Conversion Rate Optimization for Local Businesses
Your website is getting traffic, but growing your business is more than getting eyes on your product. Higher conversion rates generate more sales for the same amount of traffic you are currently receiving, so now is the time to employ some conversion rate optimization tactics to grow your local business.
What Is Your Conversion Rate?
Your conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who take action on an offer you present to them. Your physical location, industry, product, and target audience all factor into your ability to convert visitors into direct sales or leads. And there are varying degrees of difficulty in turning those leads into customers.
Conversion simply means you convinced someone to take an action you wanted them to take. Maybe you want website visitors to sign up for a newsletter, call for a demo, book an appointment, or answer a survey – all of these actions are measurable conversions that can lead to business growth.
Conversion Rate Optimization for Local Businesses
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is your strategy for creating an experience on your website that transforms visitors into customers. Conversions have different ways of being measured and how you prioritize your CRO tactics will depend on what you’re trying to achieve with your website.
Use resources like surveys and heat maps to find out what your websites visitors want to see and where they are engaging with your webpages. Google Analytics will show you what pages bring in your traffic and where they are dropping off your website.
Conversion rate optimization is focused on getting website visitors to take action so to understand what will work for your business, step into the shoes of your ideal customer:
Where do they live?
What local terms are they going to use to find what they want in their area?
Can they easily navigate your website?
Can they easily contact your business?
Are your Calls-to-Action promising something they want?
To determine the best conversion rate optimization tactics for your business, you need to first establish your baseline and then set a goal: Current Conversion Rate vs. Conversion Rate You Want to Achieve. With your data in hand and a goal in mind, you can create an optimization plan to start with.
4 Local Conversion Optimization Tips
Local businesses have smaller budgets, less staff dedicated to marketing, and fewer resources all around. But when you know how to optimize your website for SEO to get customers on your website and use CRO to convert that traffic into customers you can beat out local competition easily.
Get more traffic to your site and convert more visitors when you implement these local conversion optimization tips:
1. Create an In-Depth FAQ Page
Create in-depth FAQs pages – or just answer questions on your site Q&A-style. Not only will this help you convert more traffic, but it’s also more likely to get the right people to your site – the ones who know exactly what they’re looking for.
2. Make Your Site More User-Friendly
To get users to dig into your website and stay longer, include plenty of internal links to relevant services and products pages. Also provide an OBVIOUS way to contact someone immediately for more information when they are online, interested, and ready to buy.
3. Include Written Driving Directions
Providing old-school driving directions from major landmarks, highways, and points of interest creates LOCAL content that Google loves and reflect the language people use when searching for specific services in certain areas. Directions also let people on your website know exactly where you are when they are ready to make a purchase or an appointment.
4. Get More and More Reviews On and Off Your Website
Continuously gather customer reviews on a variety of sites and display the best ones on your website. This increases conversion in two ways: 1. People will arrive at your website near conversion because of reviews they have read. 2. People are less likely to leave your website to go look up reviews.
REMEMBER… none of these strategies will increase your local conversion rate if you don’t make it very clear what you want your visitors to do on every page, so have at least one clear call to action for every page.
Increasing Your Local Conversion Rate
Local conversion rate optimization is something you can start now. Test different tactics, measure results against your baseline, find what works for your business, and invest resources into high return activities that increase your conversion rate.
While SEO optimizes your website for search engines ranking, CRO is what turns those website visitors into real customers.
