One of the primary aims of your small business website should be to turn visitors into customers.  Whether you sell products online, provide information, offer services, or have a traditional bricks and mortar business, your website should work as a tool for you to help promote or sell whatever it is that your business has to offer.

Whether you want people to buy online, signup to a newsletter, submit an online enquiry, read about your products, register as a member, or pick up the phone and give you a call, there will be specific activities that you want your site visitors to undertake  (and if there aren't you should probably review why you have a website in the first place).  When one of these desired activities is carried out (whatever it is) we call it a Conversion.

When you optimise your website, you may think that this is to raise your sites search engine rankings, or increase your traffic, but ultimately, what you probably really want, is to increase these conversions.  Increasing traffic is one way of increasing your websites conversions - after all the more people that come to it, the more "sales" you are likely to make, but unless your site has relatively low traffic volumes, you will very likely find that spending effort on increasing your conversions is much more efficient than spending effort on increasing your traffic.    

The percentage of your site visitors that complete a desired activity (a conversion) is known as a conversion rate.  If you have 100 visitors a day, and 5 of them buy your product - your conversion rate is 5%.  In order to double the number of sales with SEO alone - you would need to double the number of visitors to your site - i.e. you would need 200 daily visitors. This may be achievable at this low traffic volume, but imagine how much effort would be required using this strategy in order to double your sales if you had 1,000 or 10,000 or even 100,000 visitors a day.  Once you have a reasonable traffic volume Conversion Optimisation usually is a much more efficient strategy to make significant improvements in your bottom line.

Here are some of the benefits of having a better conversion rate:

• More sales/leads/inquiries/subscribers/registrations
• Less business lost to competitors
• Lower bounce rate    
• Reduced web site and shopping cart abandonment
• Reduced customer acquisition costs
• Greater credibility with your target market
• Happier visitors and customers

Like SEO, there are many different ways to achieve Conversion Optimisation - but the key to almost all of them is measuring, monitoring and testing.  To enjoy the benefits of conversion rate optimisation you will need to make changes to your website.  You will also need to test the affect of these changes on your sales and conversion rates to ensure that they are in fact having a positive impact (not all of your changes will).

In future posts I plan to discuss in more detail, different strategies and techniques for Conversion Rate Optimisation, but in the interim, I suggest you check out the more than 100 different techniques you can use to improve your conversion rate that Conversion Rate Experts have compiled in their article - Google Website Optimizer 101 – a quick-start guide to conversion rate optimization.