Ways to increase your Conversion Rate

Some of the obvious points like site speed and usability aren’t mentioned in this post as you have probably read about them in other articles. My objective was to share some different methods that can work but aren’t usually found in other posts.

Driving visitors to your website is one thing, but getting them to convert is another. While we all concentrate on trying to get more visitors to our sites, we mustn’t forget the importance of conversion rate optimisation as this is a vital part of any online business. Increasing your conversion rate by just 1% can have a huge effect on your sites performance so you must always be looking for ways to improve it.

Conversion rate can be best described as ‘the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action’ so for example buying a product or signing up to a newsletter.

Whenever you think about conversion rate don’t just think about your website, try and think about the external source that brings you the visitor. Think about your search result that appears in Google or your product listing on a referrer’s site.  Can you do anything on this external source that is going to benefit the visitor before they reach your site?  A good tip is to provide the key factors about a product or your desired action to the external source. Below are a few ways that can help you achieve this.

Rich Snippets – Schema.org

Schema.org is a collection of shared vocabularies that you can use to mark up your web pages which help search engines such as Goolge, Bing and Yahoo understand what your page is about. Schema.org is used with micro format data, and can be implemented by marking up your html content with relevant tags.

Samsung have used the Aggregate Rating tag to display their rating reviews for the Samsung Galaxy S2. Other mark ups are available such as price and description. Checkout the schema.org website for the full documentation and a list of tags you can use.

By using rich snippets you are able to inform your visitor with key information which in turn could make their decision to purchase or complete the ‘desired action’ before they’ve even clicked on your site.

Google Adwords – Site links / Ad extensions

If you have a Goolge adwords account then site links and ad extension are great for providing key information to PPC campaigns. Like rich snippets, an ad extension allows you to have rating reviews on your brand and product terms.

 Build Relationships

Your business will also receive traffic from referrers, so a good idea is to contact these sites and provide more information about your ‘desired action’. They will be grateful of this extra information and the attention you’re paying to them. By building relationships with these referrers, means they are more likely to corporate with you in the future and give you a bit more attention or allow you to have more in-depth product details.

As you have started to look at your external sources, you must also look at your existing site and find ways to improve it. A golden rule in optimisation is to test, test, test.

A/B and Multivariate Testing

A/B testing is where you create 2 different landings pages and send 50% of visitor to Page A and the other 50% to Page B. You would then analyse the results to find out which landing page converts better.

Multivariate testing is where you use different variations of content within sections of a webpage simultaneously, for example you could have three different headings and two different images.

Using both these types of experiments is a great way to test your pages but a word of caution, make sure you are testing the different variations with enough visitors to get accurate results.

Google offer a tool named website optimizer which many people use to carry out these two experiments so be sure to check it out.

Think about the visitor

What I mean by this,is trying to think about what questions the visitors may have and how you can answer them. Here are some questions a consumer may have for an ecommerce website.

How much does delivery cost?

How long does it take?

Does this price include VAT?

Is this site secure?

Is the site trust worthy?

Using tools such as live chat can really benefit your business as it provides a live contact with you and your visitor. Using things such as accreditations, reviews and guarantees can help you gain trust with the visitor. Make sure you place things like your guarantee, contact number and live chat above the fold so it’s the first thing that the visitor sees.

By putting yourself in the visitors shoes, will help you realise some key factors that you may be missing on your site. Think about when you visit a site, what things do you want to see or not want to see?

 Express Checkout

Visitors don’t like to enter their credit card details or address details at the checkout anymore; they want a quick and easy solution. By introducing an ‘Amazon like checkout’ you will most certainly increase your conversion rate. If you don’t have an express checkout then take a look at some of your competitors and see how many do. You may just find that you can become one step ahead of them.

If you currently do have an express checkout, advertise the fact that you do. Don’t wait for the visitor to reach the checkout before they realise, show it on your landing pages.

New methods and techniques are always being introduced that can help your conversion rate optimisation so be sure to keep updated by researching and reading online. Always remember to keep optimising as it’s down to YOU, to improve your websites conversion rate.

Article written by Daniel Whittaker who is the website content administrator at Cartridge Monkey, one of the UK’s major suppliers of Ink Cartridges. Daniel is a keen writer on SEO, Data Analysis and Website Optimisation