Click2Customer

Want to Increase Website Sales?

Posted on 18. Nov, 2009 by Lyz in blog, web site conversion

And who doesn’t, but what exactly do you do if you want to increase website sales?

There are essentially two ways to increase website sales; increase the amount of traffic to your site and improve your web site conversion rate.

Increase web traffic

There are a few ways to increase traffic to your website, the fastest way is to undertake a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign on Google (or similar). The advantages to PPC are that you can potentially start to get traffic from the minute you put the campaign live and it’s a good way to test which of your chosen keywords actually pay i.e. which drive traffic that convert to buyers and which just drive traffic looking for information. Once you know this you can then decide how to allocate your budget for organic or natural search engine optimisation (SEO).

SEO is where you optimise your site to improve your search engine rankings, improving web traffic sales starts with targeted traffic. The higher your website ranking the more traffic you get from it and the more likely those visitors are to convert. There are two parts to optimising your site for high website rankings; on and off page techniques. On page techniques are anything to do with the actual pages on your website including; copy, page titles, meta data, site structure and coding. Off page techniques cover the things you do outside of your website including; link building, article marketing and social media.

Improving web traffic sales

Once you have a decent amount of visitors on your site each month you can start to look at increasing the conversion rate of those visitors. Depending on how many visitors you have, a small increase in conversion rate can have a dramatic effect on your bottom line. To start improving web traffic sales you really need to be monitoring and looking at your site stats (try Google Analytics) in the first place and you also need Google Website Optimiser set up so you can do A/B split testing. Always use your current page as the standard and introduce a variation to test, web optimiser will run the test for you and after a set time will show you the winner.

The primary things to look at when trying to increase web sales are:

• How easy is it to add products to the basket – what language do you use on the buttons
• How straight forward is the checkout process – how many people exit your site form the checkout age and if it’s a lot do you insist on registration to buy?
• Are customers reassured that it’s safe to buy from your site
• Do you have good photographs of your products – showing products form different angles, in use and to scale usually improves sales

Of course there are many other things to consider for example, the colour of your buy buttons and the copy that describes your products but these are unlikely to help you increase website sales if your website discourages people form buying by being difficult to use. You could undertake some usability testing to increase web traffic sales – find out exactly where people are getting stuck when trying to buy from you.

In summary, there are many things you can do if you want to increase website sales, these are just a few of them.

Tags: improving web traffic sales, increase web traffic sales, linkedin, usability testing, web site conversion rate