Simple Steps to Improve Conversion: It’s Not About Money, It’s About Design

If you’ve spent a lot of time (and money) on improving your search engine page rank (PR) but you’re still not generating sales despite increased foot traffic, time to examine your site from a human perspective. The site may be absolutely perfect for search engine spiders but confusing or unattractive to human visitors. And they’re the ones who make purchases.

You have to optimize your web site to improve your conversion rate – the rate at which visitors become buyers. Window shoppers won’t pay the rent. Buyers will. You don’t need more site traffic (of course, there’s no such thing as too much site traffic) you need more visitors who actually buy something. So, how do you optimize your site for humans? It’s not expensive. It’s all in the site design.

Keep It Simple

Just because you can have a flashy homepage with lots of bells and whistles doesn’t mean you should. Your home page should be free of distractions. Do you really need that Flash animation? Does that chart or graph really make the point? Use your site’s home page to explain what your site is about and what you can do for the visitor. Lose the animated banner, the 20 links and pictures from a clip art subscription service. Just give visitors the key points. There’s plenty of time to sell once you’ve convinced a visitor to click off the home page.

Adsense = Nonsense

Google’s Adsense program automatically places “Ads by Goooogle” on site pages, paying the site owner on a PPC basis. These ads are contextual meaning that if Google has identified you as an on-line florist you’ll see a lot of ads for flowers and florists.

In other words, you may be providing ad space for a competitive site. Now, you can set parameters for the ads you’ll allow to avoid marketing competitors, but each one of those links is a doorway off of your site, providing more opportunities for visitors to pursue another search path.

Some on-site retailers swear by Adsense and the passive income it delivers. However, you didn’t build your commercial site to generate PPC revenue. You built it to generate sales revenues and frankly, that’s where the real money is. Adsense ads also diminish the overall look of quality you’re going for so most designers shy away from PPC programs. Do-it-yourselfers are more likely to sign up for Adsense but you pay a price for those contextual ads.

The More Payment Gateways the Better

The more payment options you provide visitors, the more sales you’re going to have. Most payments are made by credit card so, at the very least, you’ll need a merchant account and an SSL (encrypted) certification to accept secure orders. But many buyers don’t like to use credit cards on-line because of all the fraud and identity theft stories in the media.

PayPal is a common option that many people prefer. PayPal is an eBay company that enables payments to be made for a fee depending on the dollar amount of the transfer. It’s simple to open an account. All you need is an e-mail address. Fill out the secure PayPal form and you’re ready to accept on-line payments. You have the option of having checks sent or of having the payments deposited directly into your business account. (recommended).

Eliminate Hidden Fees

The are lots of e-tailers improving their margins by charging “$10 shipping and handling” fees for low-cost items. It’s going to make buyers angry if they go to the trouble to shop your site, move to the checkout and discover that S&H adds 30% to the total cost of the product.

Restocking fees and other “hidden” fees won’t make you a lot of sales or friends. The buyer will find the fees soon enough so, if you’re going to improve margins with high S&H costs, make that point clear right off the bat.

Add a Strong Call to Action

The call to action is usually the last section of text the buyer sees before making a purchase. “Act Now!!!” “Call Today and Save 25%” “Don’t Wait Another Minute to Relieve Back Pain!” are all examples of calls to action.

A good call to action does two things: (1) it tells the buyer what is expected of him or her and (2) it should make one last, strong sales pitch: “TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS MIRICLE CURE, JUST CLICK HERE FOR ALL OF THE INFORMATION. FREE!!”

Add Indications of Reliability

Trust builders come in all shapes and sizes. Most are logos that you can display prominently to add to your site’s prestige and trustworthiness. If you have any affiliation with a professional organization (American Association of Optometrists) display the organization’s logo.

The on-line Better Business Bureau seal instills confidence. The PayPal logo is comforting to some. Add association and security logos throughout your site to build visitor trust.

 Keep Conducting A/B Tests

Most web hosts provide site metrics software that enable you to quickly determine how successful site changes are to your conversion rate. To be effective you need an A/B test. The A test determines the site’s baseline performance. The way things are now. The B portion of the test measures the same performance parameters against the baseline A test.

Not all changes are going to translate into improved conversion rates. That’s why it’s essential to monitor site performance any time you make changes to site design, navigation or launch a special promotion like a series of auto-responders. In order to determine how well a marketing campaign is working, you need a baseline against which you can measure up or down ticks in site performance.

Every site owner is concerned with improving PR and they’ll spend a ton of dough to improve their site’s SEO. But many site owners don’t consider how simple it is to improve conversion rates and the bottom line. With a few tweaks here and there, coupled with regular A/B testing, you’ll grow your site faster with a much improved conversion rate.

No money required. It’s all in the site design.