Getting a sale is a moment every digital marketer celebrates. That’s because a sale is a proof that their efforts have worked.
The average conversion rate for organic search is 3.7%.
Turning traffic into revenue, especially organically, takes a lot of effort. The process is long and slow, but you should keep at it. The help of a professional SEO team can help.
Having a plan of action is important if you’re revamping your website. Here is a 6-stage plan that is effective and will bring you results.
The 6 Stage Plan To Convert Traffic to Sales
1. A Website Makeover
If your website isn’t attracting the right traffic or retaining visitors, then it’s time to consider a dramatic change. Your website, especially the landing page, needs to convince users that it’s worth staying on. That is the first step to conversion.
For this, you need to first diagnose the issues on your website and when you do, you may want to consult with a trusted SEO service provider.
It’s ideal if every page on your website is optimized for SEO. So the extent of the makeover will depend on the existing quality of your website.
Here are some changes you’ll need to make.
- Re-do the content so it satisfies the possible search intents.
- Re-think the product placement, font, and theme colors. Your website should be pleasant to look at. Videos and attractive visual content on the landing page can increase the conversion rate by 86%
- Make navigating through your website effortless.
- Remove third-party links from landing pages. Reserve these only for blog pages.
- Add a ‘Testimonial’ section. This will make your brand look more legit. User-generated content is the most authentic form of content. So you should also add a review section to your page.
Doing all this will help bring the right people onto your webpage. That’s not where this ends.
2. The Ideal Sales Funnel
Once you’ve brought people into your website, you’ve completed the first step to the sales funnel – awareness.
The 4 major stages of this funnel are awareness, interest, decision, and action. SEO is an important factor for every step of the sales funnel. Let’s discuss how.
1. Awareness
This is the webpage makeover. So let’s skip this one.
2. Interest
This stage is where you lose most customers. So it’s vital you get it right.
The interest stage is when customers do their research about your product. They read reviews and compare products and pricing. So it’s your responsibility to make accessing information as easy as possible for them.
The quality of your content should beat out your competitors. Do a competitor analysis. Check what their webpage looks like. Look for the way they’ve designed the product page, and what their customers have to say about them.
Then, make your content better. This is called conversion rate optimization.
The language here shouldn’t be pushy. Simply help your customers to make an informed decision.
3. Decision
Now, you can get all salesy.
Once customers have done their research, they pick what product they’re going to buy. So this is when you make offers they can’t deny.
The keywords you use in this step are very important. You have to target your keywords in a way that only your products seem like the solution to your customers’ problems.
You will likely display CTAs during this stage. The design and placement of your CTA button play a big role in gaining conversions.
4. Action
This is when the customer purchases on your website. Though it may seem like the end of the cycle, it’s not. After this, you need to think about customer retention.
This starts with a beautifully written gratitude email. E-mail marketing will be the biggest channel through which you can retain customers. But do this with caution. Too many emails and your customer may unsubscribe.
3. Building a Secure Website
Think about it. Would you enter your credit card details into a sketchy website? Your customers won’t either.
Make your customers trust you. The first level of security with any website is HTTPS hosting. Most internet users use secure browsing extensions on their browsers. 31% of internet users use VPN.
So if you don’t have a secure website, the customers can’t even see what you have to offer.
Social media is a platform that has become indispensable. Having a social media account also legitimizes your business. Customers are also checking the follower’s count and the bot action to verify the numbers. So marketers will have to focus on their social media strategy as well.
Your website should also be fairly updated. If your site looks like a blog from the 90s, then people will click off. It shouldn’t be chock-full of grammatical errors and watermarked images. Invest in your website so others will want to as well.
4. Direct Visitors to the Right Page
Say for example a customer wants to buy candles from you, a home goods store. If you want to rank for an organic search result, then ensure the right page, the page about candles, ranks.
If you’re running ads, then place bids for candles on the link they can shop for candles from. Customers don’t like seeing a product in the ad and have to scour your website to find it. This will lead to a loss in ad money.
Many people think directing all traffic to the homepage works to increase brand awareness. But this will only lead to customer frustration.
This is another reason why all of your landing pages should be optimized for search results.
5. Slide-Ins, Pop-Ups, and Floating Bars
Google says anything that stops users from easily accessing content will result in a penalty for your site. Especially for mobile. But that does not mean pop-ups are out of the question.
Here are strategies to include interstitials on your website without a penalty.
- Time your pop-ups so that they don’t appear immediately after a user clicks on a link.
- Trigger pop-ups to appear if your users are accessing your site through anything but a Google search.
- You can use exit-intent interstitials or page-to-page interstitials.
Remember that all this applies only to your mobile website. You can still use pop-ups for desktop sites.
Even here, design the pop-up so it’s actually helpful to the customer. They are more likely to read the pop-up in that case. You should also make the “close window button” easy to find. Annoyed users may click off your page.
6. Product Recommendations
This is a must-have if you’re running an e-commerce website. If a customer has reached as far as the product page, then you can rest assured that there is a strong purchasing intent.
If you’ve made decision-making easy, then most customers will go through with the purchase. So to hook them even more, display relevant products. This will further develop the buyer’s interest.
An optimized site is one that gets noticed. A website with high traffic is one that generates revenue. So focus on your SEO and the other things will fall into place.
