Website Success

There’s a lot of hype about hits these days, but let’s face it: A successful website isn’t just about how many visitors, or hits, you can attract. It’s about sales. If you get 10,000 visitors a month, but only 1 sale, what good were the other 9,999? On the other hand, if you get only 1,000 visitors a month, but 20 of them buy..well, you get the point. A successful website is about conversions and for that you need qualified leads.

A successful internet marketing plan will focus on directing qualified leads to your website that will convert to sales and increase your conversion rate. Your conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors that purchase your product or service. Taking the above examples, if you had 10,000 visitors, but only 1 sale, your conversion rate would be 1/10,000, or .01%. That’s pretty lousy. If you had 1,000 visitors a month, and 20 sales, your conversion rate would be 20/1,000, or 2%. That’s much more respectable.

What’s a good conversion rate? Depending on your industry, a good conversion rate will typically range from 2% to 5%.

How do you increase conversion rate? There are two parts to any sale, or conversion.

1. Attract qualified leads. If you’re attracting people who are already interested in your product or service, then half the work of the sale is done before your visitors arrival.

2. Complete the sale. The second part of the sale happens on your website. Do you have the right graphics, verbiage and usability functions to convince your visitor to complete the sale?

Tip #1. Target the right search phrases. What will people be typing into search engines to find your product or service? You want to come up on the first page in search engine results, but for what search phrases? It’s almost always a bad decision to focus all of your efforts on the broadest search terms you want targeted search terms for targeted leads.

For example, just because you sell Dalmatians, doesn’t mean you should focus all of your efforts on coming up on the first page of search engine results for the term dogs. Think about all the things people could be looking for when they type in such a broad search term: information for a school paper, a dog lovers blog, images of dogs for a business brochure. But what about if you came up for the search term Dalmatian puppies in Houston? Wouldn’t that bring you more targeted leads that are halfway ready to be converted to sales?

Tip #2. Pay attention to your descriptions and titles. You can think of the description and title that show up in search engine results as a little mini-ad. It needs to accurately describe what the visitor will get when he or she clicks through to your website, or your potential sale could get discouraged and turn away.

So remember, next time you’re looking at your website hit counter: There’s another number you should be paying attention to. How many sales did you bring in this month, and what does that say about your websites ability to turn hits into cash?