By Kyle Courtright
Having a small business website can be a great asset. Whether you are selling services or products, to have a website that converts well is invaluable to any business. However, no matter how well your site converts, if you don’t have very much traffic coming to the site it’s hard to grow your business. Let’s take a quick look at A/B split testing, conversion rates, and link building, which are essential parts of all successful websites.
A/B Testing
Whether you realize it or not, A/B split testing can greatly increase your sales. Not sure what A/B split testing is? Imagine you placed an apple and a banana on a desk. You then asked 100 people what fruit they prefer most out of the two. After surveying and collecting all the responses, you’ll most likely find one is preferred over the other one. Same goes with your website. You simply choose which iterated web page you like best and you stay there.
A/B split testing is all about measuring the results of two options presented. For example: You have two web pages that sell the same product. You send the same 100 visitors to each of those pages and find that web page sells more than the other.
This is the essence of A/B split testing; you simply measure which page is more effective and continually improve it. It may sound complicated but luckily there’s software out there that helps you split test your web pages such as optimizely.com (without needing to know any coding language). By testing what type of content the visitor prefers you can make smart business decisions and optimize those sites for better results.
Conversion Rates
If 100 visitors were to come to your website, how many of those visitors would contact you? Would it be 2? 5? 10? Whatever your number is, that’s your conversion rate. So if 10 people were to contact you, then that’s 10% conversion rate. By measuring your conversion rate, you know whether your website is doing a good job in achieve it’s goals. If you’re converting 5-10% percent of your visitors, you have a solid conversion rate.
Depending on your business, there are many ways in which you can convert your visitors such as adding video, client testimonials, case studies, call to action button copy, call to action button color, reviews and more. You can install Google Analytics and begin measuring the success of your website and how well it’s converting. Once you see the effectiveness of each page, you can make smart decisions on what to do next instead of making guesses.
Link Building
There’s a lot of information out there that teaches you to build links to your website and that will increase your website traffic and search engine positions. However, that’s not what I’m recommending here. When your website is stored on a high authority website (websites that usually have millions of visitors), that in turn will generate traffic to you.
Many years ago, SEO “experts” figured out that by getting a whole bunch of links from different websites, Google will love the website and would shower them with traffic. Today the game has changed (although link-building is still important).
If your website is all about mouse traps and you have links pointing to it from websites all about cooking recipes, travel expos, interior design and other totally unrelated websites, this will be more detrimental than helpful. However, if you have quality links from relevant authoritative websites, then your website will be positioned better in the search engines results.
Try testing these tactics on your website, and you’ll be well on your way to climbing higher in those organic search results.