When I was in school I had a buddy that had a 68 Mustang. He was always working on the engine trying to make the car go faster. The car was ugly, and when going down the road the steering wheel would shake, the front end would jump up and down and you had to hope he was able to pump the brakes faster enough to keep from hitting someone or something.

But all he wanted to talk about was getting the car to go faster!

Now…20 years later not much has changed, all anyone wants to talk about is getting more speed traffic!

Had my buddy thought about putting some decent tires on the car and getting the frontend and rear end aligned he would have gotten a much safer, better riding and faster car.

Think about it like this!

Let’s say you have an e-commerce business selling a product and the average order is $10.00. If you have a 2 percent conversion rate and get 500 visitors to your website per day then you would have 10 sales per day.

Now…let’s say you’re about to get married and you are having a baby. The $3,000.00 per month the business is currently turning over isn’t going to be enough, so you’ll need to turn that $3,000.00 per month into at least $4,000.00 per month.

There are lots of ways to achieve this but let’s say for the sake of argument that you are on a budget and are currently being pitched on SEO or website conversion optimization.

Let’s compare the two on how much money they can bring in!

A 10% increase in traffic yields the exact same amount as a 10% increase in conversion.

Let’s Compare Cost

The quality of traffic is important, and at this moment and time Google has about the best quality of traffic out there. Delivering an extra 1,500 visitors to the site might require going after a new set of keywords. This requires content, links and a period of time for Google to find and credit your site with those links and content. This does not mean the site will rank it only means that you need to continue to work on the site for months before HOPEFULLY seeing results. I’d guess on the low side you might be able to get this done for under a thousand – to achieve an extra $300 per month.

Conversion Rate Optimization

So what steps should you take to try an increase your conversion rate? Step one is to figure out what you want the website visitor to do while he’s on that page. And everything after that is trying to figure out how to get him to do just that.

You start by looking for problems that could confuse the site visitor like forms, links, photos, content…

After you’ve identified a problem start creating alternatives and begin testing to see which results work best. Google has a website optimizer (a free tool) that allows you to run split tests on your website automatically and without affecting your SEO performance. The idea is to create a duplicate page of your website and make small changes to that page. Then add the pages into the system; the program will automatically serve either the new or the old page to the website visitor.

Conversion rates are then recorded by the system and a winner is decided.

The idea is to make small changes daily, measuring results and improving the user experience. Examples of small changes could be adding ‘Buy Now’ to buttons instead of “Add to Cart”, or removing a field from a form, changing text colors, photos, content, headers… You’ll be surprised at the affects these small changes can have on your websites success rate.

Focus on Upsell/Cross Sell

Now another way to increase revenue would be to increase the value of an order.

Amazon does an excellent job of getting every penny they can from each transaction by using their ‘Frequently Bought Together’ feature, with the upshot that customers actually love it. The key to getting this right is matching products properly. It’s no use matching widget x with widget y if they don’t work together, so you need to be sensible and match your products cleverly. With our supplements site this could be something like start offering a shaker flask with each supplement purchase. The two are required for the product to work and not all customers will have a shaker.

Key Takeaways

* Before doing anything else try and get the most out of the traffic you have.
* Use A/B split testing to test all pages on your site.
* Never stop testing.
* Use backend sales.
* Then go after more traffic.

Conclusion

Conversion rate optimization is cheaper, quicker and stronger than SEO. And of course the website is much better positioned to go after SEO once conversion rate optimization is done. Reason being, the websites able to convert more of the traffic it’s getting into clients and invest more money back into marketing.

What I would like to do is to start by talking about some of the things you should look for in you web design and then from there go to getting traffic and then measuring and adjusting your business according to the stats and information gathered from that traffic.

I want to start with the web design because it’s important for it to at least be designed well enough to get people to take action rather it be to call, fill out a form, register, donate or just click a link.

You need a good website design so you can start testing and tweaking the business around that design. Your website has to persuade your website visitors to react and do what you want them to do on a subconscious level, without them knowing about it.

The other day I was walking around the pool with my camera, filming the kids playing. The next thing I knew I stepped a little too far to the right and both I and the camera went in to the pool. Needless to say the camera was no longer worth having.

So I went online and started looking for a new camera. The first thing I noticed was all the cool there new features. I looked through about 5 websites and was about to make a purchase when I realized that the camera I was buying wasn’t as nice as the one I saw, on another website. I actually had to make myself purchase the camera off the other site. The calls to action, the colors and everything else was so inviting and looked so easy to make the purchase that I was about to buy a camera that was more expensive and not as nice as the camera on another site.

This got me to thinking and I realized this isn’t the first time I’ve done this.

There are sites I purchase from daily, where I know there are similar sites that offer a better product at a lower price. But subconsciously I convince myself that the extra expense is worth it, because it’s quicker and easier to make the purchase from website A.

The sad truth is, as I sit here and think about it, website B is actually less complicated then website A. But the colors and flow of website A make it appear easier to use.

The only thing that website A has better then website B is their website. Website A has been getting my money for years, not because they have a better product, better customer service or a better price but because they have a better designed website.

Their products are laid out better and the colors are more lively, vibrant, and trusting.

Website B went with darker less trusting colors and you have to click on the product to actually see what the product looks like. But the thing that surprises me is that until now I did not realize that website B had a one page checkout while website A actually has 3 pages of information you have to fill out.

I’ve spent close to $5,000.00 with website A. Had website B been testing their design they would have made over $5,000.00 off me alone this year. The majority of the purchasing decisions you make are based on emotion and followed later by logic. Website A talked to my subconscious and convinced it to make the purchase.

For your website to be effective it has to talk to all three of your brains.

I am currently working on a new website called “Your SEO Girl”.

Unlike most of the websites I work on this one belongs to me, which means I have to figure out how I want the navigation and website layout to work.

The website talks about SEO methods used to rank websites.

I don’t have much time to dedicate to the site but thought I would take the day today and play around with the design and the navigation. However, the website is going to be information heavy and trying to figure out the best way to do the navigation has turned out to be a test of my abilities.

I am now thinking it might be best to build the site and come back once the information is finished and figure out the navigation at that time.

What’s In a Website Design?

The neat thing about designing websites is that it’s an art form that goes a step further than regular art. Unlike a piece of art a web design has to tell a story while at the same time leading, guiding and converting a website visitor into a website customer.

There is no such thing as the perfect website because a website is like a living thing, always evolving, changing and improving.

So when I see an artist like Nariscuss with his eye-catching photography it makes me stop and take notice. You see the other neat thing about web designing is that it uses every form of art imaginable to deliver its message.

Check out some of the photos below

For more visit Nariscuss’ sites:

• Deviantart: http://nariscuss.deviantart.com/
• Blog: http://narcissus.paper-rain.org/

I really love photomanipulation, with all the editing tools and techniques out there you can make any idea a reality.

HumanDescent is a photomanipulater whose wanting to get more into web designing. Checkout some of his work below or his sites here.