How to Get More Visitors to Click, Buy or Promote on Your Site Your visitors follow a path after visiting your site. Make sure they get to where you want them to go.
By Dave Lavinsky Edited by Dan Bova
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If you're wondering whether your website is good enough, I'll give you the answer: No, it's not.
How can I be so sure? Because every website can be improved. There is no website in existence where 100 percent of the visitors take the precise action the website owner wants. Which means there's always room for improvement.
This leads to the next logical question of how to improve your website. To answer this, start by figuring out the primary goal of your page. Is it to generate online sales, get prospects to complete a form, encourage visitors to call you or get folks to click to promote your site on social media?
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Once you understand your goal, work backwards. That is, think about the path through which visitors must travel to achieve this goal. For example, if you sell one product on your website, the desired path for visitors to take might be to visit your homepage, click your product sales page to learn more about your offering, click the order button to get to your order form, then complete the order form to arrive at your thank you page.
This path is known as your conversion funnel, and the key to success is to improve or optimize every piece of the funnel. For example, let's assume that on your website 30 percent of visitors to your homepage then go to your product sales page. Twenty percent of those visitors proceed to your order form. Finally, 40 percent of the remaining visitors complete the order and arrive on your thank you page. In this case, 2.4 percent of all visitors completed the funnel, also known as a 2.4 percent conversion rate.
The key to improving your conversion rate, and the success of your website, is to improve each page in your conversion funnel. In fact, if you increased the conversion rate of each page in your funnel by 10 percent, then your overall conversion rate grows a whopping 33 percent.
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Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs and business owners fail to measure their website's conversion rates. Even when they do, most inevitably only look at their overall conversion rate. Rather, the key is to assess the conversion rate of each page in your funnel. Then improve those pages and see exponential increases in your overall conversion rates.
How do you increase the conversion rate of each page? There are many factors to consider and ideas to try, from changing your choice of text, modifying text size and/or font choice, adding new images, modifying your layout and changing the background color of your page.
Importantly, track the conversion rate of each of your pages both daily and monthly. On a daily basis, your rates might fluctuate quite a bit due to small sample sizes. When viewing your results on a daily basis, make sure there are no dramatic conversion drops which are often caused by a page, image or video not loading. And importantly, make sure your pages are improving daily. On a monthly basis, see how your pages are performing and spot which ones are decreasing in effectiveness and thus need to be improved.
In summary, it's the individual pages in your website's conversion funnel that determine whether your website performs well or not. Fortunately, if you monitor and improve these pages, you will convert significantly more website visitors into leads and clients, and gain significant competitive advantage.
