5 Must-Haves For A Conversion Optimized Website

Why drive traffic to your website if you’re not converting it into paying customers?

Driving people to your website can be expensive and time consuming no matter how you do it. Whether you’re buying ads and see the direct cost upfront or doing SEO where the cost is your time, you want to make sure you get the most out of every visitor you bring to your site.

While some people suggest split testing everything, that doesn’t always work for every business. They just don’t get enough traffic to take meaningful measurements. That’s why I came up with this list of 5 elements every website should have, no matter the industry.

Clear, Single CTA

Quite a few websites have way too many CTA’s (call-to-action). People land on the site, but have no idea what they’re supposed to do.

When given too many options, people tend to just leave rather than make a choice. The choice is paralyzing.

In 1995, Sheena Iyengar did a study on what happens when there’s too many choices, using jams at a farmers market. Here’s what happened.

In a California gourmet market, Professor Iyengar and her research assistants set up a booth of samples of Wilkin & Sons jams. Every few hours, they switched from offering a selection of 24 jams to a group of six jams. On average, customers tasted two jams, regardless of the size of the assortment, and each one received a coupon good for $1 off one Wilkin & Sons jam.

Here’s the interesting part. Sixty percent of customers were drawn to the large assortment, while only 40 percent stopped by the small one. But 30 percent of the people who had sampled from the small assortment decided to buy jam, while only 3 percent of those confronted with the two dozen jams purchased a jar.

Get your CTA’s down to a few, and don’t paralyze people with what to do.

Testimonials

Testimonials are like gold to your business. A survey by BrightLocal shows just how important they are.

85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Getting testimonials from people on your site is proven to grow business. If possible, include a headshot of the reviewer. It builds trust and is much less likely to be viewed as a fake review.

About Page

Aside from your homepage, your About page is often the second most visited page on your site.

Why then is it often neglected, and left outdated? Most likely, people just don’t realize its importance.

Include information around how and why you started, and your overall mission with the company.

Phone Number & Address

If I’m buying a product, I want to make sure that if something goes wrong I’m able to get in touch with someone to fix it. I also want to make sure that the company I’m buying it from is legitimate.

Adding a phone number and an address to your site is a quick way to do both. Even if no one ever calls, just seeing the number helps users feel that if they need to they always have the option to call.

Blog

Keeping an updated blog is a good way to remind visitors that your company is still in business, and drive traffic to the site.

If people land on your site and see that it hasn’t been updated in 3 years, how are they to know you’re still open?

What elements do you think every website should have? Leave a comment below, I’d love to write a followup article.