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 – DIY and sport for starters).

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.

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 I 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.

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 those being much higher up the page.

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

It’s depressingly useful to ask yourself how you’ve got to where you are now, having assessed the conversions percentage you’ve identified.

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

Maybe you’ve called on resources (internal and external), trusting them to get you results … but the conversions data is shouting out: a better solution is needed.

In my experience (having consulted on 6,300+ websites over 25+ 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 (usually!) 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.

If you need proof of that, just ask me to fix something in the house or garden.  THERE I show my true incompetence!