We all want to be the authority in our industry. We want our customers to rely on us for the information they need to make the proper decision when it comes to our expertise. So what exactly must you do in order to get there?
How Can I Further Enhance My Website?
In our previous blog post, we discussed how to empathize with your visitors and the basics of optimizing your website to properly suit them. Yet determining specific ways to improve conversion for some websites can prove to be much more elusive. Your website may need to be completely reorganized to improve usability and findability, or you may need to rethink your current content strategy and address your call-to-actions.
Choose Your Path
It is important to note that hiring a third-party to provide a comprehensive conversion marketing assessment and plan or making significant changes to your website can require a significant investment of time, money and resources. Is the Return On Investment (ROI) of improving your conversion rate by an incremental or insignificant amount worth this investment? Or could other methods of marketing your website, such as improving your social media presence or creating marketing content for a blog, email campaign or e-newsletter, be a better investment?
Follow The Funnel
If you decide to make changes to your website, understanding in detail how internet users are first converted into website visitors and then customers is vital to understanding why these changes are necessary. This is referred to as a conversion funnel. The term “funnel” is used because with each step of the process in which fewer and fewer users are funneled through to the end.
Managing Your Clicks
Many small businesses utilize online advertising and social media to initially attract visitors, and the first conversion metric of the conversion funnel is measured through the click-through rate of a referring page or link attached to the links. Yet be careful to not focus solely on your click-through rate when measuring your conversion for it can lead you to squander your most valuable resource – your time. Clicks are invisible and you cannot tell anything about the person behind the click. Just because they click does not mean that they are interested.
Establish Your Authority
Once a website visitor clicks through to the website, fewer still actually proceed through the funnel and become customers, users or referrals. At this point it becomes necessary to study your website’s analytics in-depth to determine why some users leave and why some continue on. By learning what type of visitors your site is attracting and properly utilizing your calls-to-action, you can find ways to make them fully flow through the funnel. Through this will you be able to establish authority and become a prominent resource in your community.