Today, we will discuss about conversions, and learn how to optimize your website for more sales.
Website optimization is way more complex than what you might have thought. If you are into website creation or SEO link building, then you have heard of optimization or may be doing it already. So, optimization is not a new term for you.
But what you know about optimization so far might not be enough, because the purpose of optimizing a website is not only ranking it on search engines, but also driving sales or conversions. So, the real meaning of website optimization is nothing but conversion optimization.
A sale is when a site visitor buys a product or service from the site owner, but a conversion is when the visitor takes an action that the site owner wants him or her to take. This is a tiny difference between the meanings of these two terms, but to boost sales a website must follow a good conversion optimization strategy. (A sale is only one form of conversion.)
Starting from the design stage of a website till implementing SEO, link building, social media marketing and promotion, you need to make sure the website is optimized for conversions at every single step. If you have taken care of that, your website’s online performance improves significantly.
Here are a few useful tips to help you with your conversion optimization strategy. We will start from the website design stage.
Conversion optimization at the design stage
Whether you are planning to create a brand new website from scratch or get a live website redone, you must take into consideration a number of important things like:
Your target audience, and their likes and dislikes
Loading speed of the site and its pages
Color scheme to be used on the site
Overall structure and functionality of the site
Structure of the Header and design of the header items
Height of the top slider/image container
Sidebar widgets
Pop-up messages and push notifications
Where to place the buy button
Footer items and links
and Trust in your personal name or brand name
You may not have to sacrifice your personal preference entirely, but your personal preference has to be in line with the preference of your audience. When doing the design part, make sure the heart of the matter (the most important feature of your product or service that will benefit the users the most) is clear and right in front of the visitors. They must see it first as soon as they land on the page.
The first thing they see on your site should be able to build up their interest and curiosity, and compel them to scroll down to explore other sections on the same page or move to other pages…
They must trust you as a credible and responsible company. They must feel a sense of security.
You get the point, right?
That’s the power of a smart masterpiece design. So, make sure your website has that kind of power to make your visitors fall in love with your company automatically.
Conversion optimization at the content creation stage
After you’ve ensured that your design is top-notch, next it is time for content. You need to make a strategy about how your content can bring conversions. Well, just like the design of the site, the content of your website content should have the power to attract the visitors and make them consume the content fully.
Whether you write only text or create images and videos for your users, the purpose stays the same – attract them, hold them and make them love your content. That’s the general rule for any content creator. Yeah, any content creator. But you need to take a step further and focus on creating content that drives conversions. You need to learn how to naturally add the conversion concept to your content without sounding too much promotional.
So, how do you keep conversions in mind when creating the content?
You may want your readers to read the entire content.
You may want them to jump to different parts or different pages from the given page content.
You may want them to purchase directly on the content page.
These are different forms of conversion. Different types of content have different conversion goals. And, you need to keep these elements in mind while creating your web page content, so it drives more conversions.
But remember to use a natural tone, not a promotional tone. Your users are wise and smart enough to judge your content and its usefulness in a matter of few seconds. Your content should provide help and add value to their life in the first place.
Conversion optimization at the promotion and marketing stage
When you have made sure that your website design is flawless and the content is also very useful for the users, you would need to focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website. SEO is one of the most important forms of online marketing and promotion, probably the most important one today.
When doing SEO for your website, you are basically trying to rank your website on search engines. SEO is a vast concept that includes a number of techniques. I’m not going to cover them here, but will try to help your understand how you can incorporate the conversion optimization mechanism into your SEO efforts, so your website doesn’t just rank on search engines, but also drives sales.
As soon as you begin SEO, you would need to do a keyword research to find a list of keywords or search terms that you are going to target and rank your website for. Finding the right keywords can be tricky, so you can take help from an expert here. At SEO Extent, we offer an exhaustive keyword research for free, so you may ask us for a keyword research now.
Okay, after you have your target keywords ready, you can then start writing your meta data, web page content and submission articles according to those keywords. You need to sound natural when adding the keywords to the meta details and content. In SEO, you will also need to generate authoritative links as search engines count on quality links when crawling and indexing web pages.
Make sure your site is extremely useful, trustworthy and true to what it says. People will notice that.
Highly useful content written and formatted in a way that people love spreads magically. If your readers like the content and trust you as a genuine service-provider, they like and share the same content with others. This is linking. More such links lead to fast ranking, and once you get ranked on search results, you are going to get a huge number of customers.
Our SEO Extent experts master the art of SEO, Social Media Marketing and Website Design, so if you are looking for any help with SEO, Social Media or Web design, you may please give us a try. We strive to provide the highest quality service and support to our clients.