How you optimize your website can make or break your business. How you structure your website can make you gain or lose customers and sales. Any website owner who wants to increase the site’s conversion rate and its revenue should seriously consider the matter of website optimization. Structuring a website to be user friendly can greatly help convert visitors into customers.
As an SEO consultant I can tell you that optimizing for conversion can be done through many strategies and tactics. These can range from simple to difficult and the results also vary depending on the strategy used. A website owner can do the task himself or can let a web professional do the job. For increased conversion rates and website revenues, here are some simple steps to website optimization:
Increase Your Visibility. Aim to have your website be more visible on cyberspace. One way is to improve your search engine rankings so that potential customers can easily find your site. To do this, you must optimize your site with keyword-rich, fresh, quality, and informative content. Using meta tags, alt tags, and a site map would also help a lot in your aim to optimize your site to increase its conversion rates. Later, learn more sophisticated elements like silo building, synonym usage and LSI.
It would also be helpful if your contact information is displayed prominently in your site. Giving the option for your website visitors to contact you for further information would also be a great way to build your credibility and to connect with your prospective clients.
Aim For Faster Load Times. If your website is slow to load, having less conversions and high bounce rates are natural consequences. Impatient visitors would tend to just leave your page while it is still loading. To see if how fast or slow your website loads, test the time it takes your site to load using various connection speeds. If you find out that it loads slowly, aim for faster load time.
You can do this by optimizing your CSS and HTML code and doing away with items that are unnecessary or redundant. Ask yourself if your site would be okay with or without those items. If yes, eliminate them by all means. Another important thing is to compress your images as large images are some sometimes the reason web pages load slowly.
Make Site Navigation Easy And Simple. Users and site visitors often-times get frustrated when sites are difficult to navigate. Many of them just simply give up and this results in lower conversion rates. To make site navigation easy and simple for them, group the content of your site accordingly. If you are offering products or services, you would need to categorize them by price, brand, or other applicable groups so that your visitors can find what they are searching for easily and quickly.
Shortening the path to purchase is also an excellent idea if you want to improve your site’s conversion rate. When your customers find they have to navigate through several pages just to place an order, there is a big probability that many of them will abandon their shopping cart mid-way through the process. In order to avoid this happening, adjust your purchase path to enable them to make a purchase in just a few steps.
The Importance Of Multi-variante Testing. To determine which combinations of your website elements translate to more conversions, multivariate testing is needed. With this, not only one website element is tested but the different combinations of content, headlines, images, and pricing. Identifying the combinations that result in high conversion rates is important so that you’ll know what strategy to maintain, what to focus on, what to strengthen, and what to do away with.