Rhod, reveals the simple tweaks you can make to improve your website’s user experience and maximise conversions.
Getting traffic to your website is a challenge. Getting that traffic to stick around, engage with your content and, ultimately, convert, is an even bigger challenge. Your SEO could be on point, and your site could be attracting plenty of website users, but unless they’re taking action – through purchasing a product, signing up to your email list, or using your contact form to drop you a line – then they’re, well, pretty much meaningless.
The good news is, if you’re looking to increase your website conversions, then there are a few simple things you can do to get results quickly.
Here’s how to get more website visitors to convert.
Have a clear call to action (CTA) on every page
“It might sound fairly obvious, but a quick win to increase your conversion rate is to make sure your landing page – and every other page for that matter — have a clear CTA button", insists Rhod.
“It’s surprising how many websites fail to have a clear CTA. I see so many websites where the 'Get Quote' or 'Contact Us' button is not jumping out at you or is not even above the fold. Yet, it’s one of the easiest and most effective ways of enhancing the user experience and increasing a site’s conversion rate.
With personalised experiences playing an increasingly important part in conversions, it’s also beneficial to have a dedicated campaign landing page to direct the traffic from paid ad campaigns. Not only is this an ideal way of keeping the page hyper-relevant to your campaign audiences, but can also help you track, test and tweak your page to get optimal results.”
Increase your speed
“Reducing page loading time and optimising your website for speed is a must in 2020. Not only will this improve the UX — and therefore improve the conversion rate of your website — but it's also a priority in Google's ranking factor, too”, insists Rhod.
“Simply reducing picture and video sizes, and compressing Java and CCS scripts, will help increase the page loading speeds, while using tools like Google Page Insights and Pingdom will help you monitor and analyse your website's loading speeds so you can stay one speedy step ahead.”
Think less is more
It’s so tempting to add as much content as possible to your website pages, but information overload could actually be driving traffic away from your website.
“People today are very busy. They don’t want to have to read through paragraphs of text to find out why they should sign up to your mailing list or why they should purchase your products”, says Rhod.
“But don’t be afraid of white space! Avoid filling your website pages with too much information. Allowing for white space will make important images, text, videos and call to actions stand out more — which makes it easier for website visitors to convert.
“From a user journey perspective, make the purchase or enquiry journey straightforward and easy, with a few clicks as possible to get the customer to where they need to go.
“Airbnb, Gymshark and Mr Porter are perfect examples of using white space and making their call to actions stand out. They're all also easy to navigate and offer a seamless, simple purchasing journey.”
Test EVERYTHING
Testing is one of the simplest ways to increase website conversions, but it’s also one of the tasks that we at WebBox see businesses ignoring the most.
Poor or no testing (that is, not consistently and proactively analysing and testing your website's performance) is one of the biggest mistakes you can make, according to our digital marketing experts.
“Constantly and consistently analysing and testing what’s working and what’s not should be a key part of your CRO strategy”, says Rhod.
“But it’s important to gather as much relevant data as you can before making any changes”, insists Rhod.
“Making changes too quickly can be a waste of time and money — and making changes based on the wrong metrics can also have a negative effect.
“A high bounce rate, for example, can mean two completely different things. A web page can have a high bounce rate if it isn't relevant to the user, or it can offer the user exactly what they’re looking for so quickly and efficiently that they don’t need to hang around for long. The former offers a negative experience and would need addressing, but the latter means the user is able to move on to the next stage of the process quicker — which is a positive experience.”
In essence, testing is vital, but knowing your data — and how to effectively use it to make positive changes is equally as important.
Make sure your website is mobile-first
There are an estimated 1.2 billion mobile web users worldwide. Yet so many websites fail to put mobile-first. Not only an important factor for SEO, but a mobile-compatible site also enhances the user experience (UX) by keeping the information simple, attractive, and responsive to users across all platforms.
"This is particularly important at the research stages of a purchaser’s journey", insists Rhod.
“According to Google, Over 51% of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product while conducting a search on their smartphone – and I know I fall into this category."
“I, like the majority of other users, will do my product research on my mobile then make a purchase using my desktop. This means that, by the time a user gets to the ‘desktop’ phase, they’re already pretty far along in the purchasing journey."
“If you’re looking to increase your conversions then making sure your website is designed with mobile-first is a simple yet highly effective tactic."
Consider video backgrounds
Video is a trend that grew in popularity last year – and there’s no sign of it slowing down in 2020. According to Wordstream, video drives a 157% increase in organic traffic from SERPs, while Hubspot reports that 43% of people want to see more video content from marketers.
“I mentioned that the site speed is important, but video backgrounds, despite being heavy and slower, shouldn’t be ignored when it comes to increasing your website conversions”, says Rhod.
“To keep your website speedy, compress videos enough so that they’re small enough to keep the page’s loading time minimal while not compromising on video quality."
“It’s also worth keeping videos for key pages such as a homepage or landing page”, adds Rhod.
Include product videos
While video backgrounds will help your landing page conversions, product videos are a simple but highly effective way of increasing sales.
According to Neil Patel, product videos can increase purchases by 144%, while Googles insists that almost 50% of internet users look for videos related to a product or service before visiting a store.
This is arguably one of the video content’s biggest strengths. Not only are customers more likely to remember video content — and your brand — but they’re also more likely to engage with it and share it, which in turn extends your online reach, too.
Converting your visitors is now more sophisticated than ever and this isn’t likely to change. With more content and more choices than ever before, the time you invest in reaching — and converting — your website users has never been so valuable. If you think your conversion rates could be better, then why not drop us a line? Our digital experts have a track record of increasing conversion rates and ROI beyond our clients’ expectations. You’ll be surprised what a few expert tweaks and changes can do for your brand. Click here to chat with us today.
Stats used with a little help from Hubspot.
