6 Simple Ways to Increase Your Blog Conversion Rate
- Updated on: 2018-09-30
- Read original article here
Getting traffic to your website is great, but if you’re not converting viewers to customers, what’s the point? Your main focus should be on converting those visitors to subscribers, leads, customers, buyers, etc. I’ve worked with some very large companies for which even a 2% increase in conversion rates can mean millions to the bottom line over the course of a year. I’ve used this experience to come up with these simple tips that any blogger can implement to see results.
Make Your Website Faster – Your website can never be fast enough; its speed can affect conversions drastically. Believe it or not—for every second you reduce your loading speed, you increase your conversion rate by 7%. Almost 50% of users expect pages to load within two seconds; beyond that, conversions start dropping.
Secondly, Google now uses site speed as a ranking factor for SEO. They will actually penalize your website if it’s slower than other websites for the same search term. Though this doesn’t affect conversions, it can have a huge impact on your traffic.
Here are a few ways you can make your website faster:
Simplify Your Website – Our team has designed landing pages for the likes of Tim Ferris, Neil Patel, and countless others. One principle that always proves itself is that less is more. If you give your visitors too many options, they will get sidetracked and eventually leave. I remember speaking with one big NYC agency that had a fun game on their site that they were happy all their visitors interacted with. The problem was that people got so distracted with the game that the agency didn’t accomplish its main goal—getting the lead.
There are thousands of plugins and widgets for WordPress; have restraint, and don’t install them all. Make sure you don’t add useless content like a weather or time plugin. No one is going to your site to check the weather, and I don’t think I’ve seen a computer since 1985 that doesn’t always display the time.
Keep distractions to a minimum, minimize your outbound links, and try to not have too much advertising.
Have Multiple Calls to Action – Make sure to include your main call to action in multiple locations on your blog. If you’re asking for people to sign up for a subscription, a good place to have a signup form is on the right rail above the fold. I keep mine at the very top. You also might want to test putting one at the end of your articles. People who have just finished reading a post are more inclined to sign up. Test placement on different pages as well.
Give an Incentive – Sometimes your visitors need a gentle push to sign up; nothing is better than giving them something for free. If you’re trying to sell something, you could give them a coupon for signing up. You might also want to think about giving something away, like an eBook or software. A digital download doesn’t cost you much in bandwidth and provides real value to the customer. I’ve worked with many companies and seen conversion rates go up 200-300% or more just from offering a free download with a signup.
Pop-ups – The good old pop-up—some people hate them, but others learn to love them. They do work and can give you a huge lift in signups. I’ve seen 600% to 1000% increases in conversions when using a pop, but your mileage will vary.
Content Recommendation Plugins – Sometimes people aren’t ready to convert, but they want to read more from your site. I’ve used a plugin called Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) ever since Matt Cutts from Google recommended it in 2008. YARPP has recently been bought by Adknowledge and now allows you to optionally show third-party ads, which I am not doing. (Disclosure: I was a VP at Adknowledge for many years, but this doesn’t have any effect on my recommendation.) This plugin will show related articles from your site to users that might be interested in reading more on the subject. I typically see an increase in time on the site and conversions for blogs with this plugin.
If you implement even a single tip from this article on your blog, I’m sure you’ll see an improvement to your website. Remember, it’s a marathon not a sprint. Make sure to continuously improve your site and always see what you can do to improve your conversions.
Still want to push your conversions higher even higher? Contact me and pick my brain
