At In Front Marketing, we often talk to business owners who want to completely revamp their website. They tell us it’s not doing anything for them and that it just sits there, out in the vast wilderness of the internet alone, lost and afraid.
Ok, maybe they don’t get that descriptive.
But we can hear the frustration in their voices because they’ve spent thousands of dollars on their website and have no idea if it’s really doing anything. What they do know, is that it certainly isn’t bringing in more paying clients and, the only solution they can see is to build a brand new website and start over. Before you hit that self-destruct button, take a breath. Our advice: don’t start over.
If you start over without knowing what went wrong with the last one, you won’t know how to make a more effective site. Instead, try optimizing your current one. This way, you’ll learn more about how your client is interacting with you online, which is incredibly powerful information to have as a business owner. Then, when you do gain traction and are truly drawing in paying clients from your website, you can take those lessons you’ve learned from optimizing and create a website that’s going to excel online. Here are 4 ways you can start optimizing your website and get more conversions.
1. Optimize Your Website for Free with Google Analytics
Optimizing your website starts with asking the right questions:
- How are people getting to your site?
- What are they looking at when they get there?
- How long are they spending on each page?
- How many pages are they looking at?
- Is it converting visitors into buyers?
These are big questions that many entrepreneurs give up on answering. To them, the internet and their website are a black box and all they can do is hope it’s doing something. The good news is, there’s an incredibly powerful tool you can use to find the answer to all those questions (and it’s free): Google Analytics. Check out our blog on the subject for a deeper dive.
If you’ve never set up Google Analytics or taken the time to learn how to navigate it, that’s your first step to optimizing your website. Set up your Google Analytics here. Once you’ve set up your Google Analytics and learned how to use it, you can start answering the above questions. This allows you to create a baseline for your website, charting where it’s doing well and where it’s failing. If you’re too busy, or just don’t want to dive in, don’t jump the cue and go to the next step. Talk to someone who can help – like us at In Front Marketing, for instance.
2. Tweaking Your Website for Success
Once you can see where your website is succeeding and failing, you’ll know where you need to start making changes so it can start converting visitors to buyers. Before you begin to think about how to set up your website to convert, you need to define the purpose of each page on your website and your website as a whole, i.e. what does ‘convert’ mean to you?
Defining Website Conversion
Let’s say you’re an online retailer. Your ‘conversion’ might be a purchase. However, that’s not the only conversion possible, and more importantly, it shouldn’t be the only conversion you guide your site visitors to. In fact, every page of your website should serve a different purpose; a different conversion it’s leading visitors to.
So, when a person first makes contact with your brand and finds your home page, trying to get them to buy something right off the bat is likely not the right first move. They’re too far away on the ‘Buyer’s Journey’ and pressuring them to buy might cause them to bounce back to the search engine results page. But, if you want to try, make the change and track it on Google Analytics. If it works for you, great! If not, try another call to action (CTA).
Strategic CTAs
That ‘Buy Now’ button or ‘Contact Us’ represents a big step to many of your site visitors. By using a variety of calls to action, like reading reviews, downloading e-books (or other lead generations), or even following you on social media, you lead your visitor down the path to conversion. Here, once again, you can test and see which calls to action help you by tracking it through Google Analytics. Once you find the right calls to action to lead your buyer towards trusting you enough to engage with your service or product, your website will be much more effective.
3. Content that Leads to Conversions
It takes more than just the right call to action to keep a prospective client on the page. To guide your client, to keep them on the page, you need content that will keep them engaged. To do that, go back to the purpose of the page (the conversion goal), and the type of visitors who find the page (which you should be able to figure out through Google Analytics) and build the content with that in mind. You want to take the visitor from point A to the next step on their Buyer’s Journey – and eventually, to a conversion.
4. Keeping in Touch with Leads
Unless you have the most persuasive content in the history of the internet, chances are you’re not leading every new visitor to make a purchase based on that first site visit. Instead of betting on them coming back, you need to create a quick relationship with your visitors so you can continue talking to them and make that sale.
There are two main ways you can do this:
- Using a pixel (or the next generation of tracking software) to retarget the right ads to people who have interacted with your website.
- Directly contacting them through SMS or email marketing.
Both options have their pros and cons, but you don’t have to choose one over the other. Often, the two can work in tandem with each other! When you do get to this point, things get a little trickier. If you’re not a highly technical person, pixels can be hard to set up. But, done properly they can be very powerful. SMS and email are much easier to do, but you have to make sure you’re operating within the scope of privacy laws.
Still not sure how to get started? If you want help with any of the above, give us a call and we can walk you through the steps in more detail and help optimize your website for conversions.
About The Author: Dave Taylor
Dave Taylor and business partner John McColman started In Front Marketing in Feb 2015 with 1 main goal in mind, to provide business owners with a better understanding of what happens when they run digital advertising campaigns and to do it at a reduced cost. With over a decade of working with large corporations in the Yellow Pages Group and Sun Media, Dave decided the only way to provide better data to his clients was to go it alone. In this blog, find out what makes In Front Marketing different from other advertising agencies, how they can do what they do without a retainer and why businesses of all sizes are choosing In Front as their main advertising partner.
