How to Build A Website

Website Visitor Conversion is the art of increasing the conversion rate (What is a Conversion Rate?) of your website by enhancing your websites usability and giving the visitor what they want and ensuring that its easy for them to carry out the tasks they want to complete, designing or re designing your website to suit your customers needs can increase your website visitor conversion dramatically.

A few quick tips

Using CSS

Ensure you website is written in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets - What is CSS?). This avoids using duplicate code, using CSS will allow your website to re use all of the design and style attributes defined in the CSS sheets and access them globally, hence reducing page size and then download time. Website visitors will therefore gain access to your website content a lot quicker and be satisfied. 

Improve Website Usability

As previously mentioned, allowing website visitors to find what want quickly and easily without having to navigation half of your website will definitely increase conversions. This could mean making your main features stand out more by using bold text, larger fonts or large buttons, all of this will improve your website usability. 

There are a lot more quick tips to come so subscribe to our RSS or email delivery service and be the first to get them.

A Conversion Rate, is the percentage of website visitors that end up accomplishing a given goal during their visit to a website or the period of time in question.

Goals will be set by marketing managers, webmasters or anyone!, typical goals include; download of a brochure, newsletter sign-ups, purchasing a product, watching a video, downloading a special offer coupon. Goals could be anything that  you wish to track and should be tracking.

Why Do You Need To Increase Your Conversion Rate?

Website Visitor Conversion is the art of increasing the conversion of your website by improving your websites usability and giving the visitor what they want and ensuring that its easy for them to carry out the tasks they want to complete, designing or re designing your website to suit your customers needs can increase your website visitor conversion dramatically. Right enough of the background, lets get right into it, here are a selection of tools to increase website visitor conversion.

1. Multivariate / “Taguchi method” Testing

Most people have probably heard of Google Website Optimiser, however there are a whole selection of other tools out there to improve website visitor conversion by applying different different layouts of pages etc, below are a list of some of these alternative tools, i would suggest using all of the tools and seeing how you get on.

1. Omniture Test&Target 2. Maxymiser 3. Split Test Accelerator 4. KaizenTrack 5. SiteSpect

Your really need to try these tools out for yourself, so go ahead and sign up, you usually find a lot of these offer the service as free, so why not, convert your visitor right now!

2. Usability Tests

We recently carried out a fairly large scale usability test for a marketing agency in Birmingham UK, they wanted to increase website visitor conversion. And as a result a lot of errors and bugs (mainly with website usability and navigation) we brought to the surface. We strongly recommend grabbing only a few people (more if possible) who are completely unfamiliar with your website and asking them to carry out a certain number of tasks, these tasks could be anything from booking a holiday in Spain for 2 weeks in a four star hotel to something that is purely informational like finding out the what there is to do at the weekend in Manchester on a limited budget.

3. Visitor Movies

This service i am about to mention taught our team an awful lot about visitor behaviour. Click Tale is a great free service that allows you to watch movies of visitors navigating through your site, you can see them trying to click things that aren’t click able and see how long they spend on each page, how far they scroll down, pretty much everything, its like looking over all of your visitors shoulder while they surf your website, its great so make sure you take a look at Click Tales Visitor Movie Service

4. Personalised Messages

A nice and clever little way that you can find out what your customers say about your products is on your refer a friend function add an area where visitors can add a comment (privacy policy permitting), this is a great way of gathering consumer feedback at its most accurate, furthermore you can use this data to feed it straight back into your Search Engine Optimisation as you will have access to the terms they use to describe your products.

5. Surveying Your Customers

Why not ask your customers all those questions you want answered? - What they would like to see more of on your website? What they dislike? Your customers know the answers to all of these questions and using Survery Monkey its extremely easy to create and distributed online surveys, so use Survey Monkey to create, distribute, analyse and re design.

Using Customer Testimonials on your Website is a great way to convert your Website Visitors (What is Website Visitor Conversion?). However the way you display your testimnials = even better conversion rates.

You should use testimonials on product pages and your homepage to give your website visitors that feeling of security ensuring they build trust with your brand and products.

Website testimonials should include: -

Include the customers real name

Company and

Location (city/state)

Furthermore a proven way to increase conversion is to use a real life photo of the customers - this gives the visitor the feeling that the customer actually exists and the testimonials hasn’t just been made up. 

Another great tips for you is to use the customers position within their organisation, reading a testimonial from a CEO or Managing Director means a lot more that coming from an assistant (no offence). 

Articulate - E-Learning Software do a great job of this: -

The only criticism here is the lack of location, but the rest looks good - and get your customers to smile when taking their photo!! - you want them to be happy about your products after all.

Testomonials play such an integral part in creating a website so try it out and let us know how you get on, we have seen organisations increase conversion by a significant amount just by using some real life testimonials, and remember they don’t have to be long, just punchy and straight to the point which portrays your company in a good light,.