While plenty of attention is given to different marketing channels within marketing circles (such as SEO and PPC), it is important to ensure that you’re optimising the experience of the user once they actually arrive on your website, no matter what channel they have arrived through. The process of optimising the user experience on your website to generate more of the desired action (for example, for them to submit a form or to purchase something) is called conversion rate optimisation.
Now, conversion rate optimisation can become a very complex field very quickly. However, there are certain fundamentals that you can follow to take advantage of conversion rate optimisation on your website straight away, without needing much in the way of additional resources (except, perhaps a bit of support from an SEO agency such as session-media.com/seo ).
Make sure your website is secure
One of the first things you should do is to ensure that your website is secure. SSL, also known as HTTPS, encrypts the link between your landing page and the browser that your user is using. It has very quickly become a very important part of the user experience on the internet. Users expect to see the HTTPS on your website. And if they don’t see it they may not trust it very much.
An expert B2B web designer can help make your website more secure by ensuring all security features are in place. In addition, a professional B2B web designer can help you make your website more aesthetically pleasing to generate more sales-qualified leads. You can find one who can help you in a reputable B2B web design agency.
Make sure you’re tracking everything
Of course, it’s not just about having the technical details of tracking set up correctly. It’s also about ensuring that you are tracking the right things. It’s very easy to get caught up in hundreds of different metrics. However, you need to ensure that any metric that appears on your regular reports has a very clear and direct relationship with your overall business objectives.
What are the important B2B website metrics you need to track? Using analytics software, you can track the following metrics, which are crucial in SEO and lead generation:
- Pages Per Session: It’s known as the average page depth or the average number of web pages viewed in one session. Highlight the most relevant and important information in your homepage because it’s where most visitors will land. It pays off to add a call-to-action or CTA button to the homepage to prompt your site visitors to take action.
- Average Session Duration: It’s the average session length. The longer site visitors spend on a session, the more engaged they’ll be as a potential lead. You should aim for, at least, two minutes average session duration.
- Bounce Rate: It’s the percentage of visitors’ single-page visits, wherein visitors left your website from the homepage or blog page without interaction. A high bounce rate shows that visitors cannot find the answer to their queries. This metric is related to pages or session and the average session duration. Keeping your bounce rates lower than 60% is ideal.
Speed is an important factor
Attention spans (and patience) are getting shorter and shorter when it comes to people using websites. It’s estimated that 40% of people will abandon a website that takes longer than three seconds to load. Therefore it’s incredibly important for you to make sure that your website loads quickly. And that the user sees what they’re looking for as quickly as possible.
Search engines such as Google have recognised the importance of speed to user experience and have recently integrated speed into their ranking factors. There are certain things that you can do to diagnose speed issues using tools such as Google’s Page Speed Insights tool. And there are certain levers you can pull such as minimising the size of your JavaScript and CSS files to help pages load faster.
Whatever it is that your developers need to do to make sure your website loads quicker, it is usually well worth the investment of time and resources to make it happen.
Have clear headings on your page
Another byproduct of short attention spans and short patience is that people tend to scan web pages before they decide whether or not they want to pay more attention to the detailed copy. Therefore, you must look at your headings and make sure that they clearly communicate the key points of your webpage so that your prospects can immediately identify that this is the relevant webpage for them.
Have a clear CTA
90% of the users who will read the headlines will also read the CTA. Therefore, it’s very important to ensure that your CTA is very clear, very relevant to what the user is looking for, and easy to spot on the webpage. A great way of doing this is by making sure that the colour of the CTA button is in sharp contrast to the rest of the webpage.
Of course, you also need to ensure that the message and the copy within the CTA are consistent with what the user is expecting based on what they have read on the rest of the webpage.
Use social proof
Social proof is a key behavioural science principle to apply when it comes to conversion optimisation on your website. A couple of ways in which you can deploy this is by including visible reviews on your website. 90% of buying decisions are influenced by reviews.
Of course, if you have any testimonials, any case studies where users have talked about how good your product is or what great results you’ve provided for them, it would be very useful to have that as part of your landing page. It provides new visitors to your website with a lot of confidence that they’re dealing with a reputable entity.
Keep your forms brief
Only include the fields in your forms that you absolutely need in the first interaction with a customer. While it is very tempting to include multiple fields because you want to get as much information about the customer as possible, you must be conscious of the fact that every extra field that you ask a customer to fill out is creating that little bit more friction and giving them another reason to bounce off your web page.
Start with the first and last name and email address. And then only add other fields if they are absolutely critical to your business process
Closing thoughts Conversion optimisation does not have to be complicated. Follow some of the fundamentals outlined in this article to see an immediate impact on your ability to generate leads on your website.
