It takes a lot of work to bring targeted traffic to your website, so you naturally want to make the most of it once you achieve click-through. What if you’re getting the right traffic, but stalling out once visitors reach your site?
If you’re experiencing high bounce rates or holdups in the conversion process, you need to figure out what’s going wrong so you can make changes that increase conversions. This means understanding the user experience in order to pinpoint problems that are creating hurdles and deterring desired actions.
How can you go about learning why users aren’t converting so you can turn the tables and achieve your goals? Here are a few strategies to implement.
Look at Your Website from User Point of View
When you visit a website as a user yourself, what are you hoping to find? What would make you go, stay, or convert? Most visitors to your website arrive there because they’re looking for something, and your ads or other SEO efforts have convinced them they’ll find it by clicking through. Why do they bounce or fail to convert? The simple answer is that you haven’t given them what they’re looking for.
If your SEO efforts are succeeding in bringing traffic to your website, but users fail to convert, you need to consider what, exactly, users are encountering. Do they find pertinent information on landing pages immediately? Do you have clear, compelling messaging and prominent, visible CTAs? Is navigation simple and intuitive? Is your layout attractive and engaging? How fast do pages load?
All of these factors play a role in the user experience, and you need to be aware of the impact your website has on visitors. Answering these basic questions will help you to find potential problem areas and correct them to improve the user experience and encourage conversions.
Utilizing the Right Metrics
Knowing how much traffic reaches your site won’t necessarily help you to understand why users aren’t converting, which is why you need to track and analyze suitable metrics to gain insight into what users are doing on your site and why. You can, for example, pay attention to how long they stay on a page, whether they visit additional pages, and even what they pay attention to as they peruse.
What can this data tell you? Tracking how users navigate your site could provide clues about whether you have information in the right place or if pathways to conversion are confusing, for example. When users bounce or abandon shopping carts, there’s no surefire way to know why, but you can certainly analyze metrics to see if there’s something you could be doing better.
Understand User Intent
In addition to cleaning up your pages to improve user experience, you need to take a serious look at the possible disconnect between your funnels and your landing pages. Your ads are funneling traffic to your site, but are they delivering the right message?
Just because you’ve chosen relevant keywords doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re conveying a clear message that tells users what they’ll find when they click through. You need to understand exactly what users think they’re going to find based on your ads.
It’s possible that the keywords you’re choosing are relevant to your content in a general way, but they could also be misconstrued as having a different meaning, and this is causing user disappointment because they’re seeking something you’re not really offering. When you address the disconnect between user intent and website content, you increase your chances to drive truly targeted traffic and convert.
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