Sales are the ultimate goal of every business. And to reach that final goal, many steps are employed such as investing in marketing to raise brand awareness as well as optimizing SEO to drive more traffic to the business’s website. Despite great efforts, many businesses find themselves in the scenario of attracting much traffic to their web pages, but failing to yield the desired sales amount from it. So why is it? In this article, let’s find out the roots of this issue along with the best suggestions to improve your website’s conversion rate to get more sales.
I. Why am I Getting Much Traffic but No Sales?
Targeting the wrong SEO keywords
One possible cause for why your traffic fails to be converted into sales is because it doesn’t come from the buyers, but rather the information searchers. To understand this better, let’s look at the keyword types in SEO. Behind each keyword is a different customer intent such as informational intent, navigational intent, or purchase intent. Please refer to this article to glean more helpful insights on SEO keyword research
Attracting a lot of traffic from informational or navigational keywords will not help you generate many sales because the customer just wants to look for information and doesn’t have the intention to buy yet. It’s keywords with purchase intent that have high conversion rates and can help you boost sales.
So take a look at your top ranking keywords on Google to see what customer intent is behind them and what type of visitors it is attracting. Doing this might help you figure out why your traffic is doing great while sales goals are failing.
The quality of your content
Once customers have entered your site, what makes them stay longer and might make a purchase is the content that your site serves. You can measure the quality of your content with the metrics provided by Google Analytics which consists of:
Engagement rate: the number of visitors to your website and leave without seeing another page.
Pages/session: the average number of pages a person views in a given session
Session Duration: the average time a visit to your website is.
And other metrics
The reason why your content might fail to make conversions is it doesn’t properly solve customers’ queries. Maybe it stems from the articles being general, lacking attractive highlights and other factors.
Poor Design and UI
Today’s customers are often more skeptical and they will often research the website as well as the company behind the product before actually making a purchase. Therefore, a website with an unprofessional design and interface could undermine the trust of users, thereby reducing the possibility of making sales.
Some common mistakes that websites could make in the interface design process are font Fiascos (too many fonts or off-brand fonts), stuffing too much information, having long and unnecessary Forms, improper color themes, or failing to optimize the website’s design on mobile browsers.
Complex Navigation
Another reason that might make customers leave your site before making a purchase is a complicated website’s navigation. Imagine visiting a website and facing numerous choices of where to click or which page to enter next. This kind of uncertainty will discourage customers from staying on your site any longer.
When it comes to navigation items, research has shown that 7 is the ideal number, and due to humans’ memory, the less, the better. Besides, one reason why users might leave your site early is that they’re not provided with the next steps. This is especially true for new site visitors who are unfamiliar with your site structure.
So why not provide them with follow-up steps to make sure they stay longer and have a more complete customer experience? The longer they can go in the customer journey, the more likely you can reach your sales goals. For example, you can provide the next product or next collection suggestions for your site visitors once they’ve finished the current page.
Abandoned Shopping Carts
Statistics from Shopify show that eCommerce sites lose $18 billion in annual sales revenue due to cart abandonment. This goes to show how important it is to reduce abandoned shopping carts to optimize your sales objectives.
The top reasons that lead to abandoned shopping carts are a complicated check-out process, security concerns, and unexpected costs. By understanding these roots of the issue, you can employ smart strategies to enhance the shopping experience for your customers, thereby boosting your sales.
II. How to Improve Sales of Your website?
Analyze Your Data to See Where You’re Losing Shoppers
It is advisable that if you follow the customer care on their journey, to see what obstacles they encounter and why they exit the journey before actually making a purchase.
The reasons in section I could be suggestions for you to find the points where customer drops in the sales funnel. You can also leverage tools such as Hojar to track customer activity more closely. You can also ask your customers to take a survey about their experience, although this doesn’t always yield a lot of responses.
Another useful way is to take advantage of Google Analytics, which is used to track your site visitors’ activity such as session duration, pages per session, engagement rate, etc as well as the information on the source of the traffic.
Integrating Google Analytics into your website manually might take much time and effort with some coding steps. For Shopify websites, it’s recommended that you use a third-party SEO solution: SEO Booster, which allows you to add this useful Google tool to your site easily with 4 simple steps.
After you have identified the problem, try to immediately optimize the customer exit points to be able to improve the conversion rate. Remember that customer behavior can also change over time, so update it regularly and make sure your website is always optimized for the shopping experience,
Optimize Your Homepage
The homepage is like the first impression of your store to customers. And if it’s a bad one, chances are they will leave your site and never come back. So it’s extremely important to optimize your homepage so as not to lose customers from the very first moment.
So what is an optimized homepage? it might come as a surprise to you that an ideal homepage should be displaying fewer selling items and more text about a specific topic. This helps you ensure that customers are not overwhelmed at first sight. Besides, you can emphasize your main products while being able to answer any queries customers might have about your brand.
Building Customer Trust
According to a survey from Oberlo, 81% of consumers said that they need to be able to trust the brand to purchase it. Therefore, even if you’ve attracted the customer to your site, making him/her like your products, but there isn’t enough trust for your brand, sales might not happen.
One way to build trust in your potential buyers is through offering great customer service. This requires having a devoted, attentive, and well-trained support team. The goal is to provide a prompt, professional and engaging support experience for your customers.
If your audience feels satisfied with the support they receive, especially when they see that your team has gone beyond to ensure the best customer experience for them, they would be more likely to trust your brand and consider making a purchase.
Better yet, companies with good support services are more likely to be recommended to the customers’ friends and relatives. So it’s killing two birds with one stone.
Another tip is to leverage customers reviews and case studies to win the trust of your new audience. Nothing is more convincing and reliable to these new site visitors than the social proof from other customers tell them how great or high-quality your products are
And if your store operates in the B2B setting, and you have gained good reviews from high-profile businesses, don’t hesitate to emphasize their logos or brand information on your website. This kind of social proof will do wonders for gaining trust from potential customers and building your reputation. Besides, specific logos assure your site visitors that these social proofs or case studies are all authentic.
Optimize Product Pages & The Checkout Process
As you might have expected, these are some of the most important pages in the consumer’s buying funnel. Product pages give customers the necessary information about the selling items and help them decide whether to make the purchase. Check-out pages, on the other hand, help ensure that the purchase is completed.
Therefore, If you can drive much traffic to your site but fail to optimize these two types of pages, it will prevent your site from generating the desired amount of sales.
So how to optimize your product pages? First of all, always use high-quality images to sell products. Nowadays, more and more customers prefer 360° photos or videos to check the products clearly so it’s great if you can provide that as well.
However, make sure your images’ sizes are not too large as this can affect your loading speed. You can use some image size compress tools if needed. Please avoid having generic or poorly-written product descriptions or duplicate content. Besides, you should add testimonials and reviews from past customers to improve the conversion rate.
With the check-out process, there are some recommended practices to avoid losing customers in this final stage in the sales funnel. The first thing is you should avoid compulsory signing up by providing guest check-out. Besides, it’s best to allow your customer to log in with social media options.
Moreover, to avoid cart abandonment, you should try to minimize the shipping costs or if possible, provide free shipping for your customers. Also, multiple paying methods and different delivery services should be available.
Conclusion
Getting traffic is already a success, but a true win is being able to convert that traffic into actual sales and real profit. We hope that this article has provided useful information and suggestions for you in enhancing your website to reach your sales goals. If there are any questions, please contact us and we’ll respond to you with our best resources.
Reference: https://www.shopify.com/blog/traffic-no-sales