A “Conversion” is when a visitor, on your website, achieves a “goal”.

So the goal of your website could be anything from more enquiries, product purchases or even catalogue downloads. Every website needs a goal. It is a specific action that you want visitors to take when entering your site.

Whatever it is you want your visitors to do, this action is what you are going to measure and what you are looking to optimize on your website in order to get more website enquiries.

What is Website Optimisation?

Website Optimisation is the process of a improving the design and functionality of a website with the goal of increasing the percentage of visitors that convert into customers.

When people hear “website optimisation” they generally think Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and whilst SEO does play an important part, it forms only half of website optimisation. Website Optimisation can be broken down into 2 parts:

1. Search (SEO)
2. User Experience (UX)

These 2 parts go hand in hand: Optimising your website with good SEO will get your website more visitors, which is great, but whether those visitors choose to purchase your products or use your services is totally dependent on their experience on your website (UX).

Back in 2009, it was good enough to just have a website. But these days a website has to perform, it has to sell! In order to do that it must be measured and improved. It is vital that every business continually optimises its website.

Search (SEO)

“SEO is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results”. In English: This is the optimisation of text, images and code on your website in order to improve your website’s ranking on Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

The process is simple: people type keywords or phrases into Google when they are looking for products or services. Google then has the mammoth task of trying to find websites that match those keywords – for which it uses an extremely complex algorithm that analyses aspects such as the content, structure, navigation, images and relevance of your website, to name a few.

Once it finds suitable websites, it ranks them according to how relevant they are to your search terms with the most relevant websites at the top. According to a study by an online ad network, Chitika, the first 5 results account for 67.60% of all the clicks and less than 4% of people view the second page of Google search results.

Basically, this means that if your website doesn’t show up on the first page of Google you are missing out on 96% of people searching for your business. SEO is an ever-evolving, illusive and sometimes frustrating creature. Google will never reveal their full search algorithm – they will only give us hints as to what will get our websites to rank higher on Google.

User Experience (UX)

People often think that once visitors are on your site, it’s job done – but that’s only half of the journey. How effective is your website at selling your product or service to these visitors? UX refers to a visitors experience on your site:

• How much time did they spend on your site? And what pages specifically?
• How many pages did they click through before leaving or converting?
• What links did they click (or try to click)?
• How far are they scrolling down?
• etc.

This is a heat map showing where people are clicking on the page. Red indicates high click activity. Heat mapping is one of many tools that can help you to improve your website so as to get more conversions.This information is vitally important because it provides you with concrete data as to how people are behaving on your site.

Knowing this, allows you to change the structure, layout and design of your site to suit their behaviour patterns. What makes a good salesman? The ability to overcome any objection. If a salesman can predict and handle a prospect’s objection then chances are they will make the sale.

By knowing what your visitors’ objections are on your website allows you to prepare for them. For example, if you see that your visitors are hardly scrolling to the bottom of your home page then you can take any vital info that they might be missing and place it further up in the page where they will see it.

What Tools to Use

Google Analytics – Cost: FREE – Google Analytics allows you see how much traffic is coming to your site, where that traffic is coming from and how they are behaving on your site.

CrazyEgg – Cost: R100 pm – This is a great Heat Map tool that measures where your visitors are clicking and scrolling on your pages.

How Optimise Your Website For More Website Enquiries?

Measure, analyse, implement & repeat.

1) Measure all your website analytics and Conversion Rates (visitor to customer & visitor to lead)

2) Analyse the data to establish what improvements to make (where are people clicking, scrolling, what pages are they browsing etc).

3) Implement the optimisations (design and content)

4) Repeat

steps 1 through 3 Optimising your website should be an ongoing process; it is not something which you do once and forget about. Every aspect of the online sales process is ever-evolving – from the keywords, people search to their behaviour on your site. The only way to stay ahead of that is to continuously measure, analyse and implement.