The basic goal of SEO is to make your site more appealing to the search engines. The more appealing you are to the search engines, the better you will rank in their results pages. The better your rank, the more traffic you should see. The more traffic you get, the higher your conversion rate will be. It’s all builds upon itself to help you increase your brand presence online and earn more business.

While no two sites are alike, most sites that are practicing white hat SEO and have strapped in for the long haul should see a steady increase in traffic overtime. That’s fantastic! It means your SEO is working and more visitors are being directed to your site. Here’s the catch. Even though your traffic has gone up, you haven’t seen an increase in your conversion rate. Where did it go wrong? Don’t be so quick to blame your SEO. If you aren’t seeing a better conversion rate, chances are your site it to blame.

Here are 3 ways to improve your site and increase your conversion rate.

1. Clean up you landing page

Your landing page is the page that a visitor arrives to your site through. More often than not, it is your homepage (although for e-commerce sites it is most likely a product page). Within a matter of moments, visitors to your site will know if they want to stick around. This means you have milliseconds to show them the information they came looking for. Failing to capture their attention drives them away from your site.

Does your site have a lot of ads? To most visitors, this is a clear sign of a spammy, low quality site. Even if your site is full of great content, if it’s buried under a bunch of ads, no one will stick around long enough to find out.

How have you structured your content? Blocks of text can be very intimidating to visitors. They don’t want to read an essay just to find one piece of information. Headings, subheadings, bullet points and bolded text are a great way to break up content. Make it easy for visitors to find the information they are looking for.

2. Incorporate call-to-actions

Every site has a goal. What is yours? Do you want someone to fill out a contact form? Pick up the phone and call? Download a trial software or white paper? Whatever your goal is, keep reminding your visitors with call-to-actions!

If you want someone to call your office, don’t just list the phone number on the “Contact Us” page or in the footer; incorporate it into the content on every page. Strategically placed call-to-actions provide a constant reminder of what you want your visitor to do. Make it easy for them to do business with you! If a visitor has to start searching for a way to contact you, they might not bother and you’ll lose a potential customer.

Good push words like “call now” or “click here” tell the visitor exactly what you want them to do. Don’t assume they know, show them the way. Call-to-actions don’t leave room for visitors to get confused about what your goals are.

3. Speed up your site

The speed at which your site loads play directly into the overall user-experience. We live in a “gotta get it now” kind of world. People expect to find the information they are looking for and to find it quickly. Site speed factors into that. If your site takes a long time to load (usually because of a heavy reliance on graphics), chances are you’ll lose visitors because they aren’t willing to sit there and wait the eight seconds it takes for the page to load. Cutting down on the time it takes your site to load makes your site that much more user friendly. It may not seem like a big deal, but a slow site can make for a very frustrated visitor.

There are a lot of things that factor into a site’s conversion rate. These are just three simple ways that you can improve your site to help your conversion rate along. If your SEO is doing a good job and delivering targeted traffic to your site, don’t let those visitors slip through your fingers because your site failed to capture their attention and prompt them to action. At the end of the day, conversion is what matters!

About the Author – Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis is the President and Founder of the Search Engine Marketing Company, Brick Marketing (http://www.brickmarketing.com), a full-service Internet marketing and SEO consulting firm based in Boston, MA. With over 12 years of experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO tips and SEO news to his blog, the Search Engine Optimization Journal, and publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter.

One Response to “3 Ways to Increase Your Conversion Rate”

  1. Rajesh says:

    I’am looking for online earning medium and making own site learning SEO, its very effective.Thanks for these useful guideline

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