How to double your website’s conversion rate without more traffic

Tom Garfield continues our guest blog series. Once a month, we’ll be sharing a guest blog post from an industry expert. Tom is a website producer, designer and consultant. His agency, Brand New Notebook, helps ambitious experts realise their potential, stand out from the crowd, and transform their expertise into profits with high-end websites that drive growth & credibility.

In this post, Tom covers some of the ways your website might be working against you rather than for you and explains how to fix it.

A lot of marketing advice is based on getting more.

More likes, more comments, more views, more reach.

And on websites…more traffic. 

Generating good quality traffic to your website is super important. SEO, social media, referrals, email marketing - all good ways to do it. But getting people to your website is less than half the battle. 

If you only focus your attention on getting people to visit your website then you’re missing a trick.

What if all you needed to double your results, was a way to convert more of what you already had coming in?

I’m going to teach you how to double your conversion rate, and therefore double your website leads, without generating any additional traffic.

The leaky bucket

Think of your website as a bucket, and the traffic you’re driving to it as water. If your bucket is full of holes then all that traffic is just going to pour straight out onto the floor.

You can keep pouring more and more water in, but that’s no way to fill a bucket.

Now let’s pretend you’re filling your bucket with something expensive and painful to lose. Let’s say champagne. 

Would you keep buying more bottles of champagne? Or would you spend time and effort fixing the bucket before you waste another precious drop?

So how do we find the holes on your website that are causing people to fall out?

Finding the holes

First, let’s start with some obvious ones that you can fix fairly quickly.

Slow loading speed

Site speed is critical. If you have a slow loading site, chances are that some of your visitors will leave before they’ve even seen your page load. You can check your site speed using Google's PageSpeed Insights tool.

If you have a super slow website, fixing it depends on lots of different factors, but Google’s PageSpeed will tell you. The most common issues are:

1. Huge image and video files

2. Poor quality hosting

3. Too much and poorly optimised code

Frustrating user experience

If your website is annoying to use, you’re going to lose visitors fast. And website visitors are fickle. It doesn’t take much to get them bouncing off.

Go and browse your own website as if you were a potential customer. 

We’ll cover some of these in more detail, but a frustrating user experience will mean one or more of these:

• Inconsistent or unclear navigation

• Intrusive ads or pop-ups

• Poor responsiveness on mobile

• Complicated forms and checkouts

• Broken links or error pages

• Outdated or irrelevant content

• Inaccessible for users with disabilities

• Hard-to-read text

• Irritating design elements or animation

• Auto-playing videos or music

• Confusing or jargon-filled content

• Missing important information

Inconsistent or unclear navigation

This could look like too many options on a menu, unclear labelling of menu items, too many steps to content, or just bad information. 

Your navigation should be clear and concise and lead visitors to the information that they need to see to achieve what they want to from your website. Make sure the navigation stays consistent across your site. Think about the information that’s most important to your visitors and make it super clear where that information is.

Badly written content

Bad content is everywhere. Content IS the internet, so we need to make it good if we want to convert our visitors into enquiring or subscribing or buying.

Read your website’s content. 

• Is it clear? 

• Is it helpful? 

• Is it comprehensive without being overwhelming? 

• Have you prioritised the most important information?

• Could it be shorter?

• Is it formatted to be easy to read and follow?

Poor positioning

This one is sneaky. If your messaging and your offer is too broad, you’re not likely to grab people.

Do you have a clear service and is it clear to website visitors from the homepage? 

I work with high achieving experts who want to monetise their expertise. When someone like that lands on my website, they instantly recognise themselves and want to learn more. If you’re too broad, you’ll capture no one and lose everyone.

But not all holes are the same

It completely depends on your specific website. The above is best practice, and covers just a few. The best ways to diagnose issues are with actual analysis and testing.

As a starter, here’s how you can test your website and diagnose issues:

1. Use a tool like Microsoft Clarity to observe your website being used. Review click maps and other data to get insights. Find problems, fix them. 

2. Ask real people to give you feedback. But remember, one person’s opinion is just an opinion. 

3. Review your competitors websites - see if you can find anything they do better than you.

4. Run A/B tests - this one’s a bit involved, but you could send half your traffic to one version of a page, and half to another with some changes. See which performs better and test another variation until you’ve made significant improvements.

So can you really double your conversion rate without more traffic?

If you get 300 unique visits per month to your website and you have a 2% conversion rate you would generate six leads per month. 

But if you worked on patching up the holes and doubled your conversion rate to 4%, with those same 300 visits you could generate 12 leads per month.

Think about what that would mean for you. I bet it is worth it right? 

After you’ve fixed your major holes, that’s the time to grow your traffic. You’re going to keep a lot more water (champagne) in your bucket!

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🔗 You can connect with Tom on LinkedIn or Brand New Notebook’s website.

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👀 Watch this space for more Guest Blogs throughout the year! If you’re interested in writing a guest post for The Bloom Blog, get in touch.

Bloom Creative is a design business based in Kent offering branding & brand refreshes, quality digital design, and eye-catching print design. You can browse our services or book in a free discovery call.