The Four Key Factors for Website Conversion

Before you start performing split and multivariate testing in order to improve your landing page conversion rate, there are several important factors to keep in mind.

Factor #1: Product Quality
The web can be a risky place to make a purchase. You can’t touch the product and look at it like you can when you’re out shopping at a store.

Nothing will undermine your conversion efforts faster than a crappy product. It’s extremely easy for unsatisfied customers to post scathing reviews on blogs and forums. Having to defend against a product that doesn’t meet expectations is a losing battle.

Understand that all your multivariate and sophisticated eye-tracking tests won’t mean a thing if you’re putting out a substandard product.

Factor #2: Product Demand Versus Supply
This is an area that can trip people up. You may assume that there is a need for a particular product, but unless you have proof of that demand, you’re better off moving on to something else.

How do you access product demand? You use a keyword research tool like Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery.

Keyword tools allow you to type in a search phrase and get an estimate of the demand for that keyword (how many people type it into the search engines within a fixed period of time) as well as the supply for that keyword (a measure of the competitiveness of the keyword).

Using a keyword research tool will tell you that writing an ebook on “Fishing” is a losing proposition. While the term “Fishing” is extremely popular, the competition for that keyword is enormous, making it virtually impossible to rank highly in the search engines.

However, the keyword phrase “ice fishing house plans” has a good search volume and very little competition. Writing an ebook on this topic is a much better idea and ranking in the top ten for this search term is very doable.

Before you create a product, do some keyword research to ensure your product is viable and has a low level of competition.

Factor #3: Unique Value Proposition
Every high-converting sales page succeeds at helping the customer reach their goals. In other words, you must be relevant to your web visitors. One powerful way of doing this is to spend some time defining your Unique Value Proposition or UVP.

A UVP isn’t a mission statement or a slogan. It’s a statement that answers the question “Why do I need to buy this?” If you can’t quickly communicate the answer to this question, you’ll never achieve a high-converting sales page.

Your UVP should be one of the first things your visitor sees. It must be concise, memorable, unique, and explain why the visitor needs to buy.

Factor #4: PREselling
As far as I can tell, the term “PREsell” was coined by Dr. Ken Evoy, a Canadian businessman and creator of the Internet company SiteSell.

Below is Ken’s own words about his PREselling concept.

“On the Net, effective PREselling creates a warm, ‘open-to-buy’ mindset in your target group and gets that important click-through to your monetization source (i.e., your order page, your merchant-partner’s sales site, your store, etc.). And PREsold visitors are much easier to convert into customers.

Successful PREselling content ‘works’ at several levels...

1) It has that ‘been there - done that’ voice and flair.

2) It has specific knowledge that comes from real experience.

3) It is supported by a depth of useful information -- good reference material plays an important part.

4) It is spun or positioned in a way that is uniquely yours. Furthermore, it is consistent, from page to page, from e-zine issue to issue, from week to month to year. And finally, it is for the customer, absolutely.”

You’ll find a lot of sales pages on the Net that really aren’t complete websites. Well, I suppose you could call them single-page websites, but all they are trying to do is sell a product.

Having a one-page site is not going to create that nice warm ‘open-to-buy’ mindset that Ken talks about above. In addition, the Search Engines are moving away from that single page model and looking for sites that provide more substantial value.

Here’s my recommendation. Build a complete business website that not only contains your sales landing pages, but provides lots of additional free content centered around the wants and needs of your target market.

Creating a small site that contains 25-30 content pages based around the theme of your products will do wonders to help PREsell to visitors. In addition, each of these content pages can (and should) be focused on additional profitable keywords that are related to the theme of your product or service. Over time, this will help to bring in even more natural organic traffic from the Search Engines.

By following these four basic factors for website conversion, you’ll be in a great position to naturally increase your website conversion rates.

Corte Swearingen has been a marketing professional for 20 years and is the creator of Small Business Marketing Tips and the Small Business Marketing Blog. He is also the author of Got Traffic, Now What?, a complete guide to increasing your landing page conversion rate.