Design your website for conversions

By in Building an Audience, August 22nd, 2018

Creating a good website layout and design is crucial to keeping visitors on your website and in doing so making them aware of the product or services you offer.  And by keeping people on your website for longer, you can potentially convert more visitors into online conversions. Whether you’re designing a website from scratch or even re-designing your website, you need to consider the layout, colours, fonts and the User Experience (UX), which covers how a visitor is going to interact with your website and the ease of discovering what you have to offer. The main point in designing your site effectively is to  and convince them to buy it in a clear and concise way.

When designing your website, you should not expect the end user to be able to find everything that you want to share with them all at once, on the other end of the scale, you don’t want your content hidden so deep in your website that it becomes difficult for them to find. If you are driving traffic to your website you usually have a goal, whether that be to get someone to join your mailing list, purchase a product, click on a advertisement or to get in contact. Whatever your goal is for your website you should track your conversion rate to measure how effective your website is at converting visitors.

What are conversion rates?
Conversion rates are a way to measure the frequency of visitors to your website that buy or inquire directly from your website. Conversion rates are usually represented by a percentage, composed of the number of people that converted on your website divided by the number of visitors to your site. For example if you had 12 people buy a product on your website from 100 visitors, your conversion rate would be 12/100 or 12%.

The conversion rate for a website is essentially the lifeblood for a business because it helps you determine specifics about your business on many levels . Determining percentages of buyers who end up making purchases is essential for any business. Websites make a mistake when they just rely on stats in terms of total visitors.  Yes, getting traffic is the start, but the real key is turning those website visitors into customers and this is where conversion rates help a business immensely.

What are high and low conversion rates
Conversion rates vary by industry and what the conversion metric being tracked is, however the average landing page converts about 2-3% of visitors. If you have an eCommerce website the lower end of the scale would be a 1% conversion, through to top pages getting up to 8% conversion, compare this some of the top business to business pages that convert up to 25% of visitors.

However your conversion rate does depend on the design as much as it does depend on your audience, so there are ways to test different landing pages at the same time by splitting your traffic across multiple variations of your landing page. This will help you determine if one page is performing better than another and maybe a simple wording change or layout change can make a page perform 5 times better than another page, even though it appears very similar to you.

This type of conversion testing is referred to as A/B testing and it allows you to test variants against each other, whilst still having the same traffic delivered to your website. By making small changes and tracking the effectiveness of those changes, you will be able to find the best variation for conversions for your website. At all times you should be aiming to improve on your previous conversion rates and once your website is providing a conversion rate higher than your target rate, lets aim for 10% it may be time to drive traffic.

What to do if when you have a high conversion rates
Your market is the whole world of internet users (or just Australia if you want) and your website is the best way you can reach your target audience around the world with the least possible expense. If you know your website has been designed in a way to successfully lead people to your conversion and that conversion is being successfully, you can consider growing your audience, either organically or by paid advertising, which should bring you more conversions as long as you can find the right audience.

A good website is very critical nowadays because it is the effective way to communicate and interact with your customers. If you are not good at designing websites, which a lot of us aren’t, you can still work with web design experts (like our team) to do this for you. It might cost you some money, but you will get more than what you paid for if you are able to convert more visitors.

The end goal of conversion optimisation
Your ultimate goal needs to be not only higher conversions, but ultimately higher quality conversions. The best landing page optimisations, the ones that will shoot your conversion rates into the top 10% realm, will help you not only convert more, but build a better business and allow you to spend more money on growing your business.

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About the Author

Josh Tucker

Josh Tucker

I am a software engineer and digital engagement strategist, focusing on automation and boutique builds for clients that no longer need off the shelf solutions. Having spent more than 15 years developing numerous websites/platforms, integrations and audiences for a range of clients in the local and international markets, I can combine development skills with extensive digital marketing and engagement experience, providing an overall digital strategy that can be executed efficiently and cost effectively.
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