How to Increase the Sales Conversion Rate of My Website?

Getting a decent amount of traffic to your website is the name of the game. 

You have to get as many qualified customers to your website as possible to have any chance of making sales.

To get your website ranking on Google for your main core keywords is the end game. But wait, there’s more. Great website rankings are only 50% of the challenge; the other 50% happens when they land on your website. Do they arrive on your page and make an inquiry or leave your website without making a sale or inquiry

If you find that you are ranking well, but the phones are not ringing, something is wrong, and you need to take action ASAP. After all, you’ve put all the hard work and effort into getting decent Google rankings; now, you need to convert these site visitors into paying customers. 

Known as conversion rate optimisation, you must keep people excited and engaged once they land on your website. Moz describes conversion rate optimisation (CRO) as the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take the desired action — filling out a form, becoming customers, or otherwise.

As a business owner, you always have to be looking for ways to improve your CRO rates. If you start to let them slide, you’ll soon see what happens. It’s a disaster. People will not engage with the site and start shopping or buying from your competition.

In this blog, I will highlight a few simple ways to help you improve your websites conversion rates and get more sales leads, inquiries and revenue.

What Is a Good Conversion Rate?

Many people ask this question, and it’s not as cut and dry as you’d think. Conversion rates vary between industries and competitive keywords, so we can not give specifics on this. Crazy Egg tells us that your conversion rate represents the percentage of website visitors who take action on an offer you present to them. It’s a way to track the effectiveness of your messaging and the product behind the message.

Obviously, if you’re an eCommerce business, you want to get conversion rates as high as possible. CRO Experts tell us that having a conversion rate of between 5-10% is a decent figure. Anything higher and then you’re getting into some serious conversions. You can add PPC or Adwords into the mix here, and you would like to have the maximum CRO rates as each click on Google ends up costing you money.

Conversion Rate Optimisation Tips

A quick search for “conversion rate optimisation tips“, and you will find plenty of information online. But before you go ahead and rush into making any changes to your website to improve CRO rates, you first have to know your web goals and understand your audience. Once you know what you want to achieve and what your audience wants, you can then go about the necessary web changes to improve conversion rates.

The best strategy for a business that sells directly to another company could mean a lifelong client worth many thousands of dollars or an eCommerce store where the average sale is $15 to follow these conversion boosting tips.

Write Killer Headlines

Headlines attract the eye and are the most crucial part of your landing pages—the more attention-grabbing the headline, the more chances of consumer engagement and interaction with the site. If they like the headline, then they will read further. If what they initially read is garbage, expect them to exit the page.

David Ogilvy explains that many people read the headline five times as read the body copy on average. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.

If you think about that statistic, you’ll come to appreciate how strong your headline is for each page of your website. If you get stuck writing headlines or don’t have the experience, I suggest getting an SEO copywriter to help you with this.

How can you write killer headlines?

  • You have to understand your audience and write headlines that will immediately appeal to them.
  • What’s your unique selling point? Do you know it? Well, you should, and it must be included in your headline. Ulrika from Sparrow Loans has done this on the website’s home page by highlighting that their loans help businesses within 48 hours. It’s those types of headlines that catch the readers eye very quickly.
  • Use words in an offer that solve a person inquiry, such as; ‘Do you want?” ‘Learn How To’ or’ Did You Know?’
  • Test and retest again. There’s no harm in doing this and seeing what works and what doesn’t. For example, I will change the headline 4 or 5 times before I’m satisfied with it and check bounce rates in my Analytics account frequently to see if the heading change has had any impact.

Reduce Complicated Forms

Just imagine you want to sign up for a cooking class, but you had to fill in a 3-page form before you could. Or, perhaps you want to buy a new iPhone online, but you needed to sign up to create an account without having a guest option? 

Extensive sign-up forms are a massive roadblock to the check out process and are a massive contributor to reducing conversion rates. Consumers and your customers want to get into your site, make the inquiry or buy the product as quickly as possible. Forms complicate the process and make it a hassle. If you want to improve website conversion rates, get rid of clunky, lengthy forms.

Remember, people don’t want to give you all their personal information; they want to buy without handing over all their details. Search Engine Journal puts it nicely when they tell us Don’t ask someone for their credit card number, social security, grandmother’s pension, and children’s names right off the bat – your user doesn’t trust you yet.

Hopping Mad Designs Tip: if you have to have forms keep it to a maximum of 3 to 4 fields only.

Add Live Chat

Adding a live chat feature is now super-common and at the bottom of most websites. If you were not sure about a product or service and are still sitting on the fence, then the ability to talk to a customer service rep online immediately is a great way to sway them over. Plus, it adds a level of trust where you know that there is an actual person at the end of the chat feature responding to your questions.

Include Reviews

Did you know that 70% of people will leave a positive review when asked by the business, according to Search Engine Land? Always and I mean always, ask your customers to leave a Google Review when you can. Obviously, the experience needs to be positive, just like the guys at Bali Villa Escapes do. They rely heavily on TrustPilot for their reviews, and it works really well for them. Consumers like social proof and will respond favourably to your product or service if they can browse the reviews. 95% of shoppers read the reviews posted on business review sites such as Yelp, Google, Facebook, and TripAdvisor before making a purchase.

So, the take-away here is to get as many reviews as possible as this will increase your websites trust factor and inturn your conversion rates.

Place Call To Action Buttons Strategically

Your websites primary goal is to send clear messages to your customers. You must be able to guide them to certain hot buttons or a clear call to action throughout your website. Do you want them to call you? Then place a prominent phone number at the top of the page. If you want them to submit an inquiry form, create large submit inquiry form buttons on these pages. The trick here is to make it super simple for customers to contact you or sign up for your quarterly newsletter. Whatever your intention is, make it loud, clear and very simple to find.

WordStream highlights some common examples of call-to-action buttons are:

  • Add to cart buttons
  • Free trial sign-up buttons
  • Download buttons
  • Try Our Free Trial
  • Reserve Your Seat
  • Download Whitepaper

Perhaps create a sense of urgency as well with your CTA buttons such as:

  • Sign Up and Get 50% Off Today Only!
  • Download the E-Course for $10!

Even just adding “now” builds a subtly sense of urgency for users:

  • Register For The Ultimate PPC Webinar Now!

Do You Need Help Improving Your Websites Conversion Rate?

As we’ve mentioned above, there are loads of other conversion tips that would radically help improve your website’s conversion rates, but I’ve kept them to a minimum for the sake of this article. Conversion rates are not a set and forget proposition. You have to keep testing, refining and improving your website’s performance, and over time, you will see significant improvements in your customer conversions. 

Most businesses, unfortunately, do not fully understand or grasp the power of CRO and its benefits, but those that do will be seeing vast improvements in sales and inquiries – it’s as simple as that. 

If you need a web design team to help you boost your conversion rate, you should get in touch with Hopping Mad Designs.

Contact us now, and we’ll review your conversion rates and see what we can do to help you get more sales.

Website Structure & SEO Rankings: 6 tips to get it right

Getting your website structure correct is the first step in the on-page SEO process. It’s one of the most critical components.

Get it wrong, and your chances of better SEO rankings are limited. Do it properly, and you’ll see results quickly because you can’t have great SEO rankings without a good web structure.

If you want to see your website at the top of the search engines, you have to plan your website structure which your web design agency must do. Thinking that you need to design a website and presto you rank is the wrong approach. It just doesn’t happen like that. And, with the explosion of DIY websites like Wix, websites have little or no planning and are therefore hampered in the rankings from the day they launch. It’s a real shame because many business owners have a great idea, product or service they want to rank on Google, yet they stumble and fall at this critical stage in the design process. When designing a website to avoid a catastrophe, you need to consider other factors when designing a website, but most reputable web agencies will emphasise the structure.They fail to plan a well laid out, user-friendly website where both users and the search engines quickly find the content, which is the key to having the best site structure possible.In this detailed post, I’ll tell you some of the tricks we use to create a squeaky clean website structure that will boost your SEO rankings.Why is Your Website Structure Important?There are two main reasons why the website structure is so crucial for the future of your marketing. Firstly it gives customers a better experience which means higher conversion rates and consumer engagement; critical for eCommerce sites. And secondly, it allows the search engines to index the site easily. If any hurdles or obstacles prevent the search engines from crawling your site, this will affect future SEO rankings as pages will not be indexed. Ease of use and a straightforward navigation structure is of paramount importance here.Enhance the user experience (UX) by having the best website structure.Smashing Magazine puts it nicely when defining user experience as to how a person feels when interfacing with a system. The system could be a website, a web application or desktop software.Simply put, it’s the reaction a person has when they land on your website. Do they like it and engage with the site, looking around and perhaps even buy something, or do they leave it quickly? If they exit because of the bad user experience, maybe it’s slow to load or can’t find what they are looking for, then it’s an issue. High exit numbers, also known as bounce rates, can impact your SEO rankings dramatically. Google places a lot of weight on consumer behaviour on your site, and if their ranking algorithm can detect high bounce rates, they will penalise your site.I’m not saying that your penalty will be a complete site deindex, but you can expect less than decent rankings with high bounce rates. Alternatively, the good news is that if your bounce rates are low and Google can detect a high level of consumer engagement on your website, then your rankings will improve.You can see here the direct correlation between the user experience and SEO rankings. And a massive part of the UX is the site structure, so make sure you get it correct from the get-go!

Good Site Structures Leads to Better Crawling by Google

You want Google’s web spides to be able to crawl and index your site easily. What makes this possible is a perfect site structure and URL formatting.Let me break this down for you as it’s super simple.The main navigation headings ( the buttons at the top of the page ) should be your primary services or products. Such as the following pages:

  • Home
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Services / Products
  • FAQ’s
  • Why Choose us

These are your bread and butter navigation points you’ll find on most websites.The URL primary categories would be: 

  • Home = www.xyzcompany.com.au
  • About Us = www.xyzcompany.com.au/about-us
  • Contact Us = www.xyzcompany.com.au/contact-us
  • Services / Products = www.xyzcompany.com.au/products
  • FAQ’s = www.xyzcompany.com.au/FAQ’s
  • Why Choose us = www.xyzcompany.com.au/why-choose-us

You can see how clean the site structure is as well as the URLs. People can easily see what the pages are about through the URL and the page name. It gets a little bit more complicated as we go through to the services or product pages. Here, the subcategory URL structure will be:Products = www.xyzcompany.com.au/products/red-shoesorServices = www.xyzcompany.com.au/servcies/blocked-drain-cleaningHaving a web structure like the above makes it crystal clear to both Google and your customers of the page’s intent which is the best site structure possible.So how do you create the best site structure for your audience and the search engines? Following is a step-by-step guide that will have you in Googles good books and will keep your clients happy and coming back for repeat visits at the same time.

Dummies guide for creating Site Structure

1) Plan ahead

Plan the site of your website structure. You have to sit down with your web designers and go over this at the briefing stage. They will help plan this out in their scoping documents, but this is a simple process for most small businesses, as you can see from the URL and site layout above. For larger web projects and eCommerce sites, you will need a more detailed site structure, but so long as your design team follows a rigid framework and methodology, it should be easy. The site logic is the same, except it’s just more significant with more headings, products and services. Design agencies will produce a set of wireframes before they even start designing, which will detail the site structure in advance. At this stage, you can see how each web page interacts with each other and the sites layout. If you can understand it and it seems logical with a seamless flow, this is the ideal layout. The trick here is to make the site logical. You don’t want your customers to get lost on the site or make it overly complex with too many navigation points. Use the KISS principle; nice and simple, and it will work; even if your business has many products or services, you need to keep them in hierarchical order under the main headings, which keeps the site nice and tidy.Hopping Mad Designs Tip: Do not exceed six primary categories as this start to become a little confusing to the user, and try to keep the subcategories consistent. For example, if one category has seven products or services and the other four, this may seem uneven. Keep them balanced if possible.

2) Develop a URL Structure that Matches with Your Navigation

For the perfect site structure, your URL’s have to match the navigation. I detailed this above, but I need to emphasise this point as critical for your SEO rankings. In addition to the above, if you are looking at targeting a local area such as Manly or Bondi to reach customers, you would add a locations main navigation page and have as the subcategories the separate suburbs such as:www.xyzcompany.com.au/locations/plumbers-bondiorwww.xyzcompany.com.au/locations/plumbers-manlyRemember, each page would have to have content unique and specific to that area, as you never want to duplicate content or web pages.

3) Create Your Site with a WordPress Content Management System ( CMS )

We love WordPress as a CMS and use it for all our websites. WordPress websites allow developers to create a world-class hierarchical structure and customise URL’s. For SEO purposes and user experience, you could not ask for a better solution. The dashboard where you can control the sites structure and URL’s are straightforward and easy to understand, but your web team will set this up for you in the first place. Hopping Mad Designs Tip: There are many other CMS platforms, but WordPress dominates the CMS landscape for so many reasons. When choosing your web design agency, make sure you go with the agency that builds sites using WordPress. Avoid at all costs using their proprietary CMS platforms as there are hidden dangers.

4) Three-click rule

Wikipedia tells us that the three-click rule or three-click rule is an unofficial web design rule concerning website navigation design. It suggests that a website user should find any information with no more than three mouse clicks.The above makes perfect sense, especially when you are creating your site structure. Your customers should be able to find what they are searching for within three clicks. Any more, and you risk losing them. With the above exampleServices = www.xyzcompany.com.au/servcies/blocked-drain-cleaningYou can see that the user has been able to find the page about blocked drain cleaning in 2 clicks only. They went from services then to the blocked drains section. A third click would be more services related to blocked drains, such as:Services = www.xyzcompany.com.au/servcies/blocked-drain-cleaning/ commercialWhich would relate to the business showcasing their commercial block drain cleaning service. Any deeper navigation, as you can see, would start looking clunky and confusing.

5) Create a Main Heading Menu for your Primary Pages

The most efficient website structures will have their primary services and business information front and centre at the top of the page, making it easy for your customers to access the essential information quickly. I detailed the typical top-level navigation above, so try to stick to less than six headings. Anymore will look like you’re trying to cram too much information at the top, which may turn users off and become too distracting.Hopping Mad Designs Tip: Avoid animated menus as they add no SEO value. You might also like to have a small pop-up window as we do on this site when you hover over the navigation button explaining what the page is about in a bit more detail. You can see when you hover over the services tab, a small pop up window appears saying: graphic and web design services by hopping mad designs. It’s a bit gimmicky, but it’s just an added cool feature you might like to consider.inline_358_https://hoppingmad.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/pop-up-boxes-for-navigation-example-hopping-mad-designs.jpg

6) Create Internal Links

The last tip for creating the best website structure to help with your SEO rankings is to create internal links between pages. You can see that some of the links I have created for this article link to other pages within this site.Ahrefs tells us that most people don’t realise is that—when used strategically—internal links can significantly boost a site’s performance in search engines. Google even tells us that linking pages are an excellent way for your website to be reindexed and ranked.Reasons why internal linking is essential:i) Adding internal links will allow you to create a website hierarchy, drive more traffic through your entire website and encourage visitors to spend more time on your site, which helps reduce bounce rates. In turn, boost SEO rankings. ii) If you link from your home page to an internal subcategory, you pass page rank helping boost the value and trust of this page. But don’t overdo this, as it may appear spammy.iii) Helps users navigate to specific pages. Plus, you can drive people to where you want them to go. A great example of this is mentioning a particular service offering on a page and linking to that specific service page. If a person clicks on this link, they will be redirected to this page.

Conclusion

Now you’ve read this; you may feel like you’re ready to create your link structure. This article is not intended for that purpose, as you should leave it to a professional web team to map the structure out. I’ve written this article to educate you on the many nuances that can affect your SEO rankings; the structure is a biggie! Often it’s too overlooked by agencies who want to churn out a website and get paid. Attention to the site structure is a critical element in the success of your business which is why the team at Hopping mad Designs will make a clear site map outlining the structure for you.

 

What Is The Most Critical Aspect Of An eCommerce Web Design?

eCommerce web design is a highly competitive and complex field, and to be successful online, you have to follow specific critical points.

It’s simple enough to build an eCommerce site but to be competitive and make it successful, you must understand the critical components that make the best eCommerce websites.

The common thread that separates the memorable and extraordinary eCommerce sites from the rest of the pack is the user experience or UX.

This article, Hopping Mad Designs, will go over the user experience. What is the UX, why it’s essential, and ensure that your customer shaves the best user experience possible on your website?

The Most Critical Aspect Of An eCommerce Web Design Is The User Experience or UX.

Wikipedia defines the user experience as to how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system or service. And this includes your website.

If you want to build an eCommerce online store better than your competition and get as many sales as possible, then the user experience has to be seamless, easy to use, navigate and overall; world-class.

Let’s start by breaking down the UX for eCommerce stores.

To explain what a user experience is and why it’s important, let’s compare the standard eCommerce website to a brick-and-mortar store to give you a better idea of what the user experience means.

Whenever you walk into a shop or store, say in your local Westfield shopping centre, you will expect to see and get:

  • Eay access into the store without anything blocking your passage.
  • Clear signage and any specials of good for sale, you should be easily able to spot these.
  • Be able to speak to a salesperson who is friendly, knowledgable and honest.
  • Buy as many products as you want using your credit card and other payment methods.
  • The shop has to be clean, uncluttered and easy to walk around.
  • Be able to get your goods and exit the store. Oh, yes, and you want a decent parking spot!

If you have had any bad in-store experience, say you are shopping with a friend, and you have been treated rudely by a salesperson, or perhaps the store didn’t have friendly energy or was poorly designed. Chances are you not going to buy from it or revisit it. You might even go online and leave a negative Google review.

You can quickly draw a comparison between bricks and mortar retail shop and an eCommerce online website. They are essentially the same.

Customers online want to be able to see and do the following:

  • If they are a repeat customer, they want to know if there are any upcoming sales online via email.
  • They should navigate the site easily and find the products they are looking for with a minimum fuss. PayPal tells us that over 70% of online purchases are abandoned at the checkout stage, which is one of the biggest challenges to face any eCommerce website. 
  • Products should be less than 3 clicks away.
  • All products are labelled clearly with detailed descriptions as well as delivery and shipping information.
  • You should be able to pay online quickly using your credit card or other platforms like ZIP or AfterPay. 
  • The website must load quickly and render on all handheld devices.

All of the best eCommerce sites go above and beyond clients expectations by making the whole buying process a breeze. Most websites that go bust never fully understand these critical must-haves for the customer experience. Many eCommerce sites I see are free cheap templates that have absolutely no thought put into the UX and look dreadful. They may load fast and have a decent check shopping cart page, but they look amateurish, which doesn’t inspire trust with the customers. The conversion rates are shocking, and they generally go out of business within the first year or so.

What elements are part of the best eCommerce web design & UX?

Now you have a clearer idea about the whole online user experience and what online customer expectations, we can now look at the variables essential for the best eCommerce website. 

A design that works on every device

Statista tells us that in 2017, 75.8 per cent of the Australian population used a smartphone and will reach around 80.1 per cent by 2025.

Your customers are fully mobile, and to capture this market, you need to fully design your eCommerce website to cater to this mobile market. Failure to do this is one of the reasons why people will leave your website.  

Online users want fast, snappy information at their fingertips and websites that show even the slightest hassle in getting to the products area are a real cause for concern.

Website load times

Simply put, your website must load quickly. No one, and I repeat, no one is going to hang around waiting for your site to load. Website page speed is critical for the customer experience and will also affect your SEO rankings. Neil Patel, in his blog How to Increase Page Speed, 

explains that 47 per cent of consumers expect a website to load in no more than two seconds.

Any longer than a two-second load time will smash the user experience, and your next online purchaser may just hit that back button and exit the site.

Top-quality, detailed product descriptions

Shopping online is highly visual. Your customers can’t touch or feel the products that eliminate the whole tactile experience, which means they need to read the product description and view the images in detail. The only way they can decide to buy or not is if the description is tempting and the product shots are clear and high-quality.

Product categories are evident

People hate navigating through different pages to find the products they want to buy. There is a three-click rule determining the user experience, which tells us that customers should get to a product within 3 clicks. Any more, and they are likely to leave the site and shop elsewhere. When you are briefing your web developer, make sure they understand this before designing the wireframes.

Easy checkout process

BigCommerce tells us that shopping cart abandonment occurs when customers add items to their shopping cart but leave before purchasing. 

Most people will abandon their purchase during the check out stage if they have to create an account. Never ask your customers to do this. It’s a killer for conversion. And give your customers a wide variety of payment options and shipping options. 

Offer Free Shipping

People love the words free, and if you can offer some free shipping, scream this out and let them know about this on the home page and the checkout and product pages.  90% of consumers view free shipping as the top incentive that would encourage them to shop online more often, according to Ship Bob. Free shipping is a massive incentive for customers to buy from your site. Wherever possible, push the free-angle as customers enjoy freebies.

Include a search bar 

Searching for products on large eCommerce sites can be a hassle and frustrating, especially when you know what you want. Adding a search bar eliminates any search hurdles by allowing customers to find what they want in one click. Over 40% of customers go to the search bar in the first instance, so definitely include this.

Customer support

Adding a contact button with a phone number adds trust as customers know that they’ll contact a real person if there are any issues with the product or delivery. If your a small start-up without the resources, then include an email such as:

support@xyzcompany.com.au

Make sure you get back to every customer as happy customers tend to leave positive reviews on Google, which will further boost your websites trust factor and overall user experience.

Summing it up

There are many facets to the user experience. It’s not as simple as it looks, and for an effective eCommerce website, you shouldn’t take a DIY approach. I have seen far too many failures with sites that don’t cut the mustard. Investing in designing and building an eCommerce site with a significant focus on the user experience is worth every cent. Invest now if you have a long term strategy for your business and watch your client base and revenue grow.

Need Help With Your eCommerce Store? Contact Hopping Mad Designs

As specialists in web design and WordPress eCommerce stores, Hopping Mad Designs is here to help you create a more robust, hard selling and user-centric eCommerce website that works.

To start the conversation call us on 02 9360 8514.