Five Reasons Why You Are Unable to Increase the Sales Conversion Rate of Your Website

If you are an online business owner, then you have a challenging job to attract consumers, make them stay and finally the hardest of all, persuade them to buy from you.

And your business website plays a massive role in achieving all the above. Your website is the virtual storefront for your business, so it needs to do its job to make the consumers come to you, stay and then buy from you. Its performance is crucial for reaching the ultimate goal of your business, and that is sales conversion.

A website is how a consumer perceives your business, so it has to be on point all the time. If you are not paying attention to your website, then you are probably losing out on sales and trust of potential consumers.

So, next time when you are thinking about what you are doing wrong, it would be prudent to make sure that your website is up to par and not hindering your business in any way.

So, the question is what to do for making the most out of your business website?

Well, there are several factors regarding your website that you have to keep an eye out on to ensure that you are getting the most out of it. And in this article, I am going to list 5 most crucial points that you need to improve upon to make your website the ultimate lead and sales magnet.

So, without any further ado, let’s get straight into the topic.

Your Website is Not Mobile Friendly

Did you know that 86 percent of the world’s population has access to a mobile phone?

So, we can safely say that a majority of these people access the internet via their mobile and thus does all their buying and other online transactions through it as well.

If your website is not optimized for mobile devices, then a huge percentage of visitors are not getting the mobile-friendly experience from your site and thus losing interest in your business, abandon it, and moving on to greener pastures.

Besides this, it may also prevent your website from getting targeted organic traffic in the future.

Your business is thus incurring a considerable loss by losing out on potential consumers and sales opportunities.

Moreover, with the increase of more users accessing the internet over mobile devices, Google has made it a point that they will reward websites that are more mobile-accessible than others and started the mobile-first indexing policy.

So, optimizing your website to accommodate mobile users will not only help you increase your organic SEO rankings but also improve sales. Because your mobile-friendly website will help retain consumers, reduce bounce rate, and subsequently increase conversions.

So, if your website is not responsive, does not fit appropriately across all the screens of hand-held devices, and does not have the information readily accessible on the go, then you are in big trouble.

Here is a checklist that will come in handy while optimizing your website for mobile and tablet devices:

• Go with a responsive theme.
• Use relatively large buttons for the Call to Actions (CTA).
• Design simple menus (using HTML and CSS) for smooth access from all devices.
• Distance links sufficiently for easy tapping on mobile screens.
• Place the FAQ and other relevant information at easily accessible sections of your website.
• Adding a search function on your webpage is advisable.
• Choose the right font for all the written information, so they are easy to read on smartphones.
• Keep the website’s lead generation or inquiry forms, and check out forms minimal, short and to the point.
• Turn on auto-correct for forms to shave off precious time in filling them.
• Optimize your images and use compressed ones that you add to your website.
• Keep your customer service section in a prominent place on your website.

With the rapid developments in mobile technologies, mobile optimization is an ongoing process. So, you need to keep testing your website and tweaking it accordingly to get the optimum result from it at any given time.

Your Website is Not SEO Optimized

Your potential consumers can’t come to you and buy from you if they don’t know you exist. As far as they are concerned, whatever they are searching for is available on the first page of the search engine results. And if you are not there, then you as well are a ghost without any physical existence.

I am sure; you know that 75 percent of the visitors don’t bother to check the second or third page of the search engine results. So, if you need to be visible and let your potential consumers know that you are open for business, then you have to rank on the first page of SERPs.

A surefire way to ensure that is to make your website optimally search engine optimized. If you have a good SEO plan in place, then you surely will increase the organic visibility of your business, increase targeted traffic to your website, and upswing conversions too. And with a low bounce rate and increased average stay time on page, Google will rank your page higher.

Google is the search engine giant and has a monopoly with the majority of the search engine traffic originating from it. So, to rank higher in Google SERPs, you have to keep the “Google Gods” happy, which in this case is Google’s ranking algorithms. You have to follow all of its rules and continuously tweak your SEO game to up your search engine rankings. Is it a little tricky and complicated? Yes, but the results can make your business a resounding success, so why not do it.

A few pivotal things and parameters that Google looks for in a website to rank it higher:

• High-quality content with information relevant to a searcher’s query.
• Relevant keyword in your content, which matches what a searcher wants.
• Quality of a domain based on its ‘link-profile’. The more the number of backlinks you have from high authority relevant domains to your website, the better your link profile is.
• The quantity (or more importantly, volume plus quality) of unique content on your website.
• Visitors’ engagement with your site. Google checks the users’ stay time on page, the average number of page views, and bounce rate of your website, to understand whether consumers are getting what they want from your site and spending more time there or not. It also checks the click-through rate (CTR) of your website to gauge the searchers’ interest in your content.
• Responsiveness of your website like loading time and being mobile-friendly.

If you can design your website and plan your content based on the above factors, then you are all set and good to go.

The main to-dos for SEO being:

• Do thorough keyword analysis and narrow down the most searched ones for contents or pages you create.
• Develop painstaking unique content with relevant information based on the keywords for your landing page.
• Add visually attractive images to engage consumers more, while also reducing the response time by compressing them without compromising on the quality.
• Include internal links (links to other pages inside your website) and outgoing links (links to relevant pages outside your site) contextually from your content.
• Build and acquire relevant inbound links from authoritative websites by doing guest posting, content repurposing, collaborating with other content creators, etc.
• Consistently create shareable and long-form blog content for better sales conversions and user engagement.

So, start optimizing your website right now and never lose out on traffic, potential leads, and an increased sales margin.

Your Website Does Not Have Enough Call to Actions

When consumers come to your website, they won’t do what you expect them to do if you don’t guide their actions. And how do you do that? Simple by using Call-to-Actions.

A Call to Action drives a user to an intended action. You can have control over your visitors’ actions and direct them to a path profitable for your business. For example, you can ask your visitors to make a purchase by guiding them to the check-out page, ask them to subscribe to your email newsletter or ask them to share a particular content on social media.

It’s a powerful website element to reduce bounce rate by directing your visitors navigating away from your page to a different action that keeps them engaged within your website and ultimately lead them to make a purchase.

CTAs are crucial to making your customers fulfill your sales goals. So, use them on every single landing page of your website, even if required, use them multiple times there. They can be used to capture potential leads and create sales funnels that are essential for increased conversions.

A visitor is generally looking for something on your website that they want a solution for. So, be sure to provide them with relevant information on your pages in the form of written content, video snippets, or infographics, before placing a CTA, and finally directing them to a specific action.

There are various ways you can use the CTAs on your website. And their placements and aesthetic presentations are equally vital if you want the results you are craving for.

• A study shows that by using an arrow mark towards a CTA increased consumer engagement by 26 percent.
• CTA buttons are evidently more powerful than CTA links. Hence, if the design permits, opt for a CTA button in place of a CTA link.
• A CTA needs to be in a bigger font, bold, and attractive so that it stands out to your visitors, compelling them to click on it.
• Make sure that your CTA button-color is in contrast with its background so that it pops up and gets visible clearly to the visitors.
• CTAs should be clutter-free and easily accessible across all devices. Go for a responsive CTA button, and make sure to place and repeat them in strategic locations throughout your website to get the most out of them.
• Use strong words like “You”, “New”, “Now”, “Free”, etc. on your CTAs to entice customers psychologically to click more on them.
• Offer irresistible discounts to lure more customers into clicking on your CTAs.
• Display social proof and positive reviews of your products just below the CTA button to make visitors feel confident about your items.
• Also, place a one-line statement that shows you respect your customers’ data and privacy. This helps you build trust and thus increases your CTA click-throughs.

There is no hard and fast formula about how to use CTAs. So, keep experimenting with them and use them in different ways to make them work for you.

Your Website’s Loading Time is Too Long

The loading speed of your website is a crucial factor in determining its success. 47 percent of the visitors expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less. And 40 percent of them leave the site if it takes longer than that.

So, you can imagine the enormous loss that your business is incurring every time your site’s load time exceeds 3 seconds.

Most of the time, website owners are more interested in adding new features, high-res images, and some eye-dazzling design disregarding the fact that the loading speed is getting hampered. All of these attractive embellishments won’t make a lick of difference in your bottom line if your website does not load fast enough to retain your consumers.

Here is an infographic from Kissmetrics for a better understanding of the impact of the loading time on the bottom line of your business.

Reducing your site’s load time is necessary if you want to keep your consumers engaged with your website long enough to get them to do what you want, be it a sale or a lead generation.

Speed is the key when it comes to user experience as well, and you need a fast loading site if you want better consumer retention and increased conversions. Delay reduces customer satisfaction, and they will not come back to your website again if you don’t do something about it.

Nowadays, Google rewards websites that are mobile-friendly and provide a better user experience. As increased loading speed plays a huge part in both cases, Google had added a new speed update to their algorithm in July 2018. This update simply means that if your website is fast, Google will reward it by ranking it higher, and if it’s slow, then you may not see much improvement. So, speed is a critical factor that needs to be a priority for every website if you want to fare better.

There are many ways you can go about doing it. Let’s see some critical ones.

• Use Gzip compression to compress files to improve the website’s speed significantly.
• Optimize the size of the images that you are uploading on your website. Chunky images increase load time so compress them.
• Use cache to serve a saved version of your webpage quickly while the server works on bringing up the live ones.
• Kill all the redirect chains. They require precious processing time and removing unnecessary redirects will increase your load time significantly.
• Minify all JavaScripts and cascading style sheets (CSS) by removing all the unnecessary characters, blank lines, and whitespaces from the source code without changing their functionality. Doing this will require less bandwidth for page loading, thus ensures fast loading time.
• Keep your JavaScripts and CSS as external files and not with your HTML document. It prevents them from getting downloaded every time an HTML document is requested, thus reducing the load time.
• Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to ensure faster loading time for your website. A CDN allows the user to access a faster server near to them based on their geographical location.

Your website can undergo an overall facelift, or you can add fancy scripts to make your website even more elegant but always remember, a one-second delay can cost you a lead. So, whatever you do, do not compromise the load time. That’s non-negotiable.

Your Website is Not Optimized for Buyer Persona and Has Poor Customer Service

The customer is the KING in any business.

The better you can serve your customers with the solutions they are searching for will finally decide how successful your business is.

So, before you start anything, your very first job must be to understand who your customers are, what matters most to them, and what problems they are facing and searching a solution for.

Once you have a clear picture of what your targeted consumers expect from you, you would be in a far better position to deliver, increase sales, and earn their trust and loyalty.

To better cater to the specific groups of people your products are for, create fictional representations called buyer personas to understand them better. It can be a new mom looking for kiddie clothes or a student looking for school supplies. Just picture your ideal buyers and then create a copy for your website that will lure them in for a purchase.

Make a detailed keyword analysis to determine what your consumers are searching for and write your copy relevant to them. Your consumers should be able to find you based on what keywords they are using as well as be convinced to buy from you.

Aside from this, consumers must have an enjoyable and satisfying experience while dealing with your brand, which means stellar customer service.

If your consumer gets a fast and satisfactory solution to any problems they face while buying from you, their shopping experience will improve. This means they will more likely come back for more purchases in the future, as well as refer your brand to their friends and families.

Shape your customer service in such a way that you can relate to their problems and provide them with hassle-free solutions with minimum delay.

The better you provide them with solutions they want and enrich their buying experience with excellent customer service; you will have a loyal customer base with guaranteed conversions.

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Soumya Roy

Founder, CEO at PromozSEO

Soumya Roy is the Founder, CEO of PromozSEO Web Marketing Academy, a leading digital marketing course in Kolkata, India. He is a seasoned digital marketer and coach with over 13 years of extensive experience under his belt. In his long years of experience, Mr. Roy has worked with 100s of brands of different sizes, and mentored and trained more than 7000 professionals and corporate clients.
Being an entrepreneur and digital marketer, he loves to share his knowledge and experience in topics related to internet marketing, SEO, SEM, social media, content marketing, branding, entrepreneurship, and many more.

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