A Guide On How To Improve Your Website’s Conversion Rate

Chloe Humphreys April 28, 2023

Many people focus on driving traffic to their website through a range of different channels, which is important. However, for the majority of businesses, if those users aren’t converting to become customers, then it’s a big issue.

So, in this blog, we’re discussing how to improve your website’s conversion rate.Conversion rates are a percentage that shows how many of the users coming to your website complete a desired action or ‘convert’ into a customer or enquiry, whether that’s by making a purchase, filling out a contact form or completing another goal. 

To give you an idea, the average conversion rate for an ecommerce website is between 2% and 4%, and lead generation websites are around 4%, however this can vary quite significantly depending on the nature of the business. For example, a luxury watch business is likely to have a much lower conversion rate, whereas an affordable homeware store will probably see a higher conversion rate. 

Below we’re going to talk about how you can improve your website’s conversion rate, with examples for both ecommerce and lead generation websites. Some of these suggestions can be achieved by downloading simple apps, whereas others require more investment. Either way, we’re sure you’ll find something that you can implement to suit your website, business and budget. 

10 Ways To Improve Your Website’s Conversion Rate

Make Sure You’re Targeting Qualified Users

The first thing you can do to improve your website’s conversion rate is to make sure that the traffic coming to your website is qualified. By qualified, we mean users who are likely to find what they’re looking for on your website and then go on to convert. This may sound

obvious, but it can be easier said than done and it’s often surprising how many people don’t get it right. More qualified traffic is certainly achievable with the right strategies in place. We’re going to focus on search here!

In terms of search marketing, PPC and SEO, the best thing you can do to improve your website’s conversion rate is to select keywords that are as relevant to the service or products that you offer as possible. This might mean doing more extensive keyword research to find terms that are more qualified than you had previously been targeting, but the additional time spent is definitely worth it.

With more specific keywords, not only are they usually less competitive to rank for, but are also very likely to receive more conversions. 

Offer As Many Conversion Options As Possible

Every user is different, and so are their browsing and shopping habits, which is why offering as many conversion options as possible is key to help you improve your website’s conversion rate. 

For both lead gen and ecommerce, it’s good to offer live chat options whether it’s a chat bot or a direct conversation with one of your team through a chat or Whatsapp integration. This is how many users want to engage and will therefore feel more connected to a brand. This can be done by downloading an app or plugin to your CMS, with so many different options depending on the nature of your business. 

Lead Gen Conversion Options

For a lead generation website specifically, offering as many conversion options as possible would involve providing a wide range of opportunities for people to get in touch with your team. You will likely have a main contact form that is accessible through the mega menu, as well as call to action buttons throughout service pages and potentially also a full form at the bottom of each page. By providing choices to suit a wide range of users, you should improve your website’s conversion rate. There are a range of plugin options available depending on your CMS, and many of them offer a variety of different features with increasingly sophisticated analytics options that allow you to analyse the visitors to your site in further detail. Some platforms even allow you to see where users are visiting from and even their contact email and company, so you can tailor your interactions with prospective customers whilst they’re on your website and make your conversation more relevant to them.

Ecommerce Conversion Options

For ecommerce specifically, one of the best things you can do to improve your website’s conversion rate is to offer as many conversion options as possible. Once someone has their cart filled and is ready to checkout, you want to make the process as easy as possible for them. So, offer as many payment options as you can, including Klarna, ClearPay, ShopApp, Apple Pay, standard credit card payments and anything else that is relevant. There is no harm in offering this wide variety of options, especially as many modern consumers will look elsewhere if their preferred payment method isn’t available. In addition to this, you may also want to consider auto-filling some for fields for users, and enabling features that allow them to set the same billing and delivery address with a tick rather than having to fill information out multiple times. You’d be surprised at just how much this change can improve your website’s conversion rate. 

Shorten Forms / Checkout Process

Whilst we’re on the topic of checkouts, something else you should do to improve your website’s conversion rate is to shorten your contact forms or checkout process as much as possible. 

Reduce Number of Form Fields

If you’re prompting your users to fill out a contact form, you need to keep it as minimal as possible. For every additional form field you include, users will become less likely to fill it out. For example, Dan Zarrella at HubSpot found that based on his analysis of 40,000 contact forms, conversion rates can improve by almost 50% when the number of fields is reduced from four to three! 

So, if just including name, email, phone number and perhaps one more field is possible, keep it to that. An easy way of doing this is to combine fields together where possible, for example having a single box for ‘name’ rather than two for ‘name’ and then ‘surname’. Another option would be to make some fields optional, but still keeping the form overall as short as you can. Give this a go and you’ll see just how much it can improve your website’s conversion rate.

Simplify Your Checkout Process

For websites with a checkout process, again, keep it as brief as possible. Reduce the amount of clicks it takes for a person to find a product, add it to their cart, go to checkout and complete their purchase, then you should see really positive improvements in terms of a reduction in abandoned carts. In turn, this will improve your website’s conversion rate!

Add Testimonials

Having testimonials from your customers on your website can be extremely valuable for your business, and specifically, to improve your website’s conversion rate. They clearly display positive experiences of customers you have worked with or sold to before, as well as providing a different perspective of what you offer which could provide just what the user is looking for to commit to the purchase or inquiry. 

There are plenty of different ways to add testimonials to your website to improve your website’s conversion rate. The more simple option is to manually add them to your website, which is advised if you currently only have a few testimonials and are working to build them up. For businesses who have a good amount of reviews, you can download apps to your CMS (content management system, i.e. Shopify or WordPress) that will manually pull reviews from popular review websites, such as adding a Trust Pilot widget. This has its benefits, as people will immediately recognise the trusted company and know that the reviews are legitimate. 

Testimonials are increasingly powerful, helping to instil trust as potential customers can read the experiences of people like them, as opposed to just reading information from the business itself. In such a saturated online space, highlighting how happy your customers are could help to push you in front of the competition and to improve your website’s conversion rate. 

Final Thoughts On How To Improve Your Website’s Conversion Rate

There are plenty more things that you can do to improve your website’s conversion rate, however implementing as many of the tips above as possible will be a positive way to start. 

We offer Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) at Red Cow Media, where we can identify the current barriers on your website that could be preventing users from converting, which we do through a range of techniques such as heat mapping, user testing and also a full competitor analysis to identify further opportunities to improve your website. 

We can then offer a full report with very clear action points that can be implemented to improve your website’s conversion rate. From here, either we can implement the action points or we can arrange a meeting with the relevant teams within your business to go into more detail about our findings. 

To get started, contact us today to speak to a member of our team about how CRO could benefit your business!