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Every click on your website matters. However, clicks are just missed sales opportunities if they aren’t converting. 

Your website’s ability to convert is a sign that it’s working for your business. Otherwise, it’s just a costly marketing expense. 

Conversion can be seen not only as a sale but as any action that involves a user leaving their contact information with you to inquire, make an appointment, or try a free demo. If they’re not doing any of these things on your website, then you need to go back to the drawing board and look deeper into what’s causing the problem and use some conversion rate optimization (CRO) techniques like those shared below.

Use Data to Identify Missed Sales Opportunities

Big data has been helping businesses automate sales, create smarter email campaigns, and optimize pricing strategies, among others. But customer analytics and insights aren’t limited to large data sets. You can still extract patterns and trends from your website to identify areas for missed sales opportunities. 

How do you do it? We’ll share that with you!

1. Perform an SEO Audit

It’s crucial to learn how to do an SEO audit because this process makes it easier for your business to reach your target audience and avoid missing out on sales.

The audit tells you what you’re doing wrong, what makes your website weak, where you need to improve, and it also tells you what you’re doing right — which means more website visitors and sales.

You can’t expect a weak body to do the heavy lifting. So, before diving deeper, do a full check-up and conduct a website SEO audit. 

An SEO audit tool can provide you with a comprehensive audit report that not only identifies red flags but can also give you recommendations to improve performance. Examples include:

• Website Analytics
• On-page SEO
• Technical SEO
• SEO Reporting

2. Check the Bounce Rate and Exit Page

Detecting the last interaction from a user with your website is valuable because it offers insights into their behavior: what the user is looking for, what made the user leave, and what the user didn’t find. That last page is called the ‘Exit Page’.

The ideal goal would be for the user to exit your website after making a purchase or signing up. The opposite of that is for a user to exit your page without even interacting with your website first.

High exit rates from any page other than your “thank you” pages, could mean missed sales opportunities. This means that many of these pages can’t convert customers, and they may be the culprit for missed sales.

Understand which pages on your website have the highest exit rate. Identifying these pages can go a long way toward increasing conversions. It means that these pages are of interest to people, but some elements need to be changed or replaced for them to complete a conversion.

Some elements to investigate include:

• Weak call to action (CTA)
• Weak homepage or lack of direction
• The sign-up form or form fields are too complicated
• Lack of high-quality content or value proposition
• The page may be too confusing (poor user experience/usability)
• Mobile optimization (for those that view via mobile device)
• Lack of customer reviews/testimonials/social proof
• Payment methods are limited

Similarly, you have the bounce rate. This is the percentage of visitors that leave a webpage without doing anything, like clicking a link or filling out a form. Bounce rate is the percentage of all sessions on your site where the users only viewed a single page.

A high bounce rate means that the user doesn’t have a good impression of the page they landed on. Whether it’s because of loading speed or web design, pages with high bounce rates should be optimized.

For load speed, optimize images by uploading small file sizes instead of the original file size. Image optimization will help decrease the workload on the bandwidth. The goal should be to keep users scrolling, clicking links, and staying on the site.

3. Check Website Traffic and Evaluate Traffic Value

You probably have hundreds of pages on your website, and some of them may attract more traffic than others. It’s important to know which pages these are because they will have greater sales and conversion potential. Here are some of the best SEO tools to help you identify these pages. 

You may be putting your marketing budget on a page that doesn’t have the potential to deliver. Similarly, you can use Google Search Console (GSC) and manually check which of your web pages are performing best and which queries people are using to find these pages. 

Simply go to your GSC dashboard, click the performance tab on the sidebar and click pages to see which ones are getting the most traffic. Analyze if it’s the kind of page that can push users to convert, then decide if you should activate Google Ads and allocate a budget for it.

4. Google Tag Manager

If your website relies heavily on form completion, then using Google Tag Manager will allow you to track forms and analyze them. Make sure that the GTM code you put in is tracking the right page.

Imagine funneling a potential customer down to the point where they’re ready to convert, only to have them leave the page because something about the form was not to their satisfaction.  

Here are some things you need to avoid:

• Long and complicated forms
• Questions that are irrelevant and will only frustrate the reader
• Unresponsive design (opt-in forms, CTA buttons, etc)
• Advertising through pop-ups

5. Website Conversion Rate via Organic Search

Conversion via organic search, or unpaid search, is an effective way to achieve higher sales. 

You can compute your website’s conversion rate by dividing the number of converted users by the total number of users within a certain period. Setting it up first in Google Analytics is necessary, so you can acquire the data over time. 

Go to Google Analytics, select Admin, then, select Goals from the third column, and then select + New Goal. Give your new goal a name, and choose the web page that you want to track by marking the choice for Destination in the “Goal Description” form.

Then place the link to the landing page where the user will go after they complete the goal. This can be as simple as a “Thank You” page.

Always check back and see how many conversions you have in a month as part of testing your marketing campaigns. If your not gradually getting higher conversion rates, then it’s time to tweak the elements in it. You can begin by implementing some A/B tests to see what works best.

We typically use marketing automation tools, like Hubspot, to track A/B testing metrics and improve our conversion funnel.

Like most marketing operations processes, this one will involve some trial and error. You can first tweak the messaging and CTA. If it’s still not doing anything to push up your conversion rate, then it’s time to do some major updates to the page.

Turn Your Website into a Marketing Machine

Information is power for marketers and businesses. When it comes to meeting your sales targets, that powerful information can come from your website. Using these patterns and trends to turn your website into your best “salesperson” is the key to a winning marketing strategy. 

Make sure that it’s optimized to produce a good conversion rate to make the most of your resources and your bottom line. Leverage your website data to eliminate missed sales opportunities and increase conversion rates. Leave no stone unturned and seek expert help if you want to maximize results.

Itamar Gero is the founder of SEOReseller.com, a digital marketing solutions provider that empowers agencies and their local clients all over the world. When he isn’t working, he’s traveling the world, meditating, or dreaming (in code).

Topics: B2B Marketing, Digital Marketing, Sales Enablement, Web Design