Is your website generating you new business? Is your website ranking high in search engines?

If you’ve been through a website design project for your business, whether you did it yourself or employed an agency, you’ll know it is a time consuming and demanding affair. For those that had a website built that hasn’t so far performed as required or expected, we understand that you’re probably quite hesitant to go through it all again.

Fortunately before you commit to a complete redesign of your website, there are a number of things you can do to attempt to improve your conversions and still stop short of overhauling everything. Work through the following areas to understand the small tweaks you can make to improve the marketing efficacy of your business website:

Analysis

If you don’t have any analytics software installed on your website, get this integrated asap. If you need a hand, here’s a useful guide.

If you do have access to Google Analytics then you are sitting on a treasure trove of useful data to analyse where you can improve your website. First of all, you’ll want to find the most important metrics – time on page and your bounce rate. The first metric is fairly self explanatory however bounce rate is the number of people that visit your website and leave again without interacting further divided by the total number of website users.

The overall bounce rate can be found at the top of the screen (when using Google Analytics) but what we’re really interested in is the bounce rate of each of your individual website pages. These can be found in Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages.

With this detailed breakdown of your website pages you can identify which need special attention. Typically the pages that have a high bounce rate and lower time spent on page are the ones you need to spend time remedying. Your users may find it difficult to navigate these pages, find the visual content uninspiring and/or have trouble engaging with your written content.

Adjusting your written content

As a small business, you want to scream and shout about what you do or sell and over time you’ve probably got quite good at it. Where most fall down however is that we tend to talk about what we do rather than why somebody should care.

When many businesses describe what they do, they forget who they are speaking to and website copy becomes aimed at their competitors rather than their target audience. Rather than describing your products or services, your written content should all be centred around how your offering will benefit the user.

We’re selfish beings on the internet and communicating the why rather than the what improves engagement and ultimately sales. For instance, if you were a search engine optimisation agency, your content might change from (Full of jargon and written to impress my competitors rather than my audience):

“After analysing your technical, on-page and off-page elements, we use a combination of core strategy and optimisation of all search engine ranking factors.”

To (Removing all of the technical language and framing the content to promote value):

“We optimise your website and digital presence to increase your rankings in search engines. This leads to more traffic and more sales.”

Spend a moment to read your website content and see whether there is potential to rewrite key sections to promote the value of your products or services.

Your images

Like many businesses, you may have used stock images when you first made your website in the hopes of replacing these at a later date when you had more time. Again, like many businesses, you probably never got round to doing that.

Internet users can spot a stock photo from a mile off and many find them off putting (whether they realise it or not!). Besides, it’s a much more personal and engaging experience if you utilise images of you and your business rather than faceless stock photos of business people in suits shaking hands.

If you are the face of your brand or you are a freelancer, this becomes doubly important. In these instances you are your business and it works wonders if you are able to generate a connection before a potential client gets in touch. The best way to do this is to fill your website with original images of you.

Go through your website and find the images that you are able to replace with those of your business and team. You’d be surprised how well good website imagery can increase your conversions.

Add live chat

Even if you have the most compelling text and images, sometimes this is not enough to persuade a potential customer to get in touch. Every action we take on a website adds a small level of fatigue and once your visitor gets to the point of deciding whether to get in touch, opening their email or filling out your contact form is just too much of a hurdle. We’re conscious of how ridiculous this may sound, but quite often a website user is interested in your products or sales but for what ever reason doesn’t decide to get in touch.

This is where live chat comes in really helpful. It’s much less onerous to open a chat window and type a question than it is to get in touch via phone, email or contact form. The simple action of integrating live chat functionality does wonders to website conversions for this reason.

By simply enabling a live chat service to your website will not fail to increase your website enquiries. The best bit is there are many live chat providers available that are completely free.

Split testing

If you’ve gone through this guide and followed the steps but still do not understand why you aren’t generating more enquiries, it might be time for a little testing. A/B or split testing is a technique that allows you to compare two versions of the same web page against each other, so you can determine which one performs better and produces better results.

This might sound quite technical however the good news is that there are a number of WordPress plugins available that allow you to do this.

Split testing works best when you only tweak a small element of a web page, such as a title, paragraph or images. You should start small and look at altering your main call to action titles or page titles. Once you’ve analysed which performs better (in that the alteration drives more website interactions or enquiries), move on to your marketing copy or images.

Following a methodical approach you can very effectively understand what is resonating with your audience and what isn’t. If you have the resources to apply this to every one of the pages that are not performing well you can easily improve your overall lead generation and sales.

Final thoughts

This post was a guest piece by Liam Pedley. We recommend Liam as a web designer that we’ve come across that can help you with anything to do with websites or digital marketing.