“If you build it, they will come” is a catchphrase that was made famous in the movie “Field of Dreams.” It implies that if you provide something valuable and people can use it, they will do so. Unfortunately for many website owners, this isn’t true. Most websites don’t make money, and this article explains why, and what’s needed to change this trend.
The fact is that the majority of websites out there only convert about 1-2% of website visitors into customers.
That’s a horribly low number.
If you had 100 people visit your website in a month (which would be very optimistic for many SMBs) that would mean 1 or 2 of those people MIGHT actually contact you.
From there you’d better be hope that:
- You sell to every single person who contacts you and;
- Your average invoice value is sky high.
If not then it’s unlikely your business will survive on such a small volume of leads.
But why are the conversion rates so low anyway?
Web designers great at making sites pretty
Most web designers can make a beautiful website, but they don’t know a thing about converting traffic.
The fact is there are a LOT of people out there who can “design” a website.
But there’s a big difference between building a website that looks beautiful, and one that actually converts traffic into customers.
You could have the most beautiful website on the planet but if it doesn’t convert, is it worth anything at all?
How to make a website that converts
So what do you do if you actually want your website to make money?
The first thing you need is data.
The amount of websites floating around on the internet that don’t have any analytics installed is simply mind blowing.
As the old saying goes “if you can’t find it, you can’t fix it”.
Free software like Google Analytics will track everything and provide the raw data that’s needed to figure out how to make improvements to a website.
Once you have the data, then you have to actually be able to interpret the numbers to figure out which direction to take.
“most web designers can make a beautiful website, but they don’t know a thing about converting traffic.”
– Stuart Brown
Is the contact page taking 20 seconds to load?
Do people always leave the site when the visit the pricing page?
Are people clicking mindlessly around the website because they can’t find the phone number?
These are all questions which can be identified by looking at the data, and then further analysis and testing enables us to improve performance over time.
Conversion optimisation
This process is known as conversion optimisation, and it’s the reason why our websites convert about 17 times more traffic than the average site out there.
It’s a very un-sexy part of website design, but it’s the part that actually makes the business money.
Choose your own (website) adventure
Finding the right company to build (or rebuild) your website can be a daunting task.
But aside from aesthetics, ask what conversion rates their websites typically achieve.
Many will provide nothing more than a blank expression since clients generally don’t ask those kind of questions.
You’ll know what to do if that happens.
Of course if you’d like to skip the arduous selection process, then feel free to contact us to talk about your website project instead.
