Introduction
You might be under the assumption that having high rankings on search engines or even being the first result listed on search engines, automatically translates your business having an increase in sales.
Although ranking high on search engines does contribute to increased web traffic coming to your website it won’t necessarily mean you will get more sales.
To convert traffic to sales, the web traffic that you have received on your website should:
- Have Relevance to your website
- Navigate seamlessly throughout the website
- Be able to view content correctly on mobile phones
- See the value of the product or service provided
Relevance
Are your websites visitors there for the right reasons, have you provided them with what they were looking for or are they there by accident and about to leave at any moment?
Let’s presume you own a bike store, and all you do is sell bikes, but you put a sign up on the stores display window saying “Bike repairs” and after seeing the sign, somebody walking into your store with a broken bike asking to have their bike repaired, this person will soon find out you don’t provide the advertised services and after wasting their time in your store, they will probably get frustrated, leave immediately, place a bad review, and never return.
Now let’s presume that you sell and repair bikes, but you don’t put any signs up anywhere at all to let the people know that your business does, yes people might walk into your store but after realising that your products and services have no relevance to them they will promptly leave.
This is also very similar for a website, if your website has not been properly optimised for search engines then it may receive some limited amount of web traffic but if it is not relevant web traffic, you can expect the traffic to just leave after they realise that you don’t provide what they want.
Navigability
Can your potential customers navigate your website seamlessly?
You need to ensure that the web traffic that ended up on your website can seamlessly navigate to their desired destination in the shortest amount of time.
Imagine you run a bike store, a person walks in and has difficulty finding the correct type of bike, as your store has no signs around pointing them to each type of bike sold in your store, now imagine the mountain bikes are mixed with the road bikes, your potential customers will be confused as to which bike is which but will also hesitate in purchasing as they will not be confident in their choice.
now let’s presume they managed to find the correct bike, but then fail to find the check out because it’s hidden behind a wall, at his point the potential customer would be extremely frustrated and would likely leave and never return possibly even leaving a review about how impossible it is to find anything.
If a potential customer can not navigate your website properly, for example, some links don’t work, the user has too many barriers between them and the checkout on your website or even if your website loads slowly there is a very high likelihood that they would just leave and consider using your competitors for a better experience.
Phone Optimisation
Are the users of your website able to seamlessly use your website on their mobile phones, is your website responsive to different screen sizes or are users required to use the desktop version of their website on their phones?
If the website for your bike store didn’t support mobile phones your potential customers using a phone would either need to squint very hard to see anything listed on the website or keep zooming in on each photo, link or text then zooming out to see the whole page and then zooming in again to see the next portion of the website.
Nowadays around 70% of web traffic comes from mobile phones and over half of the people will abandon your website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, this is why is it so important to have your website to be as optimised for mobile phones as possible as that is likely what the majority of your potential customers are using.
Perceived Value of Product or Service
Does the potential customer believe that your product or service adds any value to their lives and are they able to justify the cost of the product or service?
Let’s presume you run a website for a bike store and you advertise that buying and using your bikes instead of cars will help you save thousands of pounds over 5 years in regards to fuel and insurance, but your bikes start at £10,000, Yes the buyer would not have to pay for fuel, insurance, tax, and even costly maintenance, but this is also true for bikes that cost £100 which is a hundred times cheaper than the bikes you sell, some people might even decide if I’m going to pay £10,000 on a bike I might as well just buy a car.
You need to ensure that the prices of the bikes are justified, ensuring that the bikes that you sell are differentiated properly from all other alternatives while also trying to gain the potential customer’s trust, perhaps even showing a video review of the bike so the potential customer can see the bike in action.
Failing to do so may need your potential customers to explore alternatives as they will not be able to justify the cost of your bikes causing you to have fewer sales if any.
Conclusion
Apart from a high ranking in search engines, there are many factors that contribute to allowing your business to increase sales these are how relevant the website is to the visitors, how easily they can navigate the website, how well the website can be view on portable devices such as mobile phones, and how the value of your products and services are perceived by the visitors.
If even one of the factors is lacking then you can expect to not be getting anywhere near the number of sales that your website should be getting, and many of your potential customers will most likely divert to your competitors even if your website ranks first on the search engines.
