Your website’s traffic is growing, but does that translate to more sales? Not necessarily. Growing a business is more than getting in front of more eyes, your website has to convince the visitors that you have what they’re looking for. It has to engage and convert in order to generate sales.

Conversion Rate Optimization for Local Businesses

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) should be a part of every marketing plan in a growing business. CRO strategies help to create a memorable experience that can take your visitors and turn them into customers. Prioritizing your CRO will depend on what you are trying to achieve with your site.

Resources such as surveys and heat maps tell you what your visitors are looking at and what parts of your page they find most engaging. Google Analytics will indicate which pages bring in more traffic and which page they end up on before leaving your site.

CROs focus on getting visitors to take action and is an indicator of which tactics work for your business. Let’s go through some thought processes in trying to understand your traffic:

Is your site easy to navigate?

Can your visitors easily contact your business?

Where do your website visitors live?

Are your Calls-to-Action offering them something they actually want?

What local search phrases are they using to find what they are looking for in their area?

First, establish a baseline by determining what the current conversion rate it. Then decide on what conversion rate you would like to achieve. This will help you to draw out a CRO plan to take you where you are to where you want to be.

Local businesses tend to have smaller budgets, less staff, and fewer resources to allocate to marketing. This does not mean that they won’t do well if they were to dedicate some efforts into marketing. Knowing how to optimize your site SEO mapping out your CRO plan to convert traffic into customers would do wonders to catapult you above your competitors.

Try out these tips to get more traffic and conversions:

• Create an In-Depth FAQ Page – In-depth FAQ page in a Q & A style will not only help with conversion, but convert the kind of traffic who were on the brink of buying. If your visitor already know what they want, your FAQs will help to establish you as an authority and nudge them into buying from you.

• Make Your Site More User-Friendly – In order to keep visitors on your site longer, make your site informative with plenty of links they can click on to get more information on things that interest them. Create content with relevant information on the products and services you are offering. The longer they stay on your site, the more likely they will take action when they are ready to buy.

• Include Written Driving Directions – Include driving directions to your location from major landmarks, points of interest, and major roads create local content that Google loves. Directions also helps people to know exactly where you are when they are ready to buy your product or services.

• Get More and More Reviews On and Off Your Website – Reviews play a big part on conversion. The more positive review you receive from your customers, the more it will encourage others to check our business out. This correlates in an increase in conversion by: 1) visitors who arrive at your site are already half-sold based on the reviews they have read and 2) they are less likely to leave your site to look for other reviews.

Keep in mind, however, that none of this matters if you don’t make it clear to your visitors what you want them to do on every page. Simply put, have a clear Call-to-Action on every page.

Increasing Your Local Conversion Rate

Local conversion rate optimization is simple enough to get started with the most easy thing to implement for you. There are many tactics, so try and test out different tactics and measure and record the results against your baseline (current conversion rate before CRO). Only then will you find what works best for your business and what does not work. Investing in these strategies will bring higher return than the investment itself.

While SEO helps to rank your websites on search engines, CRO is what ultimately turns visitors into paying customers.