You’ve owned a website for some time. Perhaps you sell products via your blog or offer information for the price of a little data. It might be a site that links all of your other marketing channels to a shopping cart hub. Or is simply a way to contact people and tell them your point of view.

A conversion – in its simplest terms – is getting your website visitors to do what you want them to do. All your marketing campaigns are ultimately geared to the conversion. A conversion could be defined as a new follower, an existing visitor sharing your article via social media, the purchase of a product or service, collection of user data, or clicks and further navigation through your site. Most websites have more than one type of conversion goal that takes the visitor through the funnel, from signing up for a newsletter, to registration, to sale, for example.

There are three important factors when it comes to making conversions via a website, and these factors are all equally crucial:

• User Experience
• User Numbers
• User Relevance

1.User Experience

It’s not so easy to put yourself in the shoes of your visitor – your potential conversion. We all have an idealised view of who we think should land on our site and how many of this type of person will want what our website offers. But it doesn’t matter how perfect your offering is if the basics of easy navigation and attractive design aren’t there.

User experience – UX – involves everything that affects how a visitor engages with your website. Your users grade their experience according to the value of what you offer them, the functionality of that product, the ease of its use, and its level of enjoyment. When getting conversions, UX must be integrated throughout your shop window – the website itself.

2.Value

Value comes in many forms. Authoritative and true information is – and will remain for many years to come – the leading marketing strategy for long-term SEO goals. This means not hiding the fine print from view; business transparency counts. Trust is essential – if your visitor cannot trust what he or she reads on your website, how can you expect them to convert?

There are different ways for a website to be useful to its visitors, and for every one of these, trust is central. If a visitor does not trust the information on your site there are plenty of competitors to choose from.

A website becomes of use because::

• It fills a material gap
• It is emotionally stirring
• It solves a problem

3.Functionality

Website functionality means no 404s, no broken links, universal fonts that don’t shut anyone out, low down-time (so make sure you select the appropriate hosting service), the ability to cope with peak traffic times, accessibility to people with visual or hearing impairments, animations or even landing pages that don’t take forever to load. One in four people will abandon a website that needs more than 4 seconds to load; a 1 second delay reduces customer satisfaction by 16%. These are just two of the countless UX functionality variables that can tangibly affect your conversion rate.

Ease of Use

Ease of use or useability sees humans as extremely lazy individuals. It is up to your website to cater to the demands of the world’s worst couch potato. A user does not want to have to do anything that requires effort in order to get value from your pages. The biggest proof of this is the percentage of abandoned shopping carts every eCommerce website must face at every minute of every hour of every day. The average cart abandonment rate is just under 70%, with mobile devices experiencing a depressing rate of over 85%. The reasons may be trust issues (hidden shipping costs that only show up later on), the requirement to register rather than just buy as a guest, too much form filling, external distractions…the list goes on.

Ease of use also includes how large or small your buttons are, the number of pages on your website, how easy it is to access information and in which languages your content is available. Yet again, the variables are countless. These variables also translate across the board of marketing channels. Rank your Etsy listing by redirecting your website traffic to your storefront and always keep in mind that redirects should only need to put in the minimum effort at any step. Bring your visitor to the appropriate product rather than to the homepage equivalent of the Etsy shop or – even worse – to the Etsy homepage and so allow visitors to check out the competition first.

Level of Enjoyment

Your website should be a pleasure to use. Not only does this accentuate all of the above factors, it broadens your horizons for increasing traffic. Even non-targeted users can be persuaded to convert when your website is engaging and fun. With serious, high-level engineering websites, for example, the integration of blogs written in layman terms could make your website a go-to source of information for people who may not convert but who will drive your online presence up the Google search engine results pages. The domino effect will mean it then becomes easier for converting commercial clients to find you.

Imagery that does not affect loading speeds or depend on low-quality stock photographs might be a factor, especially when you offer creative solutions and products. Whether you host ads for other companies or not could affect visitor engagement levels; your level of security can affect their enjoyment, too. Even something as everyday as a cookie popup can turn off your public – ones that don’t allow a visitor to reject cookies can seem untrustworthy; those with tiny close buttons might alienate any potential conversion with thick fingers.

User Numbers

Obviously, the more people who come into contact with your user-friendly website the better. If you don’t have a top-level website to back you up, there’s no point in asking the masses to land on it. Even non-targeted audiences increase popularity statistics that boost your SEO investment; they may not convert but have other uses such as increasing brand awareness, sharing opportunities, data for further analyses and expansion into other lucrative channels. Social media marketing is certainly never to be ignored. In fact, linking a website to multiple social media accounts has become a priority for all forward-thinking businesses.

To drive user numbers where sharing and data is not a goal – such as making the Google algorithm believe you are a popular source – it is now possible to buy traffic bot software with various options. Virtual visitors bump up numbers and remain on pages for pre-allocated timespans. Some of the better bot traffic generators can produce clicks for PPC websites.

Every marketing strategy looks at increasing visitor numbers. Backlinks and guest posts, SEO, social media sharing buttons, ads and content are designed to bring in new blood – all of which (apart from bot traffic) has the potential to convert.

User Relevance

Finally, by targeting your public you increase the chance of conversion. Again, website quality is paramount. If your customer journey is more interesting, easy, informative, transparent (read trustworthy) and relevant than that of your competition, you have the greater chance of conversion.

Visitor targeting, however, is a complex science. Do all dog owners want to buy kibble online? What locations are inside your free shipping zone? Into what languages has your website been translated?

Looking at the dog kibble example, this heavy product might not be worth advertising to people living on another continent unless you have local suppliers. If you do happen to have, for example, a South America local supplier willing to offer low delivery prices, is your website available in Spanish? Do you target only dog owners (sounds obvious) or extend your potential target to cat owners  – after all, many animal lovers have more than one type of pet and data may be biased to whichever forms these people have taken the time to fill in. Do you concentrate on Millennials, of whom 73% own pets in the US, or extend your budget to include the Silent Generation (people aged over 70) who own 6% of the total number of pets in the US but might appreciate door-to-door kibble delivery more than mobile populations?

The same marketing strategies apply to generating increasing numbers of targeted visitors as with undifferentiated traffic. You cannot ignore search engine optimization or social media marketing. This time, you focus on a specific public. There’s a rapid way to target visitors that convert, too. Buy website traffic from a reputable supplier that allows you to pick location, age group(s) and countless target niches. Many professional marketing agencies also use this type of traffic to collect data that might point their strategies toward other, less obvious targets. A CareerBuilder survey in 2010 showed that dog owners are more likely to be professors, nurses, IT professionals and machine operators in the US. So testing the reactions and conversion rates of these niches by buying thousands of nursing or IT visitors and analyzing their reactions could provide additional lucrative targets.

Continuously Test and Analyze

Nothing is static in the online world. Technology changes and local or global events change the marketing environment – sometimes for good. It pays to constantly assess and reassess your online presence and marketing strategies.

400;”>Small businesses and startups might begin by asking friends and family to visit a newly-designed and hosted website. Make sure to tell them to be very harsh in their critique. Offering freebies for new visitors to fill in an evaluation form can provide a great foundation for how your website looks and is extremely relevant to your particular pages.

Many digital services provide a large testing and evaluation public that increase your insights on a much larger scale and so help make future changes more attractive to the people you target.

Whatever your plans, the three pillars should always be placed at the forefront. A user-friendly site with large numbers of targeted visitors will always produce the highest conversion rates.