Do I need help to get more website conversions?

For most businesses, as long as enquiries and sales are happening, the strength of the website isn’t a major pain point.

It’s what I call blissful ignorance because most businesses are blissfully unaware of how many sales are being lost from their websites.

When the sales start to dry up though, panic sets in and all of a sudden the website becomes more important.

There is another problem: internal or external staff who don’t know enough about achieving the most from website visitors.

It’s not deliberate – it’s purely that everyone has their own levels of experience and it’s extremely unlikely that the people you use have the level of experience that I have in website conversions.

I could sit on a Zoom call with you and any people you rely on, and taking it in turns, play a game of “see who can identify the most website problems (and what to do about them”.

The problems and answers would dry up on your end, while I would keep going.

That’s not bragging – it’s just the reality that it’s my strong point (while equally I’m weak in many other things).

But I don’t expect you to trust my viewpoint.

Instead I prefer you to judge for yourself, based on a simple exercise that helps you to assess whether you need help to get more conversions from your website visitors.

Being realistic about website conversions

Out of every 100 people who get to your website, only a small percentage would make contact within a few days of visiting.  This is because:

  1. You’ll lose the majority because your website didn’t give them enough reasons to make contact with you.
  2. Of those that were interested, they could be in the research phase and not ready to make contact yet.
  3. Of those that were interested, some will need to have further internal discussions before they’ll want to engage with you.

A simple test

Most businesses have the free Google Analytics set up on their websites.

If you don’t then you can do that and return to this simple test a few weeks later.

Although basic (compared to the software we use that goes into more detail), Google Analytics will give you an insight into how many visitors got to a particular page of your website within a chosen timeframe.

Here’s my recommendation for you:

  1. Choose one product or service that you offer on your website.
  2. Use Google Analytics to select a one month period of time.
  3. Within Google Analytics, look at the number of people who got to that part of your website.
  4. If you know how, further filter that number to only those from countries that you can serve with your product or service.
  5. Take that number of visitors and compare it to the number of enquiries or sales you’ve had during that time period.
  6. If your sales cycle is longer then choose a longer time period (e.g. 6 months) and compare visitor numbers to that product/service page to the level of enquiries over that longer time period.
  7. Express the outcome as a percentage. For example, you had 100 visitors to your blue widgets page, and you had one enquiry (1%).

That activity gets you to focus on only one product or service, and how many of those website visitors made contact with you.

The lower your percentage, the more opportunity you have to repair the problems that are stopping your website visitors from engaging with you.

What’s your conversions percentage like?

If it’s 1-5% then you’re part of a big club of businesses that will have the same results.

If it’s 6-10% then you’re in a smaller club, but one that still has room for improvement.

If its above 10% then you’re in the more exclusive club of those that have quite good conversion rates from website visitors to specific website pages.

Assessing where you are now

Here’s the good news: if your conversion rates were very low then it’s quite likely that the problem with that one product or service page is something that can be rectified and then replicated to other product or service pages to significantly boost your overall sales and enquiries.

For example, it’s extremely common for company websites to have product or service pages but NOT include numerous case studies/testimonials related to the product/service directly on each product/service page AND much higher up the page.

That problem alone is losing companies huge amounts of potential business.

So how have you got to where you are now, with the conversions percentage you’ve identified?

Maybe you don’t have many resources to call on.

Maybe you’ve called on resources, trusting them to get you results but the conversions data is shouting out: a better answer is needed.

In my experience (having consulted on 6,000+ websites over 20 years), very few businesses have website conversion experts working for them.

You may have website developers, SEO or paid advertising people, or marketing people.

They are all good at their niche, which is rarely going to be website conversions.

That doesn’t make them bad people – it just means that we are all different in our strengths and that no one person can be an expert in everything.

What to do next

You’ve worked out your conversion rate and you’re probably frustrated and wanting to achieve more.

Here’s what I recommend:

  1. Take that one website product/service page that you want more enquiries about, and ask people: “how can we get more conversions from this?”. Those people could be internal staff, external resources, and even friends.
  2. Make a note of the feedback gained.
  3. Take that feedback and book in a call with me. It costs you nothing.
  4. During our call, don’t tell me what people have suggested to you – simply tick those points that I uncover during our call about that product/service page on your website, while adding in additional observations that I make but weren’t on the notes you already have.
  5. Then go and implement the changes that will help to increase your conversion rates from visitors to that part of your website.