How To Increase Website Conversion Rate

It doesn't matter how good your pitch is if you aren't pitching to enough people. Because of this, the early points in the sales funnel are just as important as the final points but many new online marketers overlook the early phases or misidentify them. That's why I'm sharing ways for you to improve the amount of initial potential customers you generate and how to convert them past the first few steps in the sales cycle.

Connect with potential customers

No matter how good your product is, people won't buy a single product nor sign up for a single offer if they can't find your website. In the online marketing world, the main way people find you is through Google and other search engines, like Bing and Yahoo.

Search engine optimization

Google ranks pages in its search results based on how many backlinks go to those pages, how good those backlinks are, and how relevant it thinks those pages are. That means that you need to treat where you show up on search engines as an important part of your online marketing campaign, perhaps the most important part. Most frequently, companies and individuals with monetized websites hire third-party experts to build backlinks to their website for them, and sometimes pay companies to write content for their websites to act as landing page.

All this effort is so that people come to your website, but very little of it is directed at keeping people there.

Keep people on your website

It doesn't matter how many people find your site on Google if they leave before your page loads. This is a part of SEO that's often overlooked since it's handled by the technical people instead of the writing teams, and as a result it can both bog down how high your site shows up on Google (since Google penalizes sites that load slowly) and also irritate potential customers so that they leave before the page loads.

Increase website load speed

Knowing this, site acceleration companies provide services to increase your site's load time. Essentially, they host your website on a super-fast server, often with different servers in different regions. This means that an accelerated with an American audience will be hosted on a server in Los Angeles to people in Southern California and on a server in Boston to people in New England. Products like MaxCDN host videos on additional separate servers so that the video content does not slow down the load time of the rest of the site, thereby making sure that Google ranks the site where it should and that customers don't leave the landing page before it loads.

Grab people's attention

Once your site loads, potential customers are going to need to be interested in something in order to stay on your landing page and click to the point of sale. This means that the title and the first paragraph of your landing page are the most important parts, since most potential customers leave your site within the first eight seconds.

Write a good hook

When you were a kid, you may have sometimes told your friends “I have a secret” but you didn't tell them what the secret is. They became eager and begged you to tell. Other times, you may have told them the secret right off the bat. When you're writing your landing page's title and first paragraph, your readers should have the same feeling that your friends told them when you say “I have a secret”.

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands, the founder of Influence People and author of the FREE Social Media Monitoring book.