How To Optimize WordPress Blog For Conversion Rates
How to Optimize Your WordPress Blog Conversion Rates
Conversion rate optimization is a crucial step to increasing traffic to your WordPress blog. However, no amount of traffic will mean much to your business unless you’re able to generate sales leads. The way to achieve that is by engaging your audience.
Why is important to engage your audience? Because an engaged audience stays longer on your website, interacts with its content, and is more likely to invest in your product.
Here are some valuable tips for optimizing your WordPress blog conversion rates:
- 94% of consumers named easy navigation as detrimental for staying on a website.
People nowadays have a short attention span of around eight seconds. This means that if you want to prolong visits to your blog, its visuals and aesthetics need to be simple.
Sincethe first thing your visitors need to see is short, straight-to-the-point information about the products and services you’re offering, it is important to customize or have your website customized to the specific needs of your business.
Humans are intuitive beings, so it is important to make your blog user-friendly. One way to do so is to standardize and organize your navigation in a way popular websites do, all while ensuring that you’re visually communicating unique elements of your brand.
A pro tip would be to pay attention to the colors of your website so that they make sense for your industry and product (ex. If your brand’s principle is sustainability, choosing green as your color would be a good fit).
- Use empty space to your advantage.
Visual aids such as white space are important for first impressions of your website. They allow you to highlight certain content by separating and contrasting it against other elements of the design.
People are busy, so keeping your interface neat and clean saves time for your readers by immediately leading them to the key information on your business. Focus on making your content quick to read through and easy to understand.
Some of the best uses of white space are around:
- The headline
- The images of products and services
- The forms
- The customer testimonials, company badges, etc.
- Make your blog mobile-friendly for people on the go.
People spend more time on their mobiles than on a computer. A phone screen is smaller than one of a computer, so you need to scale your content down and keep it more focused on the key information.
Make sure that your blog is easy to scroll through, which means that writing long posts and uploading hefty photos that take hours to load are a no-go.
Instead, use widgets that allow streaming photos from third-party sites (like Instagram) and choose responsive themes from your WordPress admin panel to ensure your design is customized to suit each user.
- A site that loads quickly leads to a higher conversion rate.
If visitors are losing time while visiting your website, they’ll switch to your competition within seconds. That is why it’s important for you to optimize the size and format of your images, but also maintain their integrity and quality.
External picture editor tools for image compression and sticking to standard image formats such as JPG and PNG can help you in achieving that.
Furthermore, using CMS with built-in social plugins instead of standard plugins, as well as spending some time to set up caching correctly, reducing cookie size, and avoiding excessive use of redirects will make a significant difference in reducing your page load time.
- Balance attractive visuals against compelling content
If you think aesthetically pleasing navigation is enough to sell your product – think again! If you don’t properly inform your audience about what you’re selling, there’s no way they’ll commit to a purchase.
Use the data you’ve gathered from analytics (especially the keywords!) to write at least 1000 words of relevant, unique, and quality content about your product, and don’t be afraid to demonstrate its value.
Show it in use. Ask for testimonials, in the written word, and through pictures of your customers using the product, and make them public. Showcase ratings and reviews of your products and use them to convince your visitors that your product is worth investing in.
Format-wise, make sure to break your content down into headings and subheadings, use font and letter size that makes your writing readable – but also include helpful and informative pictures, stats, videos, and interactive tools to keep your readers engaged.
Be professional, but don’t forget to entertain your reader by appealing to their emotions.
- Understand your audience through analytics
To sell your products or services, you have to know what your target audience is. By using data analytics tools, you can identify where your visitors are from, how many are there, what keywords are they using to find you, which portion of your site do they spend most and least time on, etc.
The insight from the data you collected can help you in your web development process by pinpointing your weaknesses and unique selling points, so you can adjust and build upon them, as well as create a targeting strategy that is right for your market.
Combined with soft CTAs (you can read more about them in the next section), a helpful tool to understanding your audience and generating leads is forms. Keeping them simple increases the number of people finishing and submitting them, which leads to higher conversion rates.
Encourage your visitors to fill these forms out by offering benefits (ex. exclusive email offers such as e-books, free webinars, bundles, free shipping…) and for the sake of data privacy concerns, make sure to ask only for the information necessary for conversion (ex. name, email. their biggest need).
- Nudge your visitors into desired activity instead of scaring them into massive commitments.
Ultimately, your end goal is to convert visitors into buyers and a way to do it is through calls to action.
Aggressive CTA deters customers because people need time to get to know the product you’re selling and the benefits they’re gaining from it.
Instead of creating a sense of urgency with an invasive “Buy now!!!” pop-up at visitor’s first interaction with the blog, allow them to gain the sense of the brand by using soft CTAs like “sign up for free tips in Newsletter” or “book a free consultation”.
By offering free value (also known as “lead magnets”) first, in exchange for their personal details, you are focusing on communicating to your audience that they’re important to you and on building trust.
- Finally, be there to support your prospective customers
Now that you’ve gotten a sense of what your target audience is looking for, be ready to promptly meet and address their needs. Adding a live chat to your website will allow you to quickly respond to inquiries and gain instant feedback on the content your audience is accessing.
For times when you’re unable to be present or for customers who prefer to help themselves, automated customer support like AI chatbot or Macros (prepared responses assuring customers that a ticket has been created for an issue they’re experiencing) are amazing go-to’s.
Those who have tried and tested these tips have noticed a considerable boost in traffic to their website. If you’ve tried these tips or found some other useful ones, we’d like to hear from you about the results that you’ve achieved!
