6 Proven Strategies To Improve Your Website's Conversion Rate

1. First Impressions Matter

Visitors on search engines are like shoppers in a mall, but with a significant twist - instead of browsing a variety of stores offering different products, they are focused solely on shops that sell the same item. Imagine a mall where every store stocks the same type of shoes. Shoppers would swiftly compare prices, quality, and customer reviews before making a purchase.

Similarly, online visitors can quickly evaluate competing websites selling the same product or service. This can be nightmare fuel for businesses who are behind the eight ball when it comes to their online presence and branding.

Here are some quick examples of websites that deliver an awful first impression:

• Websites that are over 5 years old without consistent upkeep
• Websites that are slow, laggy or contain bugs
• Websites that are not mobile friendly or lack accessibility
• Websites that share the same template as thousands of others
• Websites without an SSL Encryption
• Websites that are simply boring with aging design trends
• Websites without a clear value proposition (See #2)
• And many many more...

Websites with any of these characteristics will only attract window shoppers at best. To separate from the crowd, it's essential that your website stands out visually, offers convenient navigation, and an easy browsing experience while making a terrific, targeted pitch to your visitors.

All in all, you need to consider that all of your competitors are competing to make a better impression than you. So, how does your site stack up?

2. Clear Value Proposition

Attractive Headlines and Subheadlines

Compelling headlines do a far better job of converting your visitors into customers than extensive paragraphs. It's rare that a visitor reads through your site line by line, but rather simply skim through the titles and pictures. With that in mind, your headlines and subheadlines should include the following:

• Clarity: Make sure your headlines clearly convey the main message or benefits without any ambiguity.
• Relevance: Your headlines need to directly address the needs, interests, or pain points of your target audience.
• Urgency: Create a sense of urgency or importance to encourage immediate attention or action.
• Uniqueness: Differentiate your headlines from competitors by highlighting unique aspects of your offering.
• Emotional Appeal: Write your headlines to evoke emotions or curiosity, drawing readers in and making them want to learn more.

Benefits + Solutions = Conversions

When creating titles, service breakdowns, or product descriptions, consider both a solution-oriented and benefit-oriented writing style. Both can greatly affect how you communicate with customers. A solution-oriented approach addresses specific problems and presents your product as the answer. In contrast, a benefit-oriented style highlights the positive outcomes. Combining both styles creates a compelling narrative that solves problems and emphasizes benefits to help drive engagement and conversions. Take a look at this example for instance:

3. Effective Call-to-Action (CTA)

Similarly as important as your headlines, the effectiveness of a website's call to action cannot be understated. Call to actions can include forms, chatbots, inline links, etc. — but in most cases, your primary CTAs are buttons that direct a site visitor to somewhere where they can get in touch with your business (ie. contact or booking page). The style, placement and wording of these buttons is what can make or break the likelihood of someone taking action on your site.

CTA Placement

CTA Style

• Contrast: Ensure that the CTA button stands out prominently on the page by using contrasting colors to the background it's displayed on. Test out different colour contrasts with the Button Buddy Contrast Tool.

• Size: Your CTA buttons should be easily clickable without overwhelming the rest of the content. They should also include enough padding between the lettering and spacing between the content around them to properly stand out

• Colour: In accordance with your branding, try to use bolder colours for your main Call To Action to clearly identify them from other buttons that lead to different resources.

• Consistency: Make sure that all of your CTA buttons have consistent text and style throughout your website. Multiple different styles can confuse or overwhelm site visitors.

4. Building Trust With Social Proofing

Perhaps the most important factor for any business to successfully land a sale from their website is proving credibility. In a world filled with online scams, vastly varying quality and underdelivering — a provable, positive reputation is king. Many businesses, even those with excellent reviews, however, don't always do a great job of promoting their reputation.

Implement social proofing strategies into your site like these examples here:

• Reviews: The most common way to display social proof is through a feed or slideshow of positive testimonials left by past clients.

• Ratings: Similar to reviews, adding your (ideally positive) "star ratings" from sources like Google or Facebook, along with the number of reviews you've received helps prove your experience.
• Case Studies: Featuring past projects in an informative and aesthetically pleasing way helps confirm your quality and legitimacy to your site visitors.
• Associations & Partnerships: Showcasing logos or media from other reputable sources like listing services, local chambers or networking groups can have a positive effect on credibility as well as SEO.

• Badges & Awards: If your business has won or been nominated for any awards or mentioned in some sort of press, featuring an image, graphic or video of your accomplishments goes a long way!

5. Performance, Accessibility and Responsiveness

With bounce rate being one of the most important performance statistics for website owners to monitor in 2024, it's critical that your website keeps your visitors from leaving if you're hoping to convert leads. That said, websites with slow loading speeds, poor accessibility, and unresponsive layouts will send your visitors packing long before you get a chance to make a sale.

How can website owners improve their site's performance? Let's take a closer look:

Loading Speeds: Websites can take a long time to load for a number of reasons. Most of the time, it's due to poorly managed resources. For example, non-optimized images, bloated or unminimized files, and lack of a CDN will cause your webpages to open and operate with a delay. Though it would be smart to research these topics further, for the purpose of this post, here are some quick resources to address these items:

• Resize Images: Resizing your images to the correct size (based on how they are displayed on your webpage) will significantly reduce your page's initial load time.
• Lazy Loading Images: Correctly implementing "lazy loading" for your website's images will help lower the first contentful paint time, allowing for a smoother site experience.
• Minimizing Site Files: Your website is made up of a compilation of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files. Minimizing these files will allow your browser to read these files faster, resulting in a quicker load time.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN):  Using a CDN to deliver your files will speed up your website by decreasing the distance between where content is stored and where it needs to go.

6. Continuous Development & A/B Testing

Regularly analyzing performance statistics and conducting A/B testing are essential steps in optimizing your website for higher conversion rates. By paying close attention to metrics such as bounce rates, click-through rates, and of course, conversion rates, you can gain valuable insights into what elements do and don't resonate with your audience. No variation of your website is going to perform the best it possibly can on the first try. Instead, regularly trying out different elements and layouts can help determine which designs and strategies yield the best results.

Here are a few common examples of areas that you can A/B test on your website:

• Headlines: Test different variations of headlines to see which ones attract more clicks and engagement.
• Call-to-Action (CTA) Buttons: Experiment with different colors, text, sizes, and placements of CTAs to optimize click-through rates.
• Page Layouts: Test different layouts, such as variations in the placement of content, images, and CTAs.
• Product Descriptions: A/B test variations in product descriptions, some with more detail for instance, or try different writing styles.
• Forms: Test variations in form length, fields, and designs to improve conversion rates for actions like sign-ups or downloads.

Wrapping Up

It's important to remember that every element — from compelling content to intuitive navigation and strategic calls to action — plays a crucial role in engaging visitors and driving conversions. By continuously optimizing and refining your website based on user feedback and analytics, and paying close attention to site speed and performance, you can significantly improve your website's conversion rate!