I never cease to be amazed at the number of leads that we get that go something like this.
Lead: Hi there, I want to rank highly on Google for these keywords.
DPFOC Strategist: Ok great, we will do a keyword analysis but do you think maybe that you should consider a website re-design as I’m not sure that your website will convert at high rates.
Lead: No, the website is fine; I just want more traffic and need higher ranks.
As we can’t force people to build new websites, we typically hear things in a few months’ time, along the lines of:
SEO Disgruntled Client: Ya, I’m happy with the ranks but I’m not getting any business so I am going to try xyz advertising instead.
PPC Disgruntled Client: PPC doesn’t work; I’m pretty sure all the clicks are from my competitors wasting my money.
Just last week, a client receiving 1700 unique organic visitors per month with literally no conversions said “look SEO doesn’t work so I would like to stop but thanks for your help.”
Think about this for a moment. This same client owns a small retail outlet. Imagine if 1700 people came into the shop in a month and not one of them converted. I don’t think this client would conclude that retailing “doesn’t work.” Rather, (s)he would examine the inventory on offer, the pricing, the product presentation, the friendliness of the sales staff and so forth ie the offering would be continually tweaked to increase conversion rates. More progressive retailers may even engage a firm like http://www.storetraffic.com/ to understand their in-store traffic in more detail (yes this is a shameless plug for one of our clients J ). But you get the idea.
My point is that a lot of online migrants (business people who established their businesses pre-Internet) just do not seem to grasp the importance of a high quality website in the success of their online efforts. I have thought a lot about this as many of these are extremely successful business-people offline and it would seem like simple common sense that with it being so expensive to generate traffic to a website, the first thing you would do would be to ensure that the traffic that you gets actually converts. But no. The approach, more often than not, seems to be to try to get more and more and more traffic while never really looking at conversion rate optimisation. I think the main reason, above all else, that most business owners don’t invest in conversion rate optimisation is because they don’t understand it and the reason they don’t understand it is because it is all too notional, too vague; they look at a Google Analytics report that says “1700 unique visitors” but this is just a number on a page. This is over 50 unique daily visitors. Imagine if 50 people came into a retail shop, browsed for a bit and not one of them bought anything! You would take action immediately.
So, the very first thing that I recommend any business person to do when setting out on their conversion rate optimisation journey is to install MouseFlow. This software, which can be installed in minutes, literally records every session to your website. You can watch how each and every visitor to your website behaved once landing on the site. There is nothing more powerful in concentrating your mind about the importance of a high quality website than seeing video after video of users getting frustrated and leaving your website. When you can actually see them leaving without buying, one after another, you will take action; it all becomes real and not just numbers on a report.
But once it is installed, what now? You can’t ask each visitor why they left. There are essentially 4 things that your website needs to do.
- 1. Great Design:
Once you start watching your MouseFlow videos, you will quickly see that you can lose a lead in the first 5 seconds. You can’t win a lead in 5 seconds but you can definitely lose one. While we have an internal manual that runs to tens of pages on how to achieve great design, to be honest, you just know it when you see it. A useful exercise here is to search for the most competitive, high demand keyword in your industry on Google.com and browse the top 10 organically ranking sites. These sites tend to belong (not always) to companies that “get” online marketing and have invested in great design. Open all 10 and your own site in separate tabs. Flick through them all, then to your site, then back to the best one, then to yours and ask yourself does yours match up. If it does, that’s great. If not, you need a re-design. Studies have shown that design plays a greater role than the site’s actual content in users’ assessment of the quality of the site.
- 2. Clearly Convey our Offering and Unique Selling Proposition
While you know what your business does and/or the services it provides, have you thought recently about its USPs. Leaving online marketing to the side for one moment, asking yourself “what makes us different” is a useful exercise. It is one of the questions that we ask clients when re-building their website and around half the time, the answer that we get is “I will come back to you on that” or some vagueness like “we really look after our customers.” This would only be a USP if your competitors didn’t look after their customers!
- 3. Build Credibility
Claims about the quality of your products / services will only be believed if your company is deemed to be trustworthy and credible. There are a number of credibility builders that can be relied upon such as: a well-populated “meet the team” page, an up to date and interesting blog, membership of trade bodies / associations, third party verification such as awards or award nominations as well as testimonials/reviews from happy clients. Remember that most of your site’s users have never come across your company before so need to be convinced that you are above board, legitimate and honest.
- 4. Clear and Compelling Call To Action
Once you have fulfilled points one to three, but not before, you can push for the conversion. The first rule of sales is “make buying easy” and that applies online too. Don’t force your visitors to go to your contact page to convert. Have an inquiry or request a call back option on every page. Keep your inquiry forms simple; don’t ask un-necessary questions like “how did you hear of us?” Typically all that you need is name, email and telephone number as everything else can be got on the phone.
Ok, now you have a great design, have clearly conveyed your offering and USP, built credibility and your site has a number of clear and compelling calls to action. Is that it? Well it can be; if you want, you can say “my site is optimised so now I’m moving on.” But this leaves more conversions on the table. By engaging in more advanced, deeper CRO work, you can drive conversion rates still higher. In my next post, I will analyse in detail how to really dig down into your website traffic and start to make small changes to your website that will increase conversion rates and drive down your cost per acquisition.
