5 Ways to Increase Your Website Conversion Rates

It’s very likely that if you’re reading this article, that you already have a website but for reasons that you don’t know, it’s conversion rate of sales, email sign ups and success just isn’t that good or it’s already doing well, but you want to know how to increase it.

Well I have 5 tips and corrections you can make to help you do this. And I can assure you that making these changes can have an insanely positive affect on your conversion rates, where they can double, triple or even go above 10 times!

Here are the 5 ways to increase your website conversion rates summarized:

1. Always focus on targeted, relevant audiences. This always increase conversions.
2. Increase and add more quality content to your website. This adds trust and improves conversions.
3. Use comparison charts. They help convince people faster.
4. Create product reviews and comparisons between products as your content.
5. When you sell people something, give them one option above all that works.

In a moment I’ll be covering each of these options and explaining how they raise conversion rates on your website.

What is a conversion rate?

Conversion rates are basically measurements, usually in percentages of a website’s success. That success can be either:

• The amount of sales it makes out of how many people visit your site.
• Or how many people opt-in on your website.

Higher numbers for each of these circumstances means the conversion rate is higher and you want a higher conversion rate if you want your website to do better.

An example of how to find your website conversion rate:

So if I sell 1 product on my website, get an average of 500 visitors a day, out of which 5 people buy, that means I have a conversion rate of 1% (1 out of 100). 

In order to measure it, you have to divide the number of daily visitors to your site by the number of people who buy (or if you’re measuring how many people sign up to a list, by that number), then take the answer and divide that by a 100 to get the percentage. 

So another quick example would be:

If my website gets 1,000 visits a day, and makes an average of 50 sales everyday, then my conversion rate is 5%.

Some places have a different calculations for measuring it, but I like my version better. And the more traffic your website gets, the higher you’ll want that conversion rate to be.

Now conversion rates aren’t always exact, especially if you take into consideration where you’re getting your information from. Some numbers may include returning visitors.

Do returning visitors count as part of your conversion rate equation?

Well it depends. 

I personally only like to include new visitors in my formula because generally on my website, returning visitors are rarely re-occurring buyers and more so readers who like my site. 

I only promote a few products on this website so returning visitors in my opinion have either already purchased it, just want to read the new articles I put up. I don’t really have information on how many of my returning visitors end up being first time buyers of my recommendations, but as of now, in my opinion, it’s too little to include. 

So what I generally do is use Google Analytics, look at how many visitors I received, but only use the “new visitor” number when I calculate conversions. So for example:

On this website, we have a daily count of visitors to the site, but there are at least 4 different numbers we have to work with. Sessions, users, Pageviews and the pie chart on the right.

I only use the actual pie chart which says out of the 706 visits on one day, 616 were new.

When I then use that number, the final calculation becomes very different, but I believe this conservative estimate is closer to the real number than if I had to factor in all those other things (returning visitors, maybe friends coming to my site who really are just there for support, not interested in buying and many other categories which would only mess up the final numbers). 

One of the few places where you WILL get an accurate conversion rate is if you use Google Ads. They have a code you can place on your website which will record which keywords your website gets conversions from and provide you with an accurate number. Bing ads is also another option, but I find Google to be more accurate. 

Here are the 5 ways to increase your website conversion rates explained:

This is where we’ll cover the above options, but in greater detail so you understand how they actually lead to higher conversions:

1) Relevancy is the most important aspect of higher conversion rates: 

If you can understand why relevancy is so important (and I will do that now), you will be able to adjust your website very quickly to be easier to buy from.

Think of relevancy as a key to a locked door which is higher conversion rates. The more relevant your website is to your audience, the easier it’ll be to open that door:

To help determine if your website has enough relevancy to make more sales, we first need to look at what your website is about. Basically your website has to discuss topics related to the visitors interest.

Let’s divide the topic of relevancy into 3 colors: 

Blue:

This means the relevancy is COLD. There is no nothing even close on your website that the visitor might want to see. The interest they have is NOT discussed and thus they will leave. Cold traffic is typically the type that will never lead to high conversions.

For example: You have a website on shoes, but try to sell people a make money online program on it. That is very cold and you will not have any visitors who goes there who wants shoes think about making money online. Your conversion rate is going to be 0%.

Yellow:

This means warm. Your website is in the field of interest/s to your visitors. 

For example: You have a website where you sell casual shoes (For business, work, important gatherings, ect…), but you also pitch to them sneakers. While these are technically in the same category, they are still not as directly related and your conversion rate will usually not be very high.

Red:

This means hot. Basically as relevant as it can possibly be which is where you want your website to be. There are 2 wa

Example: You run a site on hiking gear and sell hiking shoes. That is red because it’s relevant to the site topic. You are likely to get a more targeted audience there ready to buy.

There is a term I use for this kind of traffic: Laser targeted traffic.

Another example (from email marketing):

Since conversion rates are also measured in the email marketing realm, let me share one good example of how relevancy can help you get more email signups. I once ran a test to build an email list quickly and used the relevancy idea to target people with knee problems to sell them an eBook on the subject.

And my opt in page was showing all the necessary pictures and bullet points of helping people improve their knee health. Thus because I was targeting a red hot crowd, I was getting high opt in rates which were I believe over 20%, possibly 30%.

Unbelievable numbers for some, but not for me, since I understand how relevancy leads to conversions, which in this case are sign ups.Every ingredient was correctly set up and thus the results were good.

2) Add more quality content to an already relevant website.

When people apply the first tip very well, many of them miss a necessary component to maximize this key and that’s a lack of content. 

Imagine looking up reviews for a special running shoe only to somehow land on a website which reviews it, but only explains a few paragraphs about it, just giving a general summary you already know about, basically just wants you to buy it and doesn’t really do anything else.

While the site itself is red on the relevancy scale, because it lacks content, that red can quickly change colors to yellow and even blue and thus the conversion rate can drop!

Why would anyone who wants to know more information about a running shoe just take the advice from a website which doesn’t really go into any details about it? They may as well go to Amazon and buy it directly from there! Or worse, they’ll head over to another review site that does a better job doing what you should have been doing on yours! 

If people visit your website, they are obviously there because they want to know more than they already know:

• They want to know if it suits them.
• They want to know if it’s comfortable.
• If the shoe lasts long. 
• How much money is it and are there cheaper places to buy the sneaker?
• And they just want to learn more before they buy.
• They want to know if YOU tried it and if you liked it.

If your website does not have ANY of this information and frankly much more, say goodbye to that visitor. But if you want to keep an already red visitor remaining in that color, you had better write a fantastic review that answers all of those things.

By the way, side tip, read this if you want to write better reviews that sell.

3) Add comparison charts.

Comparison tables are awesome strategies to increase a site’s conversion rate because it quickly summarizes what you are trying to sell people. Imagine reviewing a product, and writing 1,000 words on it. This is good, but a comparison chart that explains why this product is better than others will much more quickly tell the story of why it’s good.

4) Make product reviews + comparisons between products you aren’t selling.

Any website that sells products or promotes them SHOULD be reviewing products they aren’t selling. Why?

Because you should be piggybacking off other products and selling your own, especially if it is better, and in your reviews telling people that via the comparison reviews. As long as you’re doing it honestly, there’s nothing bad about this. 

For example:

Let’s say there is a popular sneaker being sold, but you think it’s not as good as the one you use or are trying to sell on your website.

You create 2 pages, one page for the popular sneaker, and one for the one you are selling. You then use proper marketing (in this case, pay per click would be most appropriate) to funnel visitors to the popular sneaker article since that’s the one where you’ll get the most traffic.

The WRONG way (cold way) to sell YOUR sneaker alternative would be to either directly send the visitors interested in the popular sneaker directly to your sneaker page OR to initially get them on the popular sneaker page and try to get them to your alternative as quickly as possible. This would end up at best being a warm relevancy situation, but most of the time, just cold.

Now the RIGHT way would be to send visitors to the popular sneaker page, give then a very thorough and honest review of it and explain as much as you could to gain their trust before offering your alternative, which could be a comparison table or several links where you say there are better quality sneakers. It would also really help if you tried that sneaker so you can share your thoughts on it. But you will want to wait before you start pitching that stuff. Let them learn about the sneaker they like and gain their trust first.

5) When selling stuff on your site, make 1 clear choice for people to buy.

Let’s use the same exact example of the popular shoe, except now, let’s imagine that instead of offering 1 alternative, you offer 2, 3, 4 or more.

More options is technically better, but it’s also confusing for visitors and potential customers. They won’t know which one is best unless you tell them, but usually giving too many choices makes them less likely to buy. When you say there is 1 that is best, it makes it more easier for them to choose. 

Notice how every one of the 5 strategies on conversion rate increases points back to: Relevancy.

I said it was important and I wasn’t kidding around. Forget all those little tricks people talk about such as more call to action links or banners, ect… If the relevancy isn’t there, none of that stuff is going to improve conversions. If the relevancy is there, then those things will only help improve it.

Don’t make the mistake of prioritizing selling over offering information. Offer the information first, then sell, otherwise your website will not make money.

Look at your current website and it’s conversion rates from the point of relevancy. 

 

I also always recommend anyone who has a website get training and help from Wealthy Affiliate, the best program for developing highly converting websites.

And also look at my article if you want to see relevancy being used. If you’ve been reading all the way through, then I’ve kept your attention on this article and that was because I always stayed relevant to the topic.