There are several reasons for having a website for your business. One of these is for the purpose of showcasing your products. Another is to provide a medium to which your customers can be readily directed to obtain more information about your business and what it has to offer them. For both of these reasons, it is essential that your website is constructed and maintained in an optimal way. However, another equally important reason for having a website, which makes the need to ensure that it is efficiently organised and managed all the more important, is to utilise improve your business’s leads and, ultimately, its sales. This process, known as conversion optimisation, relies heavily on how your website works and in this article we will provide several ways in which you can instantly improve those all-important conversion rates.
Site Monitoring
One of the most irritating experiences of any website visitor’s experience is to encounter errors on the site and perhaps the most annoying of such errors are what are known as “404” errors. This type of error most commonly occurs when a link to a web page cannot be found by the site’s server. The website’s server will deliver a report to advise the site visitor that the page that they are attempting to access is not available. This type of report, which is usually due to an incorrectly coded link, is likely to have a damaging effect on even the most professional and creative sites for two main reasons.
Firstly, the fact that a user has tried to visit the page in the first place means that he wants to access the information that it contains. Finding that the page is not available is therefore likely to be disappointing and to cause your potential customer to leave your site and, more likely than not, go to the site of a competitor.
Secondly, an unprofessionally managed website, which contains one or more broken links, is likely to reflect adversely on the overall impression of your business that a site user will gain from a visit to the website.
The constant monitoring of a site for broken links and error reports and the rapid elimination of them is therefore vital if you want to put the website into a position where it is best placed to improve your leads and sales, rather than having the opposite effect!
Improving Calls to Action
A call to action, which may consist of a banner, a button, a widget or some other type of text that tempts a visitor to click on it, is an important way of improving leads and sales. The aim of a call to action (CTA) is to take the visitor down a carefully constructed path, which has the effect of transforming their site visit into a lead and, if the lead is successful, a sale. As the main goal of any CTA is to attract a click from the sites visitors, it is essential to optimise it in a way that encourages them to do so.
Its positioning on your site’s pages should be carefully thought out. It should be designed with your specific target-group in mind and the click must take the visitor exactly where it says that it will.
Conversion rates on calls to action should be carefully tracked and, if your rate is not up to scratch you should take measures to improve it if you want to have a rapid improvement in your leads and sales.
Bug Checking
We have already mentioned how annoying it can be for a site visitor to encounter bugs, like broken links, on your site. In addition to these visible issues, however, websites can contain a whole host of bugs which, whilst they may be invisible to the user, are all too apparent to the search engines. Without entering into the complexities of the specific types of on-site issue that may fall foul of the search engines, we need only state that their existence on a website is likely to result in penalisation. This will quickly mean that your site is receiving less and less visits and, not surprisingly, a decreasing number of leads and sales.
Constant bug checking and fixing is, therefore, another vital component in the effective management of any commercial website.
Summary
If you are going to spend time and money in constructing a website you will want it to perform as efficiently as possible in terms of its impact in increasing your business. As with your business itself, things that might adversely affect its performance can sometimes go wrong for no reason. Equally, your business and its website may simply need to continue to develop to meeting the changing needs and demands of your customers
If you want to ensure that your website is a commercial success, taking the measures set out above will go a long way towards achieving that aim.