Optimize Your Website to Convert Sales

Everyone works hard to build their website, optimize it for search engines, and increase their traffic. The problem is getting those visitors to convert to paying customers. To understand how to do this, it is important to learn to read and interpret your conversion ratios and server statistics.

It is surprising how many people build websites and rarely look at their server statistics. This is a big mistake. Your server stats are where you will find information on who is coming to your site, how many visitors you are getting, how they found your site, how many of your visitors are converting, and what pages they are exiting from. Without getting a hold on this information, you won’t know how to convert your traffic.

When you look at your server statistics, you need to figure out what your conversion ratio is. This is simply the number of sales per visitor to your site. Don’t confuse this with the number of sales per hit to your website. The same visitor might hit your site multiple times. When you read your statistics, your visitors will be labeled as sessions. Your conversion ratio will vary depending on the product or service your are offering. Some may be as low as 1 in 20, some may be as high as 1 in 500. Anything over this and you may need to look into how your site is set up.

Getting your traffic comes down to a few key factors. One, it is important that your product or service is easy to find. Don’t make your customer click through 5 or 6 links to find your product. Try viewing your site from the customer’s perspective. Would you navigate that far into a website to find what you are looking for or would you just move on to an easier to navigate site?

If you are using affiliate sales to generate income, don’t make it difficult for your customers to find the product once they click on your advertising link. With affiliate programs like ClickBank, most of your links will click through to a well designed landing page. However, some other services may just lead to the homepage of the website. Find the direct link of the product you are selling and use that to advertise. If it isn’t possible, move on to another product.

Make sure your site load times are not too long. Many people are still on dial-up modems. One growing trend, in our struggling economy, is for those that were on high-speed internet connections, to downgrade to dial-up. Ask around to see if you can find someone with a dial-up modem and test your site. If your site is bogged down with images and graphics, don’t be surprised when it takes a while to load.

What it really comes to is monitoring your stats, and understanding how well your site performs. If you can learn to focus on these two points, your conversion rates will begin to improve.

 

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