Building, maintaining and above all else profiting from a web presence isn’t easy – I think the biggest issue most people have when they transition to the online space is that they seem to think that it is.
I’ve built tens of sites, practicing SEO and analyzing analytics, and learned that in a lot of instances there seems to be some disconnection between the website and the visitor – it’s a lot like the Company building it has some level of disregard for web visitors, like they are not actually REAL people, but rather digits which appear in Analytics.
Irrespective of how much traffic you are driving to your website, there are ALWAYS things you can do to boost your conversion rate and drive more sales.
Add a Telephone Number
Wow, that’s obvious right? Well, no, apparently it’s not. It never fails to amaze me how difficult it is to find a telephone number on some websites, it’s almost like the website has been created for the purpose of demolishing one-to-one communication.
Always include your telephone number on your pages, if you so choose try and include it in the top right-hand corner of your website, so that anyone visiting knows immediately what they need to be doing.
Similarly, include your telephone number in your page titles and meta descriptions too – you would be surprised how many users decide to call you directly from the Search Engine Results Pages.
Target Less Competitive Terms
One of the things that almost everyone new to SEO gets wrong is simply selecting the right terms to target – with some 15-odd years’ experience making SEO work, I can absolutely guarantee that keyword research is time very well spend.
When research potential target terms, always make sure you’re doing so with two things and two things alone in mind: competitiveness and sales. The obvious choice for many webmasters is simply to target the high volume terms in their niche, which quickly leads to unrealistic ambitions developing and ultimately disappointment, when they get nowhere.
Scour through the different variations and patterns people utilise when searching for services or products within your industry or niche and pick out the search terms you can realistically rank for – they don’t have to be driving even one thousands searches per month, if they drive sales and if you make more than you spend, then they are worth targeting.
Define and Monitor Your Objectives
Do you know what you want to achieve with your website? Do you want people to fill in your contact form? Subscribe to your newsletter? Buy a product or service? Click on a link?
Irrespective of what your goal or objective is, emphasise it and give it prominence on the page, and do everything you can to subtly direct users in the direction you want them to head in – conventional wisdom and common sense suggests to keep all your main conversion points and calls to action above the fold and in the eye line of your visitors.
If you don’t know what you want your users to do, how are they supposed to?