Increasing your website conversion percentage is one of the most significant things that you can do to drive revenue in your small business. Your small businesses website should not just be an online brochure; in fact it should be the hub of all of your marketing efforts and lead to revenue.
So what is conversion? By definition website conversion is the percentage of visitors who take a desired action. Those actions could include completing a form, purchasing a product or service, download something, signing up for a free consultation or trial, or simply visiting a series of web pages. Whatever actions you feel will lead to capturing visitor’s information or generating sales can be measured as a part of conversion.
Some conversion metrics will naturally have higher percentages than others. Here is an example from my own site metrics. During this reporting period I had 2,059 visitors to the Cassius Blue Consulting website. Of those visitors 350 completed one of the 3 desired actions resulting in an overall 17% conversion.
- Greater Than 2 Pages: My goal is to have visitors visit at least 3 pages within my website. Ideally these would be the page that they entered the site through, my services page, and the “get started” page. My short-term goal is to have 20% of website visitors to visit at least 3 pages with a long-term goal of 35%. Because this action does not require a commitment (information or purchase) from website visitors this conversion goal is significantly higher than the other two goals.
- Form Completion: Having a website visitor complete my form is my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. However, because this conversion metric only occurs when the visitor has reached a point where they are ready to try or buy my service my conversion goal is only 3%. Not every person that visits your site is going to be ready to purchase.
- Pricing Request: This conversion metric is a short-term test that I conducted. Some of the pricing for my services is listed on the website and some pricing requires that you request pricing. I wanted to test whether more people would complete a form when pricing was on the site (meaning they knew the price and were ready to move forward) or prior to. I already had a strong hunch which would be most effective but A/B testing is very important to validate your assumptions.
Your website conversion metrics and goals may be similar or vastly different from mine. The key is to set goals, make the necessary change to your website to drive a higher conversion, and measure the success. View the recording of my online webcast “Is Your Website Just a Pretty Face or a Lean Mean Marketing Machine?” to learn what changes you can make to your website TODAY to increase website conversions and generate increase revenue. View the webcast now!