So, you finally have your company’s website up and running and you are ready to start pulling in your new customers. You have made sure that everything is on brand and your products are up and listed to start converting visitors to customers.
But, two weeks in, you have had trickles of traffic, a number of abandoned carts and one or two questions coming into your organisation. Where are you going wrong? Why is no-one paying attention to your site that you have just spent good money on?
Before you throw in the towel and give up on the digital world completely, we thought we would give you a few helpful hints to make sure that your site is fully optimized to increase your conversion rate. That is, to bring traffic to your site and to convert your website visitors to paying customers. So, let’s get started.
Your Landing Page Layout is Not Optimized
Customers can enter your site from various channels and campaigns and land on different pages. They can come in from a paid ad and land on a product page, your mailer and land in an article, or through organic search and enter through your home page.
Each of these pages need to be optimized enough to drive the customer through to the next page and into the sales funnel. Your home page, for example, needs to be simple and to the point. Include a quality, web optimized image to draw attention to your site.
Keep your content simple, descriptive and to the point with the right keywords included for SEO purposes, Lastly, make sure that the CTA is above the fold of the page. You are going to convert more visitors with an attractive CTA that is in plain sight.
Your Products Pages Have Too Little or Too Much Information
Let’s take a look at your product pages next. Cart abandonment is one of the biggest challenges that eCommerce companies face when it comes to converting customers and the problems mainly lie here in the product pages. Whether you are selling your products directly from the website, or merely advertising them, each product page needs to showcase the product.
Use multiple images taken from various angles for your customer to get a good idea of the product. Make sure the images are web optimized as it will slow down the loading speed of your site, which will increase bounce rate and lead to Google penalizing you. Add in simple to understand, highlighting descriptive content that is keyword rich. You will want your customer to organically find your products based purely on the description and land directly on the product pages.
Add in the price as well as any additional charges that the customer might come across. The biggest cause of churn in eCommerce comes down to unanticipated shipping costs. Make sure you disclose this, together with any other fees and costs on the product page.
Your Sales Funnel Is Glitchy, Complicated, Misleading or Too Long
Sales funnels can get tricky and due to the multiple elements to them, and most likely various plugins that you have on the site, things can go wrong really quickly. Pages, links and plugins break all the time, so if you start noticing a sudden drop in traffic in your sales funnel, go through the process yourself and check it out.
Consider how many forms your customer needs to fill out to eventually reach the end of the purchase and try to keep them to an absolute minimum. The more forms and fields, the more likely you are to lose the interest of the customer. There are a number of autofill solutions that you can integrate in your site, so make use of those.
Lastly, make sure that what the customer sees on the product page is what the customer sees during checkout and payment. Surprise shipping costs or highly delayed shipping times will send your bounce rate into the stratosphere. Keep transparent the whole way through.
You are Not Measuring, Monitoring and Testing Your Website
This is one of the most overlooked aspects of managing a website. Whether you are an eCommerce company or using it as an advertising platform, you will need to keep tabs on what is happening on your site at all times.
What is your traffic looking like? How is it behaving on your site? What is the bounce rate? Where is it coming from? If you have recently run a new campaign, what are the traffic volumes from it like? Is that traffic converting? You can use this kind of data to recreate similar campaigns if it is successful, or scrap the idea completely if traffic didn’t pick up.
Lastly, A/B test everything. Whether you are adding new images, CTA’s, or content, create a duplicate page and test which receives the most attention. Just make sure you do not index one of the pages otherwise Google will penalize you for duplication.
Last Thoughts
If you have tried all of this and more, and simply cannot seem to be getting that traffic and conversion rate up, it might be time to call in the experts. Seasoned experts will be able to pick up the problem rather quickly and be able to save you time and money, as well as those lost clients that could have translated into revenue.
