If you think of every visitor to your website as a drop of water, and the whole website as a hose, then water coming out the end of the hose is prospects calling, emailing, buying online or walking into your store.
Every drop that doesn’t make it out the end of the hose is a leak. And every place where your hose (website) leaks is something to be isolated and the leaks plugged!
Of course, you can never convert 100% of your website visitors to customers. But every step you take to reduce the leaks means that many more visitors who DO become customers.
How do you do it? I’m glad you asked….
FIRST, you have to have a way of detecting where the leaks are!
Rather obvious but it means having a good PAID web analytics (stats) program. There is no free program – including Google Analytics – that provides enough, accurate information for this.
If you have a good program, you can for each page in your website, isolate how visitors arrived there (whether entering the site or coming from another page), how many times the page was viewed, and how many people exited the site from that page.
If you are losing half or more of the visitors to a page, by having them exit the site – rather than click through to another page – THAT is a leak.
Then you can take action to improve the percentage. That can be by improving copy or visual imagery, adding links or re-routing traffic.
A good website – to launch into a completely different metaphor – is like a pinball machine. It just keeps bouncing pinballs (visitors) around the site and flips them back up into it if they think about leaving.
Byrd’s Law #18: The longer someone stays on your website, the more likely they are to turn into a customer.