After meeting with people for years, it’s become apparent that people are frustrated with their website design for a number of reasons, however, most issues can be put into two categories: it’s either about low traffic or low conversions. Think about that, if you are frustrated with your website, whatever you may think it is about your website that’s causing you to lose sleep at night, those are usually the root causes.
You might be thinking, “No. You’re wrong. I’m frustrated because my site is old and out of date.” Or maybe you’re thinking to yourself that you wish your site had the ability to have videos added to it. Sure, those don’t fit into the two categories above but let me ask you why you want to have video on your site? Or why are you upset that your site looks old and out of date? Is it because that’s leading to low conversion rates? By that, I mean, are you actually concerned because business is slow and you want every person who hits your site to call you…but they don’t? That’s not an issue about video. It’s a conversion rate problem. Could video help improve your conversion rates? Probably so. But I believe that all too often we treat the symptoms, rather than fixing the cause of the problems. We need to look at the root cause of things, rather than just treating the pain. Slapping a video on the site is like putting a Band-Aid on it. It’s like giving you a pain pill, hoping that will fix things.
Rather than asking yourself questions like, “Will video do the trick?” Try coming at it from a higher level. Ask, “What am I trying to accomplish and then what’s the solution that will fix the problem?” Here’s how that might look. You’re trying to increase the number of phone calls on your site. First start by looking at Google Analytics (assuming you have it installed) so that you can see how many people are visiting your site each day. Let’s say you get 100 people a day. How many of them are calling you each day? Three? Maybe four? That would be a decent conversion rate. I know, it doesn’t sound great but let’s keep our numbers conservative.
Let’s diverge for one second, if rather than 100, you see that you’re only getting five people a day to your site, stop there. Video won’t do the trick. You need more people. That’s the first criteria I mentioned at the top of this post. Low traffic. Remember? We’ll deal with the low traffic issue in another post but for the time being, let’s get back to the 3 phone calls you’re hypothetically getting from your 100 visitors a day.
If you get 100 people a day, wouldn’t it potentially double your business if you got six of them to call you each day, rather than just three? Believe it or not, it’s a lot easier to improve your site and double the number of calls from those 100 people, than it is to try and double your traffic. If you were thinking about getting 200 people a day to your site, that’s a much greater task. Think about it. Isn’t it easier to convince three more people to call you than it is to convince 100 more people to visit your site? Both will effectively double your sales. Conversion rates are huge and they’re all too often overlooked, in favor of increased traffic. Why? I can’t say. But it’s a shame because it’s costing business owners not only the money spent trying to increase the traffic, it’s costing them tons in lost business.
I’m not saying that going after traffic is a bad thing, it just needs to be considered in conjunction with your conversion rates. If I were to ask you what your conversion rate is, do you know it? You should. Maybe that’s the best place to start. If you need Google Analytics installed on your site, let us know, we can help.