Basic SEO Concepts: Conversion rate
If you have a website you are going to want to pay attention to your conversion rate. One of the most difficult things to do is to get more visitors to your site so you are going to want to make sure that you make the most of the ones that you do get. It is actually easier to get more of the people who visit your site to buy than it is to get more people to your site.
The conversion rate for your website is the percentage of people who visit your site that do what you want them to. This could be people who buy your product or sign up for your mailing list or anything else that you are trying to accomplish with your site. Obviously what constitutes a good conversion rate will depend on what you are trying to do, it is a lot easier to get people to sign up for a mailing list than to buy a thousand dollar product after all. You will need to determine what an acceptable conversion rate is for your site. If it is not as good as you expect it to be there are basically two reasons that you will have to consider.
The first reason that your conversion rate may not be what you were hoping for is that you are not getting the right visitors to your site. Obviously your conversion rate will be much higher if the people who are coming to your site are interested in buying the product that you are selling. This relies on proper search engine optimization; you have to make sure that you are targeting the right keywords.
The other reason that your conversion rate may not be what you expected is that your site is not well designed or that the sales copy is not good. A good webdesign is vital for a good conversion rate! If your site is not well designed it may not be clear to your visitors how to buy your product when they get to your site, if this happens they will just go to another site. If you have weak sales copy they will not have any reason to buy from you and they will likely go looking to see who else is selling a similar product, or they may simply decide not to buy altogether.
No matter what your conversion rate is there is always room for improvement. The key thing is to constantly track your conversion rate as you change things. When you do make changes only make one at a time. If you change your copy for example make sure that you continue to target the same keywords and the layout of your site remains the same. This way if your conversion rate changes you will know what caused it. One of the great things about selling online is that it is easy to make changes so there is no reason not to experiment so that you can get the best possible conversion rate.