6 Tips To Help You Drive More Website Conversions

In today’s digital landscape, it is not enough to simply have a website. With so much competition out there, if your website content and design is not optimized to create conversions, then you might quickly find that all of your hard work is being wasted.

When you have made an effort to create an interesting and engaging website that offers visitors something of genuine value, the last thing you want is for them to drop out before completing their journey. This is true whether they are attempting to access information, make use of a product/ service, or anything in between.

In short, a website conversion occurs when a visitor to a website undertakes a desired action. A conversion can, therefore, mean many different things depending on an organization's industry and target audience. For example, a transaction in an e-commerce store is a conversion, as is a newsletter sign up, a new loan application, or a student signing up for a campus tour. 

From an online organization's perspective, however, the term conversion basically translates to ‘’how do we get our visitors to do what we want them to do?’’. In this sense, every single organization's website has been created with the end goal of generating conversions, whether consciously or otherwise.

Even if you are completely new to the subject of website conversion, you are quite likely to have come across the subject of conversion rate optimization (CRO). CRO refers to the process of optimizing a website experience to increase the chances that visitors will take a desired action, i.e. complete a conversion. This can be done by tweaking the website copy, design or even the overall website experience strategy to emphasize the call-to-action. 

As the majority of websites are paying for site traffic in one way or another, achieving a high conversion rate is a powerful way of ensuring a better return on that investment. One way this can be achieved is by leveraging customer behavior insights in order to create a better user experience.

Monsido can scan your website for accessibility issues including mobile-specific issues so that you can deliver an inclusive mobile experience to all of your website’s visitors. 

Monsido’s mobile web accessibility scan simulates how the website is rendered in mobile view. This enables us to pick up device-specific code that only loads when a website displays on a mobile device. Based on this mobile rendering of the website, we are able to perform two additional checks on top of the many other accessibility checks performed as standard.

We invited Gill Andrews, Conversion Copywriter, Website Consultant, and author of "Making Your Website Work: 100 Copy & Design Tweaks for Smart Business Owners" to join us for a webinar and share some of her tips for improving website conversion. Whether your principal focus is on your website’s design, content, or performance, or even if you find yourself completely unsure of where to start optimizing your website for conversion, here's a summary of the tips that she shared:

Watch the on-demand webinar for more insights. 

• Tip #1: Six questions that will expose the main flaws of your website

Question 1: Could you explain your offer in a couple of sentences? 

If your core value proposition cannot be explained simply and effectively in a short sentence or two, it is potentially not clear enough for your visitors and potential customers. Instead, try to ensure that your offer is put in simple terms that can quickly and readily be understood by the average reader to maximize the chances of engagement and, ultimately, a conversion. 

Question 2: Why should someone hire you and not your competitor? 

Whatever your website is offering, you need to make clear what it is that sets you apart from the competition. Knowing what your advantages are over your direct competitors is in many respects The Holy Grail when optimizing a website to create conversions, as if you are not clear on this, you can be sure that your potential customers aren't either. 

Question 3: Who is your ideal client?

Another question that is absolutely fundamental to creating more website conversions is whether you know who you are targeting in the first place. In order to optimize your website’s content and design for conversion, you need to understand your ideal audience and tailor these elements to their specific needs.  

Question 4: What is your strategy for getting new clients through your website?

Your website may be getting traffic, but unless this traffic is landing on the right pages and is coming from the right sources, it is likely to be doing nothing in terms of creating new conversions. When developing your marketing strategy, it is therefore important to not only make sure that your site is attracting new visitors, but that those visitors are being drawn to your site for the right reasons and interacting with it in the way that you intended.

Question 5: What is your current monthly traffic and your main traffic sources?

Before you make any changes to your website’s design and copy, it is important to know how much monthly traffic you are attracting and to identify your main traffic sources. This is a fundamental first step, as it will allow you to see not only how many visitors your site is attracting, but also how they are getting to your website and why they are arriving there in the first instance. 

Question 6: Who are your competitors?

No website exists in a vacuum, and if you are unaware of your competitors, it will be much more difficult to actually compete with them. Understanding how your competitors are delivering when it comes to things like website performance, design, trustworthiness etc. will give you an idea of what steps you need to take to stand out from the crowd.  

• Tip #2: How to lure more prospects to your website from search 

In order to make your website attractive to your intended audience, you need to ensure that both your Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions are optimized. This basically means that, instead of simply throwing generic marketing slogans at your visitors, you appeal directly to their actual core wants and needs by identifying a particular problem they are looking to solve.   

For maximum conversion, Meta titles should be ultra-specific, useful, urgent and unique, while Meta Descriptions should use ‘‘you’’ more than ‘‘I’’/’‘we’’, address your intended audience’s problems, promise a benefit, and appeal to their current emotional state.  

• Tip #3: How to spot vague copy

At the end of the day, visitors to your website must be able to understand exactly what it is that you are offering, otherwise you can hardly expect them to make a purchase, sign up for a service, or whatever else it is, you would like them to do. To avoid any confusion or misunderstandings on the part of your visitors, it is therefore vital to avoid vague copy that doesn’t actually communicate anything concrete about what your website is actually providing. Keeping this in mind, try to write copy that uses plain and simple language that creates a clear mental image that represents what you are offering. In addition, you could also try putting your copy through Google Translate to see if it is easily translatable. If it is, then it is probably both simple and specific enough for purpose.    

• Tip #4: Want people to stay on your page longer? Treat headings like a table of contents

It is an unavoidable fact that the vast majority of people visiting your website will not read its content word for word. Rather, people tend to skim the headings of a website in order to decide if they are sufficiently interested to stick around and read further. For this reason, it is important to present your website visitors with a clear content roadmap so that they can identify the things that are of particular value to them. In order to achieve this, you should treat your headings as though they are a table of contents that clearly and unambiguously communicate what each section is about. P.S. Clear headings are also important for SEO and Accessibility, so it's win-win. 

• Tip #5: Comparing your website to other websites? Here's how to do it right

While it is important to compare your website to those of your competitors, there are a few things you need to consider if you want to do this correctly. Most importantly, you should only compare your website to others that exist in the same niche, belong to a business/organization of a similar size, have a comparable target audience/business model, and/ or solve similar problems. In essence, website benchmarking is most effective when it is used to compare like with like. 

When comparing your website against equivalent sites within your industry, some of the key things that you should look at include: the main promise of your competitors banner, the overall quality of their copy, the most common subjects covered, the different types of social content they are producing, and the trustworthiness of their design. Examining these key elements will allow you to see what your competitors are doing that you should also be doing, as well as what you could be doing differently or better.

• Tip #6: How to tell if you should implement that new website tip you just read about?

There is no shortage of advice out there telling you how you should implement this or that new website tip to better achieve your online goals. When thinking about whether a piece of advice might actually be useful for your website, it is worth reflecting upon what the meta idea is that underlies the advice. Ask yourself ‘‘will it help my visitors do something I want them to do on this page? Or will it steer them in the wrong direction?’’. Ultimately, when assessing any website advice, you should be asking if this method of implementation will actually help your visitors, or if perhaps implementing in a different way would be more optimal? Fundamentally, it all comes down to whether it actually works for your specific business model and brand.

Remember, the first step to better conversion optimization is to cover the basics of 1. straightforward website copy, 2. meaningful web design, and 3. ensuring a smooth user experience. Once you have these elements in place you will be well on your way to a better conversion rate. 

Whether your interest in optimizing your content and design for conversion comes down to cold hard cash, understanding your customers better, or simply ensuring that you are helping your visitors have a better journey through your website, we hope that the above tips will assist you in making it happen.

Get a free website scan to see if you have broken links, etc that can hinder conversion on your site.