So it turns out that your home page is good at attracting visitors, but not turning them into customers. It's a fact that the most visited pages of your website are really bad at convincing people to stay, or to go further towards turning into customers.
Good calls to action are what drive people further into your website. Without them, your website just flounders. Sadly, most websites are fine tuned to attract visitors, but then fall short on converting them to customers.
Last week, I explained how some sleezy SEO agencies prey on the naiveté of business owners, and how to avoid paying for bad service. But there are many really good SEO companies out there that have your best interest in mind, and they will help bring more people to your website.
Search engine optimization has been around for as long as there have been search engines, i.e. since the launch of the world wide web. As the web has matured, so have the techniques of getting yourself ranked in the search engines. Directions for using those old SEO techniques can still be found online even though they are no longer valid.
Sadly, it doesn't matter how much I explain that keyword stuffing is bad, some website programmers and SEO agencies still do it because they hope to attract more organic visitors to the website.
In the early years of the internet, we used to measure website success by the number of "hits" counted by the website software. "Hit counters" were very popular for a while until website owners started learning the difference between a visitor session and a simple hit.
Hit Counter - A measurement of the number of files read from your website. Every page on your site is made up of an HTML file, image files, CSS files, and JavaScripts. Every one of these files is downloaded to a browser with each page refresh. Your website counts 1 hit for every file download, which means you might have 10 or more hits for every page view.
You might still find hit counters on older websites and I've even written reviews for some websites that still used them.
Visitor Session - This is a more accurate count of the number of people who view your website. The visitor session count is only incremented once each time a user visits your website. SEO agencies usually concentrate on increasing the number of sessions per month.
Google Analytics (or any analytics software) can correctly measure the number of sessions you have every month.
Most business owners feel that they can improve their business simply by increasing the number of customers they see. It's assumed that sales will increase if you can get more people into a store. Likewise, it's assumed that a website will work better if you bring more people to it. Although both of those situations seem similar, they really aren't.
Unlike grocery stores or department stores where foot traffic volume will directly increase sales, in a retail jewelry store you need to rely on a salesperson-to-customer interaction in order to make a sale. If your sales person is poorly trained it won't matter how many people come in the store, your sales will be poor. On the other hand, put a fantastic sales person on the floor and your sales will skyrocket even if only 9 people come in the store every day.
Your website needs to be trained just like that fantastic salesperson was. Every page needs a clear call to action to guide the visitor toward the next click. Those calls to action can be visual, aesthetically designed, or written; it all depends on your website.
Visual calls to action can be photos that attract attention or words contained within images. Aesthetic calls to action involve website design that streamlines how someone would look around your site and leads them to the next logical click action.
Written calls to action are usually pretty obvious and include words like these:
* click here
* save now
* shop here
* compare
* find
* order
Do your own Google search for "list of call to action words" to find many more examples.
The SEO agency you hire should be building content for your site that attracts the right type of visitor to you. The correct content will bring the right visitor, but they won't convert into a customer unless you have the right type of call to action.
Truthfully, only a few people will stay on your website and turn into customers.
From hit counts to session counts to conversion counts, you should be concentrating on what helps you gain the most sales. Instead of worrying so much about attracting more people to your website, perhaps it's time you think about different ways to convert the visitors you already have, into better paying customers.
