5 ways to improve sales conversions on your website

1. Select calls to action
2. Position calls to action
3. Measure calls to action
4. Create a distinct competitive advantage
5. Repetition, repetition, repetition!

1. Select calls to Action

Sales are converted on your website when viewers of your website content follow a call to action and make contact with your sales team.
 
In order to get website traffic to follow your call to action and make contact with your sales team you must firstly identify what you want your calls to action to be.

Here are some good examples of generic calls to action:
“Call us now”
“Contact us”
“Request a quote”
“Shop online now”
“Click here”

Obviously you can change your calls to action to something a little bit more exciting depending on your business. The most important thing to understand about calls to action is that they need to be measurable. This can be achieved by having clickable calls to action with click recording. Here’s a really good example of measurable calls to action: http://www.donateblood.com.au/

An example of a call to action. Image Source: www.londontravelandtours.com

                 

2. Position calls to action

The positioning of calls to action is critical to the success of your website in 'capturing' sales leads.

An understanding of website psychology allows you to identify the reading patterns and familiarize customers and potential customers with your brand and website structure.

 2 website structures that i recommend are (click to enlarge):

Based on http://www.commbank.com.au/

Based on http://www.toyota.com.au/home

It is always important to keep an eye on the websites developed by the large market leaders in Australia as they have the resources to develop and implement exceptional websites. http://www.bupa.com.au/ is also an excellent website to have a look at.

3. Measure calls to action

Using Google Analytics you can measure how many times a potential customer clicks on a call to action. Have a look at conversions > goals in Google Analytics. Set up a goal for each of the calls to action on your website.

4. Creating a distinct competitive advantage

Your website must have a clear and easy to understand competitive advantage as to why potential customers would contact your business.You need to identify what your businesses strengths are and communicate this to your customers as simply as possible. A good way of doing this is making a clickable icon/ image that leads to another page on your website with details on why your business is the best!

5. Repetition, repetition, repetition!

You must repeat the calls to action and competitive advantage on every page of your website. This is because website traffic doesn't always come from the home page.

Is there a correlation between SEO and Branding?

Why do people visit your business's website? Is it because you have a strong brand backed by a good reputation and quality products? Is it because your digital and traditional marketing strategies worked and your customer followed your call to action; to go onto your businesses website? Or is it because of your businesses' search engine optimisation strategy (SEO)? The SEO agencies would like you to think that they are 100% responsible for your sales but how much do they generate really?

Please note: This post gets pretty complicated- if you really want to skip all of the hard stuff, jump to the last paragraph!) 

Most SEO agencies don’t know the quantity or quality of sales leads they are generating for your business 

With promises of Google positioning, competitor analysis, reporting and online strategies surely you’re getting a good bang for your buck, right? Maybe, i'd assume most SEO agencies don’t know how many sales they are ACTUALLY generating for you! Is this apart of their measurement process?

Because most SEO agencies sell to you based on a position or ranking on Google they may not provide you with quality sales leads because they don’t know if the traffic coming to your site is looking for YOUR specific product or service. The questions that you need to ask your SEO agency are: Do you understand the type of traffic coming to my businesses' website? Is this traffic primarily related to my company brand, a product or service or is it keyword driven?
Whether they are providing you with quality sales leads is an important aspect of your return on investment.

How do you know if your website is pulling in quality sales leads? 

You can identify the quality of the traffic on your website by looking at the bounce rate and average visit duration using your Google analytics account. If you have a large amount of traffic but the people landing on your website keep leaving your site as soon as they get onto it then your website hasn’t been marketed by the SEO agency properly. You need to ensure that the traffic coming into your site is being presented with the information the searcher is looking for and they need to be able to follow the calls to action to make contact with your sales team. I recommend aiming for a 3-5% conversion rate. What this means is that for every 100 people that land on your website, you get between 3 and 5 calls, emails or forms filled in. Please note that this rate varies across industries and products and you will need a full service digital marketer to look at your business strategy and determine how many leads you could or should be bringing in via your website (read more: Why do I have/ need a website? ).

Branding and your website 

It is very important to utilise both SEO, digital and traditional marketing to achieve sales conversions on your website. I recently interviewed a full service digital marketing expert to find out his view on how branding impacts websites. He believes that the vast majority of visitors who go to a business’s website do so because of effective branding. “SEO provides your website with some extra leads that you wouldn’t be capable of getting based on brand alone. From a marketing perspective the traditional media platforms are even more important today than ever before. If you hear of a company, have a company recommended to you or see an advertisement on TV, in magazines, newspapers, brochures or hear about them on the radio then the first thing a potential customer will do is visit the website. And more importantly they will visit your home page.” Does your SEO agency talk to you about the impacts of traditional marketing and branding? If not be very cautious about how many sales leads they are ACTUALLY providing your business!

How do you measure the effectiveness of SEO and branding using your website? 

Now this is where things can get quite difficult. Google analytics makes measuring all of this a bit easier through having traffic sources available to report on. This includes how many website visits were referred to your business through Google (this is one of your measures for SEO effectiveness), how many visits were made to your website because the customer typed your website address into their browsers i.e. they typed ‘www.yourwebsite.com.au’ (this demonstrates the power of your brand and traditional marketing strategies), the effectiveness of your social media campaigns (through social traffic sources) and visits to your website from Google ad words campaigns. You must be aware that people may search Google for your brand instead of just typing your website address into their browser directly. This will affect your reporting and how effective you perceive your SEO provider to be. If a customer types your brand into Google they are then technically referred to you by google (even though traditional marketing and branding did all of the hard work!). In conclusion, you need to be sure of the correlation between traditional marketing and SEO generating sales via your website. SEO brings customers into your website that are searching for a product or service that is relevant to your keywords and not your actual brand i.e. they probably haven’t ever heard of your brand before!

Okay, I know I’ve gotten WAY to technical for you- What do you REALLY need? 

You need a full service digital company or consultant that you can trust. They need to be able to tell you how many sales leads your website is capturing from your SEO strategies and your brand INDIVIDUALLY! Now this is BLOODY complicated (I’m sure you skimmed past most of the content in this blog post). It is important to have regular and reliable reporting from your full service digital consultant or company so that you’re not wasting your time or MONEY!

I recommend you also read my post:  (read more: Why do I have/ need a website? ).

Your website capture's traditional marketing sales leads Image Source: banbillboardblight.org

Is SEO effective for lead generation?

According to a study by Marketing Sherpa, SEO was selected to be the most effective marketing strategy for lead generation. Content marketing is an essential part of any long term SEO strategies and it was rated as more difficult and less effective than SEO. Also under the content marketing category, webinars or web conferences were perceived to have mid-level difficulty due to issues with content generation. However, this strategy was perceived to be effective due to the low level of competition of other firms in those markets using webinars presenting some good opportunities for lead generation for businesses.

Social media marketing was perceived to be less effective but I predict this will change as Google is indicating that SEO strategies and social media will be linked in the future. It was disappointing to see that mobile marketing was perceived to have a low level of effectiveness for lead generation especially when smart phone and tablet purchases are seeing a huge amount of growth in both purchases and usage. This is probably due to inertia to explore mobile marketing strategies because this strategy is so new to marketers and business owners. Email marketing was perceived to be the easiest strategy and quite effective.

Handy tip: Use mobile friendly email marketing campaigns that can be viewed on any device. Mail Chimp offers this service for free! http://mailchimp.com/mobile-friendly-campaigns/ 

It is important for all business owners to be aware of the quality of your businesses SEO strategies. SEO is not only a technical process; it is an essential part of your marketing strategy and should be carried out by an experienced marketer. Overall even though digital marketing is scary to some business owners it is the most effective strategy for generating sales leads and for this reason alone it is worth investing in!

Click the picture to enlarge:

SEO is the most effective marketing strategy according to marketers (source: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/)

Why can’t most search engine optimisation agencies promise you a return on investment?

You’re scared! No really, you are at least nervous! You can deny it to everyone around you but deep down you know the truth about your emotions; you’re at least worried. The future of the economy is uncertain, business confidence is lower than you have ever known it to be and even the mining sector is starting to slow down. Now, when your down in the trenches working as hard as you can to increase your businesses sales and profitability you have some pesky salesman on the phone telling you that you’re missing out on a whole lot of sales opportunities because you haven’t got your SEO right! That’s not that big of an issue until they start telling you that your competitors are ranking higher than you. No wonder the phones aren’t ringing like they used to!

Now they have got you cornered!  

So what is the salesman’s offering you? A position on the first page of Google? A yearlong contract that sounded cheap when you were focused on the monthly installment cost (and not the thousands of dollars it will cost you over the year)? Some strange marketing and web development jargon that sounds like a foreign language? You barely notice all of the important details of how this whole process actually works because the salesman is spending most of the time emphasizing how all of your competitors are ranking better than you; that means you’re missing out on sales right? The doom and gloom is so bad that you’re actually considering spending money on a service that you don’t even know anything about!

It’s time for you to fight back! 

We all like to believe that we make logical purchasing decisions. If you’ve ever read “Emotional Selling” by David Yule you’ll know that most purchasing decisions are motivated by two major emotions: fear and greed. I believe fear to be the number one motivator for purchasing SEO from agencies that can’t prove a return on investment for their customers. They’ll sell you on the position against your competitors but they won’t be able to tell you how many sales leads they can generate for you.

How do you get a return on investment from your website? 

It’s really simple! Your website must: 
1.  Capture traditional marketing sales leads

2. Generate traffic to your site through digital marketing strategies (mainly through Google searches, social media, email marketing or other websites) 

3. Effectively communicate your competitive advantage and 

4. Entice your customers to follow your calls to action and make contact with your sales team. 
The return on investment can be calculated through the number of sales leads generated and the cost of your website. A Google position is not enough to measure return on investment. (read more: Why do I have/ need a website?)

Don't get sucked in by SEO Marketers!

Why do I have/ need a website?

I recently completed a very conservative survey of business owners to ask them why they have a website. If you do the same you will usually find the following standard responses, “because my competitor has one,” “because I’ve heard that you need one” and put simply “I just don’t know.” Well if you don’t know then why do you have one? Here’s why…

Your website is your ‘super salesman’

So what does that mean? Well, imagine a salesman that’s so hard working that he is in contact with your customers 24/7. He doesn’t require sick leave, holiday pay, a career plan or a pay rise. He won’t tell your customers fibs and he will always generate sales. He serves two major purposes, he'll capture your traditional marketing leads and even better, he'll capture new marketing leads through SEO. But that’s if you’re making your 'super salesman' work for you!

 

How do you make your ‘super salesman’ work for you? 

The job of the super sales man is to ‘pull’ potential customers into your business and 'capture' sales leads generated from traditional marketing strategies. He’ll do it for less than any other sales man and he’ll show you how he is converting potential customers into real customers. There are 4 things your super salesman must do:

1. Capture sales leads from traditional and digital marketing strategies (how many radio, television and newspaper advertisements have you heard telling customers to go to the business's website?)

2. Generate traffic to your site (from customers that may not have heard of your brand) through SEO

3. Effectively communicate your competitive advantage and

4. Entice your customers to follow calls to action and make contact with the rest of your sales team.

 

How much will my ‘super salesman’ cost? 

The problem is in the word ‘cost.’ There are many search engine optimisation/ marketing companies out there that will promise you first page positioning for a 'cheap' price. But what does this really mean? Have you ever felt scared that if you don’t hand over a big (or even small) chunk of your marketing budget to a bunch of fast talking kids that are speaking what seems to be another language that you’re going to miss out on a huge amount of sales? Well guess what; like many other business owners you have unfortunately been sucked in to paying for something with no guarantee of generating sales. A good position on google doesn't automatically mean that you generate more sales through your website.

So how do you generate VALUE from your ‘super salesman’?  

You need to find a web marketing consultant or web marketer that will cut through the online marketing and web development jargon and show you how to make your website generate sales leads. The performance of your ‘super salesman’ will be proved through regular reporting using Google Analytics and more specifically by:

1. Increasing the quantity and quality of website traffic through traditional and digital marketing strategies.

2. Website conversions (converting your marketing efforts into sales leads)

Your Website needs to become your super sales man! Image source: http://www.hdwpapers.com/