Is Your Website a Conversion Machine?

The business end of the year is here! Q4, or the fourth quarter of the year is my favourite time. I've seen so many businesses implement and execute killer strategies for Q4, increasing conversions and skyrocketing revenue. Unless you run a seasonal business that sees spikes in business during specific months of the year, Q4 is a crucial time for you to buckle down and get to work.

Where do you start? Here's the thing -- you can do all the ad campaigns in the world but still not get the return you're hoping for if your website doesn't measure up. So I want to know, is your website a conversion machine?

What's a conversion machine?

Building a conversion machine simply means creating a hub of attraction and conversion. Is your website there yet? Ask yourself these questions to find out:

• Is your website built on the principles of Inbound Marketing?
• Is your website fully optimized? Does it provide a friction-less opportunity for conversions?

A conversion machine features a website designed to satisfy not only the visitors but also the search engines by optimizing for both User Experience (UX) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Doing this would ensure a seamless purchase path for the visitors and higher Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) rankings as well

3 parts of the Conversion Machine

1. Building a super powered Website Engine: To power the online marketing efforts of your business, your website needs to be built on a conversion-centric web architecture. Ask yourself:
   1. Is your website a lead generation mechanism or just a static information brochure?
   2. Is the website customer-centric?
   3. Do you have engaging content for the visitors?
   4. Do the website pages download quickly?
   5. How seamless is the website navigation?
   6. Does the website provide different experiences for new visitors, returning visitors, leads and existing customers?
2. Fueling consumer connections with Content: Your website engine needs fuel to run. Content is that fuel. Just like a car engine, even a website engine needs to be refueled from time to time. And filling it up with premium content often creates higher levels of engagement.

Some examples of premium content are as below

1. Informative blog posts
2. White papers
3. E-books
4. Online tools
5. Videos
6. Webinars

Publishing meaningful content of a regular basis encourages attraction and engagement

3. Creating a seamless buying experience: If the website is the engine for the conversion machine and content is its fuel, then the lubrication in creating a well-oiled machine are you Call-to-Action (CTA) Maps. Having the right CTA’s for every page, and well-defined and organized CTA maps increase fluid user flow by allowing prospects to easily and intuitively navigate through your online structure.

By following these simple steps, you are essentially optimizing the buying experience. The last aspect I want to cover here, after you have taken care of the above 3 points, is Testing. Test all your attraction and conversion points. Here's why:

• Testing ensures that the website/campaign you built works
• Testing helps you discover which CTA works best
• Optimization without testing is not possible

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Aseem is a Marketer with more than a decade of Corporate and Digital Marketing experience with global brands such as Vodafone and Tata. He is an expert in Inbound and Data Driven Marketing with a proven track record in customer value management, life cycle management and digital content distribution on various platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. Follow him on Instagram: @travel_eat_click_repeat.