see a lot of people struggle with is that they are trying to do too much with their web site;

- They are trying to sell a product
- They are trying to get people on their subscriber list
- They are trying to give information to their employees
- They are trying to get new business
- They are trying to get information to customers
- They are trying to give information about the community

Just hold fire a minute and zero in on the ultimate goal of the site. What is your site's primary objective?

You need to have one goal for the site or at least one goal for each page.

Your Website Only Needs To Do One of The Following 2 Things

Tohelp your thinking in this there are really only two things that a website should do. If you are in the position that you can sell directlyover the web that is what you need to do - you need to be sellingthrough your website.

If you can't do that, and there are a lotof companies that can't due to the type of business they are in, thenyou need to be getting people's contact information. That is it. Justtwo things.

Either sell to visitors or get their contact information.

Onceyou realise this, and it might not be a nice thing to hear, because youmight look at your site and think that lots of your pages are nowredundant, or that certain pages don't sell anything or get contactinformation. You might realise that specific paragraphs aren't gettingcontact information for you or selling anything. The entire creationand copywriting process of your website becomes a totally differentexercise.

But if you don't focus on one of those two thingsthen nothing is going to happen. I know from experience that not manyvisitors will read through your homepage, through the about page,through the services page and then dawdle along and click on contactand say;

"I will go to the enquiry form and see how much do you charge."

Youmight get the odd one. But you are not going to get tens, thousands ortens of thousands. You need to sell something or get contactinformation. Your website needs to be a machine that does one or bothof those things and that is it.

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