Most business owners are primarily focused with getting more traffic to their pages.
It’s not hard to see why. After all, more traffic means more visitors discovering your business. Which then potentially translates to more focus. But simply focusing on traffic generation ignores one vital aspect of every website: Conversions.
Traffic is not always the answer to increasing sales, although it’s certainly a part of it. If one person out of every thousand visitors makes a purchase on average, your site has a conversion problem. In other words, visitors are leaving as quickly as they are arriving.
The question is why.
Reasons for a low conversion rate include:
- Outdated website design
- Slow loading pages
- Not mobile-friendly
- No clear call to actions
- Complex navigation
- Spammy content
Any of these factors could be turning visitors away, potentially costing your business in lost sales. If conversions are low, the priority then needs to be on why. The following looks at how you can increase conversions on your local landing pages with a few tweaks.
1. Make Mobile a Priority
Companies must learn to adapt to emerging technologies or risk losing a competitive advantage.
Perhaps the most important now in regards to consumer behavior is mobile usage. Online traffic from mobile devices have now overtaken traffic from desktop devices according to data from comScore.
Mobile plays an even greater role in local search more than half of all smartphone searches while performed on the go have local intent. Consumers expect a mobile friendly experience and are more likely to leave it fails to meet their expectations.
Optimize for mobile devices to improve conversions.
2. Consider Website Loading Times
Loading time matters.
And it can have a huge impact on your bottom line.
Studies on site speeds have shown that 47% of visitors expect a page to load in two seconds or loss. And 40% will exit a page if they have to wait longer than three seconds. So what impact does site speed have on conversions?
The following chart from TagMan paints a better picture:
Visitors on the go have little patience for sites that take too long to load and will not hesitate to leave to a competing page.
3. Consider Your Call to Actions
As previously mentioned, more than half of mobile searches done on the go have local intent. What is even more interesting is that 34% of consumers who performed a local search on a desktop or tablet visited a store within a day. That number is even higher for mobile searches on the go.
Why is this important?
Because local searches typically have a clear purpose. The searcher is looking for specific information such as business hours or contact details and simply doesn’t have the time to sort through reams of data.
This is why call to actions are so important.
These are buttons that guide visitors on the next steps to take (e.g. making a purchase, calling a number, downloading a guide, etc.). Add a call to action on your landing pages with relevant copy that explains the benefits and features of your products or services. Then measure the results by performing a split test.
4. Display Business Information
Nothing is more frustrating than landing on a site that doesn’t have any contact information. Visitors would be unable to call the business or input the address into their GPS. If your business focuses on a local area, make sure that your NAP is clearly visible on all pages.
NAP refers to the business name, address, and phone number. Including this information is also beneficial from a local SEO standpoint and should be included on local business pages such as Yelp. Local citations are actually a ranking factor and can help improve your visibility in the search results.
Conclusion
Traffic is vitally important to increase sales. But numerous factors could be affecting conversions from a poorly designed to a confusing navigation structure. If you have questions regarding your local landing page conversion rate please contact us and let us walk you through your website improvements.
Perhaps the most important is ensuring that your site is mobile-friendly. Otherwise you risk losing visitors to competing sites that are optimized for all devices. Equally important is to include a call to action on your landing pages and to ensure that business information (NAP) is clearly visible. By making the tweaks as detailed above, you can considerably increase conversions to your local site.