You know your website isn’t doing it’s job, so the issue you’ve got is where should you focus your efforts in order to make the biggest potential gains. Leaving aside for the moment the need to test and measure, there are four key areas where small changes can result in significant gains in your conversion ratio.

Let’s make some qualify statements right at the start:

  • You will never really know about what drives any result on your website without testing and measuring. Anything other than that is both guesswork and speculation;
  • Not all sites are the same, a lead generation site is different to an e-commerce site and therefore where to place the emphasis will be different.

Although there are a good number of elements that could be tested with the objective of optimising the conversion rate, there are four page elements that are easy to focus upon and potentially drive the biggest conversion rate change. These are:

  1. Headline copy: This is the first thing people see when arriving at your page. Does this headline have what it takes to create forward momentum in the mind of the visitor?
  2. Body copy: Does the body copy answer the objections in the mind of your visitor? Body copy length has become an issue upon which many people have become hung up on. The rule of thumb you should go by is that it should be as long as required to answer the questions in the mind of your prospect.
  3. Images: Images need to be appropriate and support the body copy. They need to be relevant and appealing to your channel you are targetting.
  4. Forms: Forms are a fact of life on a website, whether you are trying to generate leads or sales. The form layout must relevant to its function. The information you seek to gather must be relevant, not in your eyes, but in the eyes of the prospect.

your target market

The astute among you would have picked up on a few words – “relevant”, “channel”, even the word “prospect”. Online conversion can only take place if you have carefully matched the right channel with the right offer. A common error is to think that generic web pages are always going to be appropriate to drive to0. This is too often seen in the case of pay-per-click marketing, where marketers have the unique advantage of being able to drive specific traffic to a unique webpage. Such an approach provides to ability to create greater relevancy abd therefore higher conversions.