Statistics suggest that 81.7% of potential customers are lost if you’re not in the top 30 ‘natural’ search engine results.  Therefore effective Search Engine Optimisation is vital to the success of your online store.... 

...But getting listed on the first few pages of Google is only going to be worthwhile if you’ve got an online shop that’s designed to convert customers.  It is a pointless exercise if you receive a torrent of visitors as a result of your high search engine results, but only a few people actually go on to buy your products.

Investing time, effort and money in Web Page Optimisation will not be cost effective if your website is not able to convert your visitors into customers.  You must also review your website, to make sure you have done everything possible to encourage visitors to buy your products.

Optimising the conversion rate of your website is extremely important

Imagine that you sell a product for £50. If the average conversion rate of your website is 1% then 1 out of 100 website visitors will buy your product.  Therefore you will sell 2 units if 200 people visit your website and so on.

If you want to double your sales, you will need to double the number of visitors to your website, which doubtless you already know, can be difficult to achieve.

If however you can optimise your web pages and double your customer conversion rate to 2% then you will have doubled your sales without having to actively entice more visitors.  Increasing the conversion rate of a website is usually an easier option than trying to woo more customers using conventional methods.

What can you do to improve the conversion rate of your website?

There are several things that can be done to improve the conversion rate of your website:

Drive traffic to the most relevant pages on your site

Your visitors should enter your website at the most appropriate page relevant to their keyword search term.  For example, if you advertise on Google AdWords (more ins and outs on this in a future blog) for the search term “buy trainers” then your landing page should be a page about how they can buy trainers and it should be possible to buy this type of shoe right on the page.  It’s simple stuff, but you’d be surprised how many internet retailers don’t do this consistently.

Check your website statistics for your pages with a high bounce rate

There are loads of solutions out there, but Google Analytics is one of the most useful.  Analyse your website statistics to find pages on your site that have a high bounce rate.  You can track how many people leave your website too quickly, then you must improve your web pages and make them more relevant to what your potential customers are looking for.

Add a “call to action” on all of your landing pages to help improve customer conversion rates

Every landing page should contain a call to action.  It is likely that a website visitor will only visit a single page of your website, which is why all pages should contain a call to action so that your website visitors know what to do.