How to Increase the Conversion Rate of Your Website
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The conversion rate is the most important web metric in a commercial website. Conversions lead to sales, and sales leads to profits; this is why a good conversion rate is essential for long term business success. Yet this important web metric is often the hardest to figure out. SEO companies often ignore it, and leave it to the website owner to determine. This is not good, because SEO should not only be about increasing traffic from rankings; instead, a good SEO should also pay attention to the conversion rate.
Website owners often lack SEO and web marketing skills, and therefore find it hard to solve conversion-related problems. Even if the website has high traffic because of good rankings in organic search engines, a poor conversion rate alone can turn a good ranking/traffic success into a failure. How many SEO clients complain of failing to achieve a reasonable ROI after an SEO campaign?
This tutorial aims to educate any website owners experiencing a problem with a low and unacceptable conversion rate. By following the techniques illustrated in this tutorial, any webmaster or web site owner can increase conversion rates without diving into highly technical details or spending thousands by hiring a consultant.
The conversion rate is defined as:
Conversion rate (measured in %) = Number of Successes / Total number of website unique visitors
The “number of successes” depends on the specific online enterprise. For an online bookstore, it may mean the number of books sold in a given month. For an e-commerce website selling movie downloads, it may mean the number of movie downloads the site experiences in the entire month.
You should define what constitutes a “success” for your website. By clearly and objectively defining a success, the conversion rate problem maybe easier to solve.
How much conversion is enough?
One of the most frequently asked questions is "How high of a conversion rate is considered OK?" The best answer is that your conversion rate should be high enough for your venture to stay profitable. It can only be 1% or 3%, or you may need a 20% conversion rate to be profitable.
Of course the higher the rate you actually achieve, the better, but a zero conversion rate is definitely not good. Think carefully about your conversion rate if you believe it is an issue, because it is often NOT the real problem. See this financial equation:
Total $ profit in month = Total sales in month – Total operating cost
Where:
Total sales in month = Total unique visitors x Conversion rate x Average dollars per sale
If you are believe that a low conversion rate causes you to have a low profit every month, it might not be the real problem. No matter how high your conversion rate, IF:
Your total number of unique visitors is extremely low, you might not get a profitable number of conversions. You might need to review your targeted keywords, or your website may lack the content to attract long tail traffic. Consider adding content on a periodic basis.
You are pricing your goods too low compared to what is considered profitable and competitive, you are going to have a problem making a profit. Consider looking at how your competitors price the item and decide on the most competitive pricing, not necessarily aiming for the bottom.
You have an extremely high operating cost, it's going to eat into your profits. Consider looking at your expenses and double checking the real value before you spend money on something for your business. Is it really a good financial decision to go for dedicated hosting at the early stage of your business? Do you really need to spend money on a monthly office rental, or can you use your home? These basic questions are easier to solve than the real website conversion rate problem because these are non-technical questions which most website owners can handle, and the financial savings can increase the overall website profit.
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