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Ok, you’ve probably just finished checking your website’s conversion rates in your Google Analytics account.
Clearly, you’re not impressed, and now you’re looking for ways to increase conversion rates.
That’s fine! Who doesn’t want more conversions?
Many website owners and digital marketers out there drool over capturing more traffic from anywhere they can. But just increasing website traffic isn’t the right strategy.
Driving high intent traffic to your website is the right strategy.
Traffic with high intent often converts more, because they’re coming to your page with more intention to buy your products or services.
When it boils down to it, your conversion rates aren’t going to just change overnight, and just making one or two adjustments isn’t going to radically change much either in most cases.
You must implement a conversion rate optimization strategy that will help you convert more leads, sales, or desired outcomes you seek.
In this article, I share some tips on how to improve conversion rate, and ultimately end up with a good conversion rate.
How To Increase Your Conversion Rate: Optimization Tips
After running through these tips, review your website and make sure you’ve got them implemented on your website to increase conversions.
Because it’s nearly impossible to discuss all of the methods of improving your conversion rate in one single post, I decided to list the top 8 things you can improve along with a rapidfire checklist towards the end.
Let’s begin!
Improving Your Website’s Design
This is probably the best thing you can do to improve your conversion rate. A well designed and creative looking website is going to outperform a bland, normal website any day.
Website design is all about creating a website that has clear direction and messaging.
Your website should “guide” the user through the customer journey, all the way through to your desired outcome, whether that be a form submission, a sale, or a newsletter sign up.
A Simple Website Design
Most internet users are not interested in an overly complicated website layout that is heavily filled with content and other elements that distract from the purpose of the site.
Recent design trends focus on minimalism, doing more with less, and utilizing a design style called “flat” design.
Flat design is a design style that focuses on creating interfaces that avoid any 3-D elements (shadows and textures).
Not only is a simple, flat design easier to look at, it also helps your page speed improve because you’re not loading large sized elements.
In addition, page speed is a big factor when Google ranks pages, so not only are you naturally going to improve your conversions with a simpler site design, but you’re going to rank better on Google search and get more traffic because of it.
While a simple website design does make it easier to code, making it look beautiful and optimizing it for Google search are the major benefits.
Colors Schemes
Aside from a simple design, color scheme and placement are essential to a visually appealing website.
The specific colors you should have on your site entirely depend on the colors of your brand.
While using the colors of your brand is a great idea for your website, sometimes choosing colors with the same shades as your brand can be just as effective if necessary.
It could be useful to learn more about color theory before you start implementing them on your website.
Colors are all about evoking the right emotions to get your users to take a desired action.
So, when you factor in your brand, your industry, and the emotions you want to evoke, you should have a good idea which colors you want to employ.
Typography and Fonts That Match Your Site’s Style
You don’t need to hire a typographer to choose fonts for you.
Once you’ve found a simple design style and a color scheme you wish to implement, choosing text fonts becomes a lot easier. In addition, if you went through the steps of developing your brand’s style guide, then your brand’s fonts will have already been decided and should be implemented on your website.
A mistake I see on many sites, is using an extravagant font that captures the attention of users but is too distracting or ends up taking away from the rest of the page.
While I can’t get into every specific font you should use for your website, I can share with you our core philosophies to follow:
- Use Google Fonts; these fonts are safe for basically any web browser, and they work well for most websites.
- Keep your font in line with your brand. (Don’t use a font that is not part of your brand just because it looks cool).
- When using multiple fonts, make sure they compliment each other.
- Don’t use more than three fonts on your website (2 preferably). Keep it consistent!
- If pairing fonts with a minimalist design, you can use fonts with thinner weights.
At the end of the day, fonts improve the user experience when done right. They help users read and understand your messaging with minimal effort.
If you’ve picked the right fonts, you’re well on your way to improving your conversion rates.
Adjust Your CTA
Now that you know about your color scheme, font, and overall design style, choosing the text that actually goes into your CTA button is CRUCIAL.
Some common CTA buttons are:
- “Learn More”
- “See Now”
- “Try it Now!”
These examples aren’t necessarily bad, but feel free to get more specific.
If you have a critical selling point, placing a CTA right after the selling point can be an effective placement. If you sell software online and give free trials for that software, try messaging such as “Start My Free Trial”.
Some websites have an even more specific CTA, but it’s really up to your product/service, your target audience, and your objectives.
Try out different phrases and see which ones receive higher conversion rates. You can do this with A/B testing, which we’ll get into later.
Enhance Your Site Navigation
Clear navigation starts with a navigation bar that is… well, easy to navigate!
Your navigation bar isn’t meant to host every page on your website.
Rather, make sure your navigation bar consists of the most important pages.
Think about it; if you were a user on your website looking for more information in the navigation bar, you’d want four or five amazing options compared to 10-12 questionable options.
Shameless plug, but take our website for example.
Our potential clients want to know exactly who we are, what we do, and what we’ve done. And if they like all of that, they can contact us.
So that’s exactly why we place those items in the navigation bar. Keep your navigation bar simple, and only include 4 or 5 of the most relevant and important pages.
If you want, an optional drop down menu is available just in case the user wants to look for something more specific on our site.
Other than that, a navigation bar like that makes site navigation easy for the user.
But let’s not forget that the user isn’t the only person you’re trying to please.
Google’s algorithm loves short and sweet navigation menus because it’s much easier to index your site that way.
So by simplifying your navigation, not only will you improve your user’s overall flow through your website (towards converting), but you are improving your SEO efforts as well!
Improving Your SEO Efforts
Speaking of SEO, putting time and effort into optimizing your website will definitely improve your web traffic, but did you know you can improve your conversions this way too?
Only if you do it right though.
Did you know you can tailor your SEO efforts specifically towards getting more conversions?
Here’s how.
Split Your Pages Up Into Specific Topics
If you have multiple services/products all packed into one page and your expectation is that the one page is to rank for all of your products/services, you’re making a big mistake.
In order to achieve top rankings for several different topics, you must have a page for each topic.
Say for example, your business offers both “garage door repair” and “garage door maintenance”.
The right way to go about ranking for both of these terms, is to create a unique page within your website for each topic.
By doing this, you are able to deliver content that is specific to the user’s interest. In the case that someone was searching “garage door repair”, it would be optimal for the user to visit the page for garage door repair, and not the garage door maintenance page.
In addition, this gives search engines clear direction on what your page is about and for whom it is written for.
Clustering too many topics into one page causes confusion for both search engines and users.
Use Highly Relevant Keywords
Aside from splitting up your pages, you can rank each page individually by using highly relevant long-tail keywords that generate a lot of high intent traffic.
For example, say you run a high-end online boutique shop. If you have a page that sells a very unique style of red blazer, let’s say one with gold studs, and a pointed bottom hem.
Well, if someone searches for “ red blazer with gold studs and pointed hem”, you’re definitely coming up first if you describe that on your page.
Even though the overall search volume for that keyword is low (0-10 searches/month), those users have serious intent, and are much more likely to convert than someone searching “red blazers online” or some similar variant.
Also check out our article on Google AMP and SEO.
Keep Your Conversion Tracking in Check
Assuming you’re using Google Analytics, check your conversion rates every couple of weeks at least.
Sometimes, conversion tracking can be tricky on setting up depending on your site, and if you’re seeing conversion rates that are abnormal, you’ll know something is wrong with the tracking.
Update your conversion tracking and configurations, and be sure to keep an eye on your conversion rates to make sure everything is running smoothly.
It’s relatively easy to tell when your conversions are inaccurate; all it takes is some quality assurance and after that you can learn more about how to improve conversion rate.
Test New Page Layouts
Have you heard of A/B testing? If you have just started dabbling in marketing your business, chances are, you have already come across this term.
It’s definitely one of the best ways to see which layout of your website converts better.
Essentially, A/B testing takes all of the users that land on a particular page, and shows half of them one variation of the page, and the other half a different variation of the page.
After some time, you can review the different metrics (conversion rates) of each page, and decide which one you want to implement permanently.
Make sure your page has a decent amount of traffic to have a valid A/B test.
Finally, Here Is Your Very Own Curated CRO Checklist
Now that you’ve read through and implemented all of these conversion rate optimization tips (I hope), you’re probably out of stuff to optimize!
Remember when I said that it’s impossible to go over every conversion rate optimization tip because there are so many of them? Well here’s a curated CRO checklist you can use to make sure you’ve covered all your bases and increase conversions. Enjoy!
- Offer a better or more unique value proposition.
- Give a few great options rather than a ton of sub-par options.
- Avoid stock images if you can, get real, genuine images for your pages.
- Create a sense of urgency (add a timer, or use phrases like “limited time offer”).
- Make your headline more enticing.
- Make your forms easier to fill out.
- Don’t neglect mobile design. Make sure things look good on mobile too.
- Run A/B Testing.
- Review Google Analytics more often.
- Analyze your conversion flow, see where your conversions are coming from.
- Use a heat map to figure out where you should place important buttons.
- Make your web design more creative.
- Utilize white space on your pages.
- Keep your web design simple and easy to navigate.
- Improve page speed for each page on your website.
- Use fonts and styles that match with your brand.
- Use different CTA’s to see what works better.
- Add more CTA’s to different sections of your page.
- Try the AIDA model (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action).
Feel free to come back to this checklist whenever you need to. At times, you may find the time to dive further into your conversion rates, and when you do, you know where to find this post.
If you want to avoid the hassle of exploring the technical details of conversion rates, you can always request the help of a marketing professional to do it for you!
