Stephen Covey’s book ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ became a bestseller and is still valued today.  His book became a multimillion dollar bestseller because it gave people a simple formula of becoming highly effective by adopting only 7 habits. It became unavoidable because the idea was very unique and sense of novelty in a product always attracts customers.

The main purpose of building a website is also to attract more customers. Bigger businesses have the ease that comes with bigger budgets and they can afford to place ads and utilize other expensive methods to get customers.  Small businesses don’t have this luxury.

However, every business once started from scratch and grew with time and effort. The best businesses thrive because they kept their ‘consumer’ in mind. As a small business website, this should be your aim and goal - to attract the attention of a potential customer and convert them into a paying customer. 

Keep A/B testing:

As a website owner, you may assume that your pages are doing just fine for everyone. Assuming is not going to benefit your site’s conversion rates because it is extremely important to know what the user thinks. For this purpose, you need to run split tests on your most important pages. A/B testing or split testing is the process of trying two different things on the same page and projecting it to the users at the same time. The results achieved by these tests are checked to see which page converted better. It is going to tell you a lot about user choices and their preferences on your website.

Therefore, the most important page you should test is the landing page. Keep adding new elements and check them to see how they convert. The viral video site Upworthy is a good example in this case. Almost all of the stories on Upworthy go viral. They’ve built a thriving business online which is loved by common users due to its uniqueness. However, it wasn't built in a day. The company tested everything since day one; site- headlines, content, site performance, you name it.

As they improved and grew a subscriber base, they kept realizing new stuff like performance based on high activity on the site or content placement according to priority. They grew their conversions by 28% and the social engagement of the site also grew many folds.

Add trust signals:

This is not just for visual appeal, but also for the benefit of your business credibility. If your target audience trusts your website based on trust signs, they will feel more comfortable in sharing their personal details with you. Another great way is to include testimonials and opinions from prominent people in the industry about your business and services. Customers like to get some assurance before they spend money on your product or service. You can showcase your awards, site certifications, and accreditations either in the top or bottom bar, as creatively as you can.

Don’t fake testimonials. It can hurt your business reputation. Fake testimonials or trust signs can be spotted and will not make your current or future business endeavors look good to people at all.

Install live chat:

You should always have excellent customer service for your clients because it helps in retaining existing customer base. Business websites add forms and phone numbers to help people reach out to them for feedback and queries. Live chat on the website has emerged as a new way of communication and is a great customer service tool. When you have a live agent ready to solve a query of the user right at the moment, the user can most likely convert into a customer.

Many website owners believe that live chat is only good for e-commerce websites which sell items like shoes and beauty supplies. It surely is a good e-commerce conversion tool, but every website can benefit from it.

Imagine a travel reservation site with live chat features. It can help customer queries about reservations in a minute. People can make better decisions without scourging the website for long periods on their own. Many of these services have integrations with smartphones, so a traditional business model can also benefit from website conversions. It is a very low-cost option that can show great results.

Record visitor activity:

First of all, you should have Google Analytics installed on your website. It becomes the eyes and ears of the website. Analytics information can come in handy when you are making a weekly or monthly report about conversions. Google Analytics can tell you if a major element on the site is not converting at all, and if a minor element is converting more people. You can use this information to make positive changes.

By fully understanding your Google Analytics data, you can reduce the budget distributed to poorly converting traffic sources, and scale up your marketing towards the things which are converting more users.

You can also record the activity of users on your website by deciphering where they clicked and scrolled the most. This is called heatmapping and you can get help from Crazyegg. It will not only record clicks but also show the referral sources and how far down the site people browse. Heatmaps determine the majority areas where your users like to click and hover around on the site. This data is very important for studying which channel is converting the most. You can’t just add one ebook or a promo and think that people will start converting right away. There has to be controlled monitoring for a greater conversion rate.

Run a conversion audit:

Have you designed a website which is a conversion magnet? Every web developer and designer thinks that the websites they create are beautiful enough to attract leads, but that is not always true.

It’s because these people aren’t conversion rate specialists. That’s when a conversion audit comes in handy. Just audit the whole website for conversions and compile the data to analyze. Before you launch any marketing campaigns,  gather as much information about your website’s performance as you can. Then, you can use this information to turn your website into a true lead magnet.

Last word:

You will only attract more conversions if you keep learning and improving. The first version of your site can’t be the perfect one for conversions. If you are a Wordpress user, you can check out these 40 plugins that convert more, or you can look at these different tips and reviews that can help you to attract more leads for your site.