4 Essential Elements to Building Your Business’ Bridge to Conversion

It’s one thing to get people’s attention towards your business, but what use is having all the recognition in the world if you can’t influence them to actually engage with your business? Once you’ve got them at your site, you need to give them a reason to stay there and click on a link to register an account, subscribe to a newsletter, order a product, or even just look around and find out more what it is you do.

But how do you accomplish this? Here are four fundamental elements that you need to build on to start getting conversions on your company website.

User Experience

How your target audience feels about interacting with your website is one of the very first things that you need to take into consideration. Your site needs to provide the information your visitors are looking for. It has to be easily navigable for different devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets, etc.), browsers and connection speeds while still maintaining a credible and compelling design that reinforces your business’ brand.

Having an in-house web developer and designer would greatly help in this aspect. Consulting freelance designers is a viable alternative, and sites like Elance and DesignCrowd are reliable resources for such a route.

When you’ve designed your website in a way that incorporates the aspects of usefulness, usability, reliability and design, you can expect people to enthusiastically engage and soon be converted into paying customers.

SEO Strategy

Although it does greatly help build awareness, a solid SEO strategy also works in the way of influencing conversions. Streamlining your site’s structure and link architecture doesn’t just help your SEO efforts, as it also directs your visitors’ focus towards your call-to-actions and makes for a smoother user experience which in turn helps your conversion rate.

Building links with high authority domains drives traffic and improves a site’s link profile for search engines leading to higher search rankings, but it’s only through a greater understanding of your analytics that you can use it to maximize conversions. Jason Acidre has an excellent post on using Google Analytics to uncover potentially good traffic sources and keywords which you can start building links on.

Social Media

When the average marketer thinks of social media, promotion is the first thing to come to mind. While this platform certainly works in that area, many fail to realize that social media’s strength comes in its ability to engage users. It’s the connections and conversation people look for in social media, and it’s one of the few channels that allows them to instantly communicate with businesses.

When your customers are liking, retweeting or sharing your content on social media, they are putting a stamp of approval on your business and associating their own identities with the ideas you’re spouting. When their own networks see their endorsement of your business, they will also be more likely to take an interest in what you’re offering. The potential for virality in social media also makes running contests and promos that encourage your target audience to engage much easier.

Customer Service

Increasing conversions isn’t all about getting your target audience to buy in to what you’re selling. You’ll want your first-time customers to continue patronizing your business, and to do that means fostering a relationship that addresses whatever issues they might have with your product/service. You will then need to give those customers ways to communicate their concerns such as opening a dedicated social media account for customer service or implementing live chat onto your website, and you will need the infrastructure to receive their questions and complaints and answer them in a timely manner.

By providing excellent customer service to your target audience, you are showing them that you care for them which is essential in creating a long-lasting relationship together. Not only do you get repeat business, you also create brand advocates that can help promote your company for you.

Develop these four areas as your foundation, and you’ll give your first-time visitors incentives to stay on your website, consume the information you’ve provided, and take the step towards sharing, subscribing, registering, and buying.

Author Bio: Writer, blogger (it’s different), and now content marketing specialist, Joseph Berida is all about making great content. He also loves to talk about video games in Kambyero. You can follow him on Twitter @ohthatjoseph.