Traffic is Vanity, Conversions are Sanity

How an effectively designed website really does make a difference to brand trust and conversions

In today’s digital world the first thing most people often see, or will head to, is your website.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Google Adwords ‘Pay Per Click’ (PPC) are invaluable tools when it comes to improving brand awareness and search engine visibility but wonder why there is sometimes no new business as a result of it. That’s because Traffic is Vanity and Conversions are Sanity.

Take a look at these two websites…

AppleSiteOld

AppleSiteNew

Which one are you more likely to trust?

Everyone knows who the second site is (its Apple); now what if I told you the first site is also Apple’s.We all hate to admit it but everyone judges everything by first appearances, it’s human nature. So when our website works like it was designed for 1997 you can’t be surprised when all those visits don’t convert.

Luckily there are tools available to us all, the most common of which is Google Analytics, which allows us to research our website users’ behaviours and monitor the conversion paths. If you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your website then you should, IT’S FREE!

When a customer lands on your website it has to (albeit subconsciously) answer 5 questions almost immediately:

  • Do you offer the service I need?

  • Can I trust you?

  • Where is the proof? – Either by way of case studies, customer testimonials or brand.

  • How do I buy/get-a-proposal/download?

  • Look and Feel - According to a Stanford University study, 46% of conversions are lost because the user loses trust in the brand, based on the websites look and feel.

Hubspot published a cool article "7 Habits of a Highly Effective Landing Page" on creating effective landing pages which would answer all of those questions.

Clear Call to Action

It seems obvious but many websites don’t drive a user down a path which results in the businesses desired outcome. You may receive a few thousand visitors a month, but if there is no clear call to action then you are potentially missing out on a few hundred enquiries.

You need to make the conversion funnel obvious. One reason shops put their tills on the left and at the back are so that we follow a predefined path, through the clothes, before buying. They understand their conversion funnel and they maximise on it!

…And this is all before you may have considered that the UK have the largest ratio of smart phone users, and that your website should probably be smart phone friendly, but that’s for another day!

…And yep! Apple has an app for that too!

Apple Mobile

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