Most website owners understand that getting traffic is essential for business success and have methods for attracting visitors.
However, not nearly as many have a good understanding of how to get those visitors to take action and turn them into customers. But if you don’t have a solid strategy for getting your visitors interested in your products, no amount of money that you spend on attracting those visitors is going to bring desirable results.
So, how can you optimize your site for conversions?
Well, when your conversion levels are low, the first step is figuring out the problem. If you’re getting traffic to your site, but aren’t converting website visitors to leads, that means that you aren’t meeting the expectations of the visitors that click through to your site.
Luckily, there are a few common reasons why conversion numbers can be low, and sometimes all it takes is a few small tweaks to make significant improvements.
To get you started, here are a few things you could look at that could make a difference for your conversion numbers as soon as today.
Optimize Your Website for Mobile Users
52% of web traffic today comes from the use of mobile phones, and only 43% from a laptop or a desktop computer.
That means that if you’re going to achieve any kind of success with your website, you need to take a mobile-first approach for making your visitor’s experience as seamless and convenient as possible.
After all, if you’re not taking into account the needs of the majority of your site’s visitors, it’s going to be very difficult to expect good results.
Luckily, making your website mobile-friendly isn’t difficult.
Today, most website builders and tools make it easy to build a beautiful mobile site that provides a seamless experience to mobile users, offering an adaptive design that can adjust based on the screen size of the person viewing.
And even something as simple as making it easy to read and watch your content can make a huge difference in your conversion numbers – after all, if your site’s visitors can’t consume your messages, they will inevitably leave to a competitor’s site that accommodates their needs better.
What’s more, you need to make your site mobile-friendly if you want to get quality traffic in the first place.
Google and other search engines are placing a high priority on providing the best possible experience for mobile users, so if your site doesn’t meet the requirements, it is going to get penalized and drop in the search engine results.
Finally, not having a mobile-friendly site hurts your conversions because it decreases trust in your brand. It’s hard to imagine a site’s visitor wanting to buy something from a website that doesn’t even load properly on a mobile device.
In fact, if you really want to go all out in making the experience of your mobile visitors as convenient as possible, you should convert your site into a mobile app and provide the option to access your offers directly from their phone, without having to use the web browser.
Add Social Proof to Your Landing Page
When stumbling on a website for the first time, visitors are naturally skeptical, and that’s completely understandable. With so many scams and unethical practices on the internet, people have learned to be careful and not buy from a website if there’s even a whiff of anything suspicious.
That’s why having social proof on your site is essential if you want to ensure that your conversion rates are satisfactory. And you need to put in the effort to make the social proof legitimate and believable to your target audience.
Not too long ago, it was enough to slap together a few generic testimonials with first name credentials, and people were willing to trust the site.
But now, you need to go a few steps beyond that – if you are using testimonials, they need to be ultra-specific and talk about the benefits and solutions that your products or services provide.
The testimonials must also come from real people with full names and even job titles so that your site’s visitors know that they aren’t fake.
If you want to really step up your social proof game, you should include detailed reviews and success stories from your best customers as well, perhaps even writing whole articles or case studies outlining the exact results that your customers were able to achieve.
But no matter how informative your testimonials get, they should always accomplish two main tasks – show the prospect that they’re not the first person to buy your product and that other people that bought it have achieved success using it.
You should also frame the testimonials and reviews in a way that would seem familiar to the reader – if you know your audience’s problems well, you should allow the social proof to tell the story about how your product can solve those specific problems and help to overcome various hurdles along the way.
The best approach is to use different testimonials to showcase different angles of the problem so that each segment of your audience can identify with the ones that are closest to his situation.
Have an Effective Squeeze Page
No matter how well-targeted the traffic to your site might be, it‘s likely that not all of your prospective customers will be ready to buy immediately, even if you have a solid offer in place.
The truth is, each visitor of your site will be at a different point of the buyer’s journey, and a significant part of them won’t be ready to commit just yet, so you need to have a method for capturing those leads and nurturing them towards a buying decision.
The best way to do that is to develop a squeeze page that helps you capture leads and grow your email list that you can then engage with useful content and offers.
However, setting up a squeeze page that gets people to subscribe is easier said than done – most folks already have enough offers bombarding their inbox, so they’re naturally hesitant about giving away their email and other contact info to anyone else.
However, if you can come up with a compelling offer or giveaway that delivers immediate value and helps them overcome a pressing issue, it won’t matter how cluttered their inbox already is because your emails will be welcome.
In fact, many companies find success in offering the email newsletter as the main selling point of joining the list – if you manage to provide value week after week, you can get people excited about receiving your messages and have a much higher chance of building your relationship with them.
One important thing to consider when you create a squeeze page and develop the offer is to set clear expectations and be consistent – you should inform the subscribers what they’ll be receiving, how often, and what’s in it for them.