Building Bridges to Increase Your Conversion Rate

If you think of conversion as a destination, then your website is the road to that destination and your customers are the travelers.

Directing traffic to your website through SEO or social media  is about getting customers on the right road – the road to your website. The purpose of conversion optimization is to keep them on the road so that they reach the final destination  - conversion.

The problem is that most websites have glitches that cause their customers to halt the conversion process. Think of them as broken bridges. If the customer can’t cross the bridge, he’ll take a detour and perhaps end up on another company’s website.

Here’s 3 ways to build bridges and avoid glitches on your website.

●      Bridge #1: Usability

Each page of your website should be easy to navigate and easy to operate. Usability issues include buttons that don’t work, broken links, dead-end pages, and confusing navigation.

Test your webpage out with people who aren’t familiar with it in order to find out where usability problems arise.

●      Bridge #2: Clarity

Your website may function correctly, but does it also communicate clearly? The purpose of each page should be immediately apparent upon entrance.

Clarity problems arise with hard-to-find call to actions, poorly written copy, misleading headlines, and lengthy paragraphs. Don’t make your customers struggle to figure out what they should do next. They won’t, and you’ll lose them to the competition.

●      Bridge #3: Appearance

Appearance doesn’t just refer to creating an aesthetically pleasing website, although that is important. It also encompasses elements such as clutter, white space, placement, and eye tracking.

Each element on the page should be placed purposefully in order to increase online sales with conversion optimization.

Avoid cluttering your pages with too many images and keep enough white space between elements so they don’t appear crowded.

Also, place important elements such as your call to action in the typical line of sight, which begins at the upper left corner and progresses down to the lower right.

Of course, seeking to increase online sales with conversion optimization will require you to dig much more deeply into each of these areas, but remember that your overall goal is to remove obstacles from the path of the user so that he’ll remain on the road until he reaches the ultimate destination: conversion.