Many business website owners become so involved with trying to drive more traffic to their site, that they overlook the point of having more Internet users visit their website in the first place, which is to convert those prospects into sales. There are a number of design features you can incorporate into your website which will contribute to lowering your bounce rate and boosting your number of conversions.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) should always be one of the driving factors in the mind of every business person because unless that traffic is converted into a sale, there really isn’t much point to having increased Internet traffic. Here are some of the things you can do to reduce your bounce rate and increase your conversion rate.
Make sure your site is secure
By implementing secure socket layer technology, you can make all transactions between your site and Internet users completely safe from hackers. Because SSL encrypts the link between a user’s browser and your landing page, all data passing between those two points becomes unreadable and therefore useless to the criminal-minded person. Security is quickly becoming a major factor for Internet users, with at least 50% of all Internet users checking a site’s security certification before continuing on with a transaction, and supplying any kind of personal details.
Create an engaging call to action
Statistics show that more than 90% of all Internet users who read a headline, will also read your call to action (CTA). That makes it critical for you to provide an interesting CTA, so that all your site visitors, or least as many as possible, can become legitimate leads and prospects. One thing to avoid when composing your CTA is the usage of the word ‘Submit’, which has been demonstrated to turn off most Internet users and scare them away.
Optimize load speed
If pages on your website take more than three seconds to load, chances are you’re going to lose a huge part of your audience. It is known that as many as 40% or more of all users visiting a specific website will abandon it when they encounter pages which take longer than three seconds to load. There are some things you can do to cut down on your loading speed, for instance, to use smaller images or to compress your images. You can also use a content delivery network (CDN) to increase the load speed of your pages.
Use clear headings
One of the best things you can do to improve the readability of content on your website is to use clear headings and subheadings. Discrete paragraphs of information should have subheadings which are printed in bold type to provide the user with a cue about paragraph content. This will help users decide whether or not to continue reading through the text, and it caters to the natural tendency of most users to be lazy when reading and to have important content spoon-fed to them. As user interface factors go, this is one of the most important ones.
Track all activity on your website
A majority of B2B marketers claim that the biggest obstacle they have to increase their lead generation is a shortage of high-quality data. With more useful information at their disposal, marketers would be able to craft better campaigns which target audience needs and desires. As a bare minimum, you should have a good system of analytics in place, so that you can evaluate user behaviors on your website. You should also have conversion tracking in place so that together these two systems can be used to improve on campaigns of the past and make them more focused on the target audience’s actual behaviors.
Watch out for embedded videos
Adding videos to your website content is one of the best tactics you can use for user engagement, but if you are embedding those videos from YouTube or another source, you have to be careful about a couple of things. At the end of most YouTube videos, for instance, there is a brief message which alerts the user to the fact that there are related videos below. Unless you are a very generous business owner indeed, you probably won’t want your visitors watching videos from some other company, or even worse, a competitor.
Obtain third-party validation
One of the ways that establish the trust for users with regard to your website is to have it validated by another party. This means you should encourage backlinks from other reputable sites, and you should strive to create a credential bar which shows that other companies have found your business or its products to have great value to them. B2B companies in general, love to be doing business with other companies which are considered a safe bet to them, so establishing your credibility and your trustworthiness is crucial to securing more business.
Keep your content short and sweet
When you’re composing content for your website, avoid as much as possible the overloading of sentences, even if you have vital information to convey. This is especially true in your opening paragraph, which is where users will normally go first to find what they’re looking for. Supply the most important information in short, compact sentences which make it easy for users to pick out vital facts. Studies have shown that users can grasp the main idea of any paragraph by consuming a mere 14 words, so anything else you include in your text is basically unnecessary.
Feature your good reviews
Studies have made it crystal clear that most users are positively influenced by good reviews about a business and its products or services. In fact, as many as 90% of all buying decisions take into account online reviews which the user has read. This is because the majority of users will trust the opinions and accounts of other users like themselves who have already gone through an experience with your company, as opposed to listening to anything you tell them about yourself. If you have bad reviews, use them to your advantage and fix whatever needs tweaking about your business, and if you have good reviews, make sure to place them in a position on your website where they are easily found and easily read.
