In order to see real results from SEO & SEM efforts, you need a website that makes it easy for the customer to do what you want them to. In digital marketing, we call this converting. Why? Because they are moving from one stage of your sales cycle to the next. It could be from visitor to lead, or from lead to customer.
This draws us to our first website conversion killer:
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You haven’t defined your conversions
If you haven’t clearly defined what you want people to do on your website, how do you expect them to know what to do? You can fix this killer by first mapping out your sales cycle. Then, define how each person converts from one stage to the next. Do any of these happen on your website? Are you actively tracking these activities? Can you attribute the action to the marketing effort that caused it? These are important questions to ask yourself (or your digital marketing team) in order to define what a conversion means to your company.
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Your visitors are landing in the wrong places
You’ve more than likely heard about the importance of landing pages (If you haven’t, Hubspot did a long-form piece of content on them). But simply having landing pages isn’t enough in 2017. You need to ensure that the keywords and topics that are relevant to incoming visitors are what’s actually discussed on the page. You can fix this by getting familiar with Google Analytics. It will tell you what keywords are leading people to your website, and what pages they are landing on. Sort your landing pages by bounce rate to see which ones are most likely to be problematic.
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People have questions but can’t find answers
The good news is that people are actively engaged in your content. The bad news is that they can’t find the answers they need, and this is a killer. Luckily, this killer is easy to solve. One free way that can take a while is to create a FAQ page (or insert FAQs into individual pages to be more specific). Another way that is much simpler but will cost you is to install a live chat feature to your website. You may have noticed it on the bottom right corner of our site, and this is something we provide for many of our clients. This allows you to solicit interaction with potential customers with ease. The one thing to note is that you must have someone capable of monitoring the chat, as people will stop using it if nobody is there to respond within a reasonable amount of time. (Learn more about LiveChat here, or contact us and we’ll tell you about it)
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You don’t have credible social proof
One of the first things people look for when making a purchasing decision is credibility. The best way to establish this on your website is with social proof. This can come in the form of reviews, testimonials, certifications, badges, case studies & more. When people see that you are well-respected in your industry, they will be much more likely to buy from you. This is the hardest conversion killer to fix – assuming that you haven’t built up enough credibility yet.
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You aren’t telling them what to do
This is surprisingly the killer we see most often! It happens across mediums- on websites, social media, even in paid ads. Without direction, people could completely agree with what you are saying, and still not convert. There is a time for introductions, a time to engage, but eventually, you have to get down to business.
By avoiding these 5 conversion killers, you will make sure that your website converts seamlessly through your sales funnel. Can you think of any others? Tweet us @AugurianTweets with your conversion killers!
