Conversion Rate – What It Is & How You Can Improve It

If you want to be successful online, understanding your conversion rate is probably the single most important thing you can possibly do. Now before you start wondering, no, we’re not talking about converting from Christianity to Judaism because your girlfriend is Jewish or vice versa.
Instead, we’re talking about the number of people who “convert” from being visitors to your website into customers of your website and or products. After all, simply getting lots of traffic to your website is not enough to make decent money on the Internet.
You also need to get these people to buy a particular product which you sell or that you are an affiliate for. Without that, you could have 10,000,000 visitors and still not make a penny.
Indeed, you could actually lose lots of money because your web host would be charging you for all that traffic coming to your site (one of the dirty little secrets of the Internet is that unlimited hosting isn’t truly unlimited – if you get too much traffic, they shut you off until you pay for more hosting).
So, how do you figure out your conversion rate and what can you do to improve it? Here’s what you need to know:

Start With Analytics

If you haven’t yet installed Google Analytics onto your website, you should. This software can tell you a ton of information, from how many people visit your site, to how long people stay, whether they leave immediately or decide to stick around and see other posts on your site and more. In short, it analyzes your entire site and shows you everything you need to know.

Do Some Comparisons

Once you have this information, you can begin to use it effectively. For example, check what your most popular pages are. See how long people stay on that page. Keep track of all this information and then compare those pages that are getting lots of visits with the ones that are getting fewer hits and try to see what’s different.
Make changes to the weaker pages and try to get them to rank higher. Remember as well that it’s possible that the weaker pages are weaker because of backlinks and not just because of on page SEO. Be sure to check all those details and act accordingly to build up the weaker pages.

Do Split Testing

Another thing that you can do to improve your conversion rate is to try split testing. This involves sending half your visitors to one version of your home page and half to another version. This can easily be done by rotating the pages, either randomly or depending on backlinks.
You could also try two different versions of a squeeze page to see how the conversion works with each of those pages. Finally, you can try using split testing in your e-mails as well, to see which version of particular subject lines and e-mail content are getting the best conversions.

Bottom Line

Bottom line, it’s all a matter of testing to get the best conversion rate out of your website and that does require an investment of some of your time. Ultimately however, you’ll find that it’s well worth it to do so since the rewards can be substantial.