Generate More Leads And Sales, Without Increasing Traffic Costs

Hi. It's Will Swayne from Marketing Results, and today I want to talk to you a little bit about the case for website conversion optimisation.

Most small business customers and business owners, when they're thinking about their website, focus on traffic generation, and that has been the overriding sort of theme of website marketing for the last 5, 10, 15 years. People are always thinking about how to get more traffic to their website, whether it be through pay per click, Google AdWords, organic SEO, or through social media or whatever.

This video is about the other side of the coin, which is conversion optimisation, in other words, making more of the current traffic that you already have. I'm going to show you a few slides and talk about a few issues as to why this is a good idea for you to start considering.

First of all, take a look at this slide. It shows that over the last five or six years, working with one particular client in pay per click. You'll see that, when we first started, the cost per click for this client was about $0.16. Lately, their cost per click has actually climbed up to $1.36. So it's the same click, it's just that now that click costs 800% of what it did 5 or 6 years ago.

Now, that's fine, but we now have to convert so much better in order to maintain profitability. So if you're using pay per click, you'll probably find that your cost per click is going up as well, and you need to look at your conversion rate in order to counteract that effect.

You also would have noticed that SEO is becoming more competitive. In the past, maybe in the last three or four years, it was possible to rank well if you had a well optimised website. You could rank well for 5 or 6 or 10 phrases in your market. Now, it's very hard to rank well for many competitive phrases. You might find that you can get one or two keywords, but you can't get a broad range of keywords, which is why conversion becomes even more important.

Another reason to consider conversion optimisation is that conversion optimisation represents the best opportunity for quick wins from your website, so in other words, getting a 20%, 30%, 40%, 50% gain from your website in a relatively short period of time, especially if your website is currently under-optimised.

So, when you're doubling your conversion rates, let's look at some of the benefits that you accrue. First of all, you actually cut your paid traffic bill in half. So the greater the conversion, the less effectively you pay for traffic, and you can save some money on that front, especially when traffic is costing quite a bit of money these days.

A second great benefit is that previously unprofitable traffic sources now become profitable. So you can actually tap into more traffic and grow your, I suppose, revenue and therefore your profit.

When you optimise your conversion rate, also the ROI from all your different traffic sources increases, you generate more revenue, and you now have a bigger war chest to actually pump back into traffic generation or improving your services on backend services and that sort of thing.

Often you can be in sort of an economical battle with your competitors and if your war chest towards traffic is small, then you will tend to be bitten by a competitor who has a high conversion rate, can access more traffic sources, and therefore can generate more revenue and run their economic sort of engine faster and harder than you can run your own engine.

Lastly, when you double your conversion rate, more affiliates and partners want to work with you. If you've ever done a promotion with an affiliate or a partner and your conversion rate is low, typically the partner gets a poor result and says, "Well, we tried and didn't go so well. So, you know, all the best."

If a partner works with you and they get a great result, they probably want to work with you again and more people will be attracted to working with you on a partnership or a host beneficiary basis. 

So that's a quick summary of why you should consider website conversion optimisation, and the idea is to start with your current reality, which might be point A, and gradually keep testing and trying new things in order to go through B, C, D, E, F and ratchet up your conversion rate on an ongoing basis.

Thanks for listening.