 Today on The Journey, we're talking about how to improve conversions on your website. To The Journey, entrepreneurs and small business owners, a website ends up being more of a chore than anything else. You build it and then leave to take care of the other 10,000 things that you need to be doing. But what if your website could actually be an automated sales machine and in fact, one of your hardest working employees? A channel to bring you qualified leads that takes less effort than managing a full sales team. And we're going to give you some handy pointers on how website design can help you increase conversions and sales. First off, Nealey, what is conversion rate optimization? Yeah, so without digging too much into the jargon, there's a method where designers and marketers crunch data both from analytics tools and user feedback. It's called conversion rate optimization or CRO. This technique provides insights into fine tuning a website and making it the best possible ratio between visitors and a specific action such as making an order on the website. And this can be leveraged into acquiring new customers, gathering leads, downloads, or anything of the like. So let's say last month, we're going to do a little math, you had 1000 website visitors and you had 10 requests for proposals that would give you a conversion rate of 1%. Now a quick disclaimer, keep in mind that the insights from each analysis will be highly contextual because what might work for you and your company might not work for another company. And there are a few key areas where you can get started to improve your website's design to increase this conversion. And you should commit not only to implementing them, but to also measure it and constantly improve. Think of it as a continuous process instead of that, set it and forget it. And one of the first things that you can do that is an instant win is placing your call to action above the fold. Now take a step back and kind of consider something for a second. What is the goal of your website? Is it to make a sale? Is it to acquire a lead? Is it to just entertain people and make them watch tons of your videos? With that in mind, each page of your website should have a beautiful and prominent call to action, be it a button or a form right above the fold or whatever they first see when they visit your website. That means the visitor doesn't have to take any other action by scrolling or viewing, they can go right to what you want them to do by clicking that CTA. Also by adding a benefit to following your call to action, it's a double win. So instead of using the generic buy now, mix it up and try a start my 14 day free trial. Test a few different colors. With only this slight adjustment, you can heap extra conversion points. Still at the page above the fold, research shows that 55% of visitors spend fewer than 15 seconds on a website. So make sure you have a creative bold and catchy headline. And besides text attracts attention before graphics to help increase that conversion with design. Consider bold fonts taken a stage really paint a persuasive picture with words that really resonates with your target audience. Also add social proof elements. If you're unfamiliar with the term social proof, the name gives it away a little bit. It's all about following the group, following the crowd, buyers turn to their fellow peers for guidance and help inspire their purchasing decisions. That's reminds me of like laugh tracks on comedy shows. They exist for this reason, but translating that conceptualization into website design to increase conversions include testimonials, right? Like I'm way more likely to go to this dentist in town. If that dentist has a ton of patient reviews on the site, or I'm way more likely to go try a soy latte at a new local coffee joint. If I can read what the customers are saying about their coffee. So people sharing how happy they are by using your services or drinking your coffee. It's going to help. If you can include also the reviewers pictures, I saw a dentist do that here in San Diego recently. Holy smokes. Like that made it even more believable. And I trusted that business before I ever even actually went and made an appointment to get my teeth cleaned. Another way to approach this is a case study. So it's a powerful tool that you can add for social proof to your website. And think of it as storytelling. So think of it as like testimonials on steroids. You tell the customer about something that that you solved. And design wise, you can distribute case studies in a multitude of formats. You could do a report, you could do a video, you could simply put in just a section on your website. But all in all case studies testimonials, they're going to facilitate social proof. That's right. Social proof is huge for improving your conversion. But it's also been shown that videos can dramatically increase conversions as well. And this alone seems like a pretty good reason to start thinking about how to add them to your website. And a couple of content ideas that you can start doing right now, or I know it's Emma's favorite that behind the scenes showing off the work that went into creating the product itself, whether it's me developing websites or a restaurant owner making their signature dish, whatever that might be show off that behind the scenes. You can also do a bit of a product tour, a quick 60 seconds on your product and its benefits will save the visitor's time scrolling around their page. But they just want to see something nice and easy to digest without having to read a ton. But you can also turn that case study, remember that testimonial on steroids into a video and have one of your customers go on video and really tell their story and talk about how you help them accomplish their problem. It kind of goes in the direction of that social proof and video and it's just a win-win overall. Totally agree nearly. Also, show off your badges. So adding badges as a design element can bring an extra element of trust to your website, which I'm all about that. How can we build trust online when more consumers are doing all their shopping and decision making online now than ever? And you can organize these into three categories. One, trust badges. So typically that would be like from review sites. Trust Pilot is a pretty popular one in the B2B market while Tripp Advisor and Yelp, I use Yelp all the time, are popular for consumers in the B2C market. There's also security badges. These badges are provided by companies like McAfee and it demonstrates you have an encrypted link in between your website and your visitor's browser. Now these badges assure all info sent through your landing pages are secure. And lastly, award badges, my favorite. So highlight your best in class status with badges for industry specific awards like awards for the best web designers and developers and agencies. And consider all these points as starting points to boost your website's conversion and sales. But don't only implement them, remember to measure them and always work towards improving your overall performance. You'll have a surefire path towards increasing your lead generation and ultimately growing your business. Now if you liked this video go ahead and drop us a like below and add a comment with what you learned from this video. Also be sure to subscribe and ring that bell so you're the first to know when our next video comes out. This is a journey.