9 Powerful and Tested Tips to Increase Your Website Conversions Now
Having a beautiful website is nice, but a website that converts is a must. Here are 9 best practices that are easy to overlook but that can have big impacts on how well your website works for your business.
#1 Clear and targeted Messaging
What message are you sending your ideal client when they land on your website home page? A reiteration of your business name? A long sentence of industry jargon? A laundry list of their problems?
Or are you telling them - in simple language - how you’ll solve their problems, promising them an aspirational transformation or clearly stating what exactly you do.
Images attract but words sell. No amount of beautiful design can help messaging that isn’t dialed-in.
#2 Typographic Hierarchy
While it’s true no amount of beautiful design can help muddy or unclear messaging, It’s also true that great messaging that isn’t supported by thoughtful typographic design can’t do it’s job very well.
If your headlines, sub-headlines and paragraph text are all in similar sizes, conflicting typefaces or aren’t ordered in a way the provides contrast and legibility, your messaging won’t land the way it should.
#3 Well Structured Navigation
Do you have more than 5 items in your main website navigation? This is not a hard and fast rule, but make sure things don’t get too cluttered in your main menu.
Why? So people know where to go when they land on your site.
Same thing goes for sub-menus. Can you consolidate information? Or are visitors forced to jump from page to page to get bits and pieces of exactly what it is you do.
A confused mind can’t make a decision.
#4 A considered color palettte
Color is important, but it’s also important not to go nuts. Let me be more specific.
Typically the color palettes I create in starter brands have five colors. Two of which are white and black, or a near black grey.
I add three colors to those. Out of those three, two of the colors are the main colors with a third being an accent color. The accent color is often used sparingly.
Some brands call for a saturated, intense colors and that’s fine. The key is not to sacrifice usability, legibility and conversion best practices.
Your website should be easy to read and easy to scan.
Too many contrasting colors or too many colors of the same shade or tint can make this difficult.
Additionally your call to action buttons need to stand out. This won’t happen if there are too many colors fighting with each other.
Sometimes we in the design community like to make things sound more scientific than they actually are. In my opinion, picking a color palette is more art than science.
There are best practices when it comes to assigning colors to your website, but my approach is to consider two things: brand and user experience.
Having said that, color theory is real. So here’s a quick guid of some almost universal associations with different colors.
Red: Bold action, energy and passion, but can also be associated with danger or aggression. Orange: Friendliness, warmth, enthusiasm and adventure
Yellow: Confidence, sunlight, joy and inspiration, optimism
Green: Peace and calm, often associated with nature, sustainability; a sense of refreshment
Blue: Trust and reliability, why it’s often chose by corporations. Also the ocean and sky; possibility and expanse
Purple: Royalty, luxury wealth but also mystery and magic and to some degree power.
Pink: Fun, youth, femininity, romantic love
Black: Strength, wisdom, sleekness, technology but also evil and death (in some cultures)
White: Modernity, minimalism, strength, cleanliness and light, optimism
Again these are guidelines, don’t get too caught up in these meanings. Consider your brand and the imagery you’re using.
In order for your color palette to support your website conversion rates, the whole thing has to hang together for a strong user experience.
#5 An unambiguous call to action
An assertive or unambiguous call to action. What do I mean by that?
I mean something that is direct and and tells your website visitor exactly what the, what you want them to do next.
There's some debate about this. A web designer I admire and respect says ‘Let's Connect’ is one of the most effective calls to action on her website. She’s done the testing to prove it.
But if you’re just implementing a call to action strategy the best thing to do is be clear.
Book a call. Start now. Get access.
These are all action phrases.
On a homepage or sales page, use the same Call To Action. Only ask the visitor to do that one thing. Have at least three. At the top above the fold, in the middle, and the bottom.
One final tip: Include your main call to action butter it in the footer of your website. Don’t forget people are scrolling on phones. When they come to the end of the page provide one more opportunity for your website visitor to take action.
#6 Resonant Imagery
So earlier in this post I dropped the phrase ‘Images attract, but words sell’ and that’s true.
But as the phrase indicates, your website visitor needs to be attracted (instead of repelled or indifferent) by the imagery so the words can start doing the selling.
Ideally your imagery will be ‘on brand’. What does this mean?
Your imagery should be high quality, and convey the your businesses brand attributes.
Example brand attributes could be open, competent, edgy, playful, irreverent, innovative, creative, friendly, formal, respectable, reliable.
Your imagery needs to reflect these attributes.
We are barraged by a tsunami of graphics and digital imagery all day long on our devices and social media.
Developing a visual language and consistently using it in your content, sends a signal and is a visual cue for people that come into your orbit. They begin to associate that imagery, that visual language with your business.
So not only does this imagery need to reflect your brand, and work with the rest of your website, it needs to be high quality and non-generic.
We are in a golden age of stock imagery. This has it’s pros and cons. There are some free stock images I’ve seen repeatedly across ads, websites and social media sites for different brands. That’s not great.
Using stock imagery non-strategically does more harm than good because it makes you look like everyone else.
Your vibe attracts your tribe
3 ways you can tackle creating a library of resonant brand imagery
#1 Hire a professional photographer to create custom brand imagery for you.
When I worked out my own personal brand I created a mood board and hired a photographer whose aesthetic matched the vibe I was going for.
We created a shot list so I always have imagery I can use on my website as well as all my digital assets.
#2 Use a hybrid of custom imagery and stock imagery.
When I created this brand and website for my client Krystal and her non-profit consulting agency, she came to me with two, high-quality head shots.
Krystal wanted to stand out in her industry by using very graphic and colorful imagery that conveyed her collaborative approach.
A website in a day project where I used a mix of custom and stock imagery
Other players in her industry tend to go with a sustainable, natural and neutral color palettes and imagery. While she believes in sustainability, she wanted to distinguish herself and stand out from the crowd.
I created this color palette and we paired it with images from Stocksy. It’s stock imagery but on the premium end and it’s not free. However it is less expensive than hiring a photographer, but if intentionally edited, can look like custom, on brand imagery.
Krystal will not only use imagery from this photographer in her social media, on her Instagram and LinkedIn. So people will associate this with her business.
It’s also going to intrigue and attract the right clients for her business.
#3 Customized stock imagery
You can also just use nothing but stock imagery and ‘treat’ it so that it looks cohesive. You can run it through filters in programs like Canva.
#7 Your Humanity
ChatGPT, AI, content scheduling, chatbots. We are getting better and better at using technology and artificial intelligence to project a ‘human presence’ when no one is actually there.
So do the opposite.
Show pictures of yourself and your team. Create content that sounds like a human being. Add video of a real human, you or a member of your team to your website.
Anything you can do, that a robot can’t (yet) is a win and builds more trust.
Don’t create a boiler plate about page. Tell your story! Tell the story of your business. Avoid to much marketing jargon. Write for humans not algorithms.
If you are a one person business, write in first person - don’t say ‘we’.
A website that looks and sounds computer generated with no sign of a real person or people behind it will not build that critical ‘know, like and trust’ factor. In fact, it may even do the opposite.
If you want people to take a next step - to convert - show them who are you are.
#8 Limit off ramps
This is a simple, but easy to get wrong. Your goal is to keep people on your site as long as possible. Don’t give them reasons to leave.
Those reasons are typically social media icons.
Why don’t you want people to leave your website?
On your website you can control the message. There are no distractions and no algorithms. It’s the best place to tell your story and get your visitor more engaged with you and your brand.
That’s not to say that you can’t have links to your social media accounts, but keep the small and place them in the footer.
Instead think about strategically placing content that invites your website visitor to go deeper into your site. Sprinkle particularly engaging blog posts or podcast episodes throughout your site. Not social media off ramps.
#9 Social proof
Social proof is another way to establish credibility and trust on your website which helps with conversions.
Social proof usually comes in the form of a testimonial. These can be written or video testimonials, but they can also be logos of where your work or product has been featured.
One powerful way to display social proof is to display screenshots of messages and reviews you’ve received from clients or customers.
Capture WhatsApp messages, emails or Google reviews and use them on your site in an image gallery.
These screen shots add a touch of authenticity especially because they are usually unprompted.
How to tell if your website conversion strategies are working
After you’ve implemented these 9 strategies to boost your website conversion, it’s important to track whether they’re working or not.
How can you track website conversions? There are businesses that do nothing but optimize and track conversions, but for a regular business owners here are two quick metrics to get a gage on the effectiveness of your conversion rate:
Average Time on Site:
How long is a visitor staying on a web page. Anything over about 54 seconds is good. That’s the industry average. If a visitor is staying on a page over two minutes that is great, 3 minutes is excellent
Bounce rate:
A bounce rate shows where a user decided to leave your website. If certain pages or posts have a high bounce rate (over 60%) something about that page is not enticing your visitor to stay.
A good bounce rate would be under 40%. Tweak and test all of the factors mentioned in this post to try and get key pages (homepage, sales pages, high traffic blog posts) to this rate.
Your can use analytics software to measure this. Your website platform might have some built in. I like Fathom. It’s privacy focused, has a simple, easy-to-understand dashboard and is GDPR compliant.
A website is a dynamic, ever-evolving digital asset. Hopefully these nine tips will help you get yours to a place that it is working for you 24/7 to bring in engaged, qualified and enthusiastic leads!