How to Refresh Your Website for Better Conversions in 2020

Organizations have started evaluating what worked in 2019 and are planning the course of action for 2020. As the new decade kicks-off in a few weeks, here is how you can refresh and upgrade your website to drive more conversions.

Marketers are always in the pursuit of optimizing the conversion rate of their website because, ultimately, it is conversions that help generate revenue. That’s why they are in constant pursuit to simplify the conversion funnel, implement innovative growth hacks, and onboard conversion rate optimization (CRO) specialists.

THE MODERN CONTENT MARKETER’S BUYER GUIDE

Welcome to the 2019 edition of The Modern Content Marketer’s Buyer Guide. About 10 years ago, marketers realized that content is a critical piece of their pie, and have since been working overtime to generate content to help win the prospect’s attention.

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Driving traffic to the website is a straightforward process, although not easy. But retaining visitors, guiding them through the marketing funnel, and converting them is a complex process. The reason is, there are plenty of factors at play, and you can’t pinpoint the reason unless you spend time analyzing user behavior.

In this article, we will look at a 3-step website refresh project plan, along with five actionable CRO tips to improve the conversion rate of your website.

The 3-step Website Refresh Project Plan

To prepare your website for conversions, you need to detect, diagnose, and debug conversion killers that prevent your visitors from becoming paying customers. The following 3-step process will help you fix what’s not working and optimize what’s working.

Step 1: Identify Website Traffic Drivers
 

Unless people are aware of your brand, they’ll mostly land on your website via search engine queries, social media updates, paid ads, third-party website backlinks among other traffic sources.

Not all visitors are the same, and neither are the traffic sources. Traffic sources provide insights into understanding different buyer intents. For instance, a search engine query is often a better purchase indicator compared to social media. Check your analytics tool to identify the keywords that visitors use to land on your website.

You also need to spend some time on pages with forms to find out traffic sources, keywords, time spent on page, goal completion rate, etc. This information will inform you about the motivations/intents and pain points of your target audience behind their website visits.

Learn More: The Dos and Don’ts of UX Design for Small Business

Step 2: Identify Conversion Killers
 

You can take the following two approaches to identify what prevents your visitors from completing the conversion process:

1. Website Funnel Analysis: Using features likes Funnel Visualization and Goal Flow in Google Analytics, you can view pages where the maximum drop-off occurs. Check these pages for thin content. Thin content is content that offers little to no value. Such pages are detrimental to the conversion rate of your website, and you can resolve them by either updating or deleting them.
2. Qualitative Analysis: You can analyze your pages using visual, qualitative analytics tools such as heatmaps, form reports, and session recordings to identify where your visitors get stuck. Is the content too hard to read, or a technical glitch is rendering the form obsolete? Resolve all such hindrances that take visitors away from your website.
    

Step 3: Optimize Conversion Facilitators
 

Now, some pages on your website might have a good conversion rate. You can observe user behavior by implementing visual analytics tools on these pages. For example, heatmaps and session recordings reports tell you which areas receive maximum attention. Analyze the content and form behavior in these areas and create a hypothesis to test it out on low performing pages.

Experiment by running A/B tests on these pages to check their validity and scale such changes across the website to boost the overall performance.s

Learn More: Is It Time to Rethink Corporate Websites — Again?

5 CRO Tips to Refresh Your Website

Get started with your CRO efforts with the following five tips:

1. Prioritize User Experience (UX)
 

Your website’s UX plays a pivotal role in deciding whether a visitor fills out the form or leaves your site. Here’s how you can ensure that they choose the former:

1. Fitts’ Law: Paul Fitts, a US-based psychologist, proposed the eponymous law, Fitts’ Law, that predicts the time required to move to a target area is a function of the division of the distance and width of the target. Which means call-to-action (CTA) buttons with a larger width will have a better click-through rate (CTR)
2. Design Forms Carefully: The number of form fields should follow the stage of the buyer journey. A simple technique to implement this is to increase the form fields as the buyer progresses through the funnel. So, a form for the awareness stage could have 2 to 3 fields, whereas a prospect might have to fill in an elaborate form.
    

  2. Address Obsolete Pages
 

Certain website pages either don’t bring any traffic or serve no utility. A high bounce rate on these pages can devalue your  search engine rankings. Therefore, it is necessary to resolve this issue as soon as you notice it. Here are four ways to deal with obsolete content:

1. Update the outdated content with the latest stats, facts, and findings to make it relevant
2. If it comes under the category of thin content, rewrite it to make it engaging
3. Combine/consolidate two or more content pieces into one
4. Delete content that has no purpose
    

3. Make Your Website Mobile-friendly
 

A mobile-friendly website no longer means a mobile-responsive one. It also needs to perform well on mobile devices in terms of speed too! Ensure that your mobile website is optimized for speed and loads without sweating time. And if you don’t address this issue, Google is making provisions on Google Chrome to let mobile users know about it.

4. Show, Don't Tell
 

Social proof is a powerful persuader, and that’s why c-commerce websites encourage users to leave ratings and reviews for their products. Buyers may have thousands of questions about the brand and its offerings, and they’re looking for real users to vouch for the business.

You can overcome any questions or objections buyers may have in the following two ways:

1. Provide case studies during the interest, consideration, and action stages of the funnel to let them understand how your offerings can help them resolve their pain points
2. Highlight testimonials of your biggest clients on the landing page as a trust signal
    

5. Remember the Paradox of Choice
 

More choices don’t simplify decision making. They rather lead to confusion. Keep fewer options as possible to reduce the time required to make a decision. In his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less, American psychologist, Barry Schwartz proposes that eliminating unwanted choices can reduce anxiety among shoppers.

Successful landing pages implement this principle. High-converting B2B pages provide only one CTR and don’t contain navigation, links, or anything that would potentially distract user. Similarly, e-commerce websites use “Add to Cart” and “Buy Now” buttons for goal completion.

Learn More: Your #1 Goal Should Be Providing the Best Digital Experience—Here’s How

Closing Words

CRO is a data-driven activity rooted in experimentation, and the one-size-fits-all approach won’t bring you much success. Use the plan laid out in the article as a framework, run multiple A/B tests, and improvise on the tips mentioned to see what works for you!

What are your CRO goals for 2020? Let us know on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.