Many business owners realized, after careful observation that an increase in website traffic doesn’t always lead to more conversions. From research carried out, it’s been shown that this is due to the fact that many site owners neglect the optimization of their conversion efforts.

Most small business owners will focus almost exclusively on Search Engine Optimization, which will help their site rank high in the search engines, resulting in more traffic.

However, when it comes to Conversion Rate Optimization, you are focused on turning those customers to your site into potential clients, who will either purchase a good or use a particular service. Your conversion rate is equally as important as the traffic your site receives, it’s for this reason I’ve put together several tips below, that you can use to get the most out of those that visit your site:

1. Optimize the Checkout Form

You can eliminate a lot of confusion by simply creating a checkout process that is nicely designed and easy to follow. You want to ensure that the fields you use in the form, make sense and are logical. They must be clearly labelled and there should be some form of error message and validation that the end user will need to check, to ensure that they’re a human using the form.

All these little things need your attention if you want to make the most out of your checkout form.

2. Understand Where Your Traffic Is Coming From

In order to find your traffic sources, you will need to use some kind of web analytics software like Google Analytics or Unbounce. Through these tools you can get accurate real time data on who is visiting your site, and which of your landing pages they are spending most of their time on, which of them, they brushed aside, and where they go when they arrive on your site. With such information you will be able to better understand how your sales funnel is working and be able to identify where on your site your leakages are occurring.

With this information, you can then go ahead and focus mainly on the parts or aspects of your site that are converting the best, and think up ways of expanding those aspects to other parts of your site.

3. Test Your Sales Funnel Pages

When it comes to split testing, this is a very huge subject, which I recommend you go ahead and do additional research on. The idea is basically for you to make subtle changes to elements of your funnel pages, then monitor whether or not it improves conversions or makes it worse. If you’re not seeing any real improvements from these changes, you can then attempt something a little more drastic, like new page layouts and concepts.

If the design you’ve tested, fails to achieve the kind of results that you had in mind, you should then retry your efforts, while adopting an entirely new approach to everything. In most cases, people are able to learn from these failures, why visitors are rejecting their sales pages.

For example, if you tested a sales page, one with a testimonial and one without, and the one with the testimonials does better, then you may want to consider including testimonials on all of your sales pages.

4. Adopt the 8-Second Rule

When it comes to the 8 second rule, it’s the assumption that you have no more than 8 seconds to get your visitors attention, because that is the attention span of the average human being.

So you have less time than you think to gain the interest of your site visitors, so you want to maximize every second that you do have.

Below are some tips that you may want to consider utilizing to boost conversions within those 8 seconds:

  • Use a headline that is large and highlights the benefits.
  • Make sure your imagery is eye-catching and accentuates the main purpose or point of what you’re trying to promote.
  • Make all your buttons large, clear and simple.
  • Consider using videos and audio on your pages.
  • Don’t forget to include power words in your sales copy, to entice and engage.
  • Use hover effects on all of your buttons, to increase visitor engagement.
  • Use exit-popups, to reengage your visitors after they have lost interest.

5. Set Targets That Are Realistic

When it comes to targets or goals, we’re essentially referring to conversion, under whatever capacity that may be, on your site. Of course, this can mean different things to different sites.

A site that is designed to sell expensive homes, is unlikely to sale anything directly from the site, but what they are likely to do, is bring in potential clients, who can be followed up on. A conversion for such a site, is thus, different from a site that sells software.

It’s very important that you know exactly what a conversion means for your business, and then come up with numbers that you think are achievable.

So, depending on the kind of website, and business, a conversion may occur at different junctions in the whole process. It’s very important that you’re aware of these points, so that you can better engage your prospects.