Optimize Your Local Business Website for Conversions

No matter what the offering, whether it’s services, information or physical products, I tend to see some of the same issues with websites specifically that can easily be fixed and should be kept in mind when looking for improvements.

Here are three ways you can optimize your local business website for more conversions —- that should be implemented before you even consider investing in PPC or a long-term SEO game plan.

Having a site is a must. Getting the right traffic to it is a must. AND Getting that traffic to turn into conversions is obviously important.

However, before you decide how exactly you make your customers convert make sure it can be measured and quantified.

Whether it’s call tracking so you know how, when and why a customer called via call tracking, or a specific appointment booking app so you can lock people into certain time – make sure you know how you’re going to measure success so you can improve on it.

Avoid sending traffic to any page where success can’t be defined, or counted, it’s flying blind and will just leave you frustrated.

What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?

Not sure?

What’s flavor do you like better, cookie dough or mint chocolate chip?

Cookie dough obviously.

Forcing your traffic to make a choice right off the bat can immediately tell you more about what they are expecting to find, if they are looking for something else and offers an immediate path to conversion.

For example a physiotherapy clinic might offer a dozen different services.

Massages, personal training sessions, therapy for certain conditions or ailments – there can be a lot to distill and forcing the user to make a choice off the bat can give us data on what they are looking for and what they are not finding.

So by grouping the services into buckets we can funnel traffic accordingly instead of leaving customers wandering through the site looking for something that may not even be there – or worse just leaving your site thinking you don’t or can’t solve their problem.

I recommend keeping choices to four at the most so it doesn’t become overwhelming and it’s easy for customers to make a choice.

If your business gets tons of calls – or even a few. You definitely need to be tracking calls so you know what’s coming, and how it’s being handled. This is a key method to optimizing your local business for conversions!

At a certain point the sales cycle becomes more face to face, and having transparency on how your staff is handling inbound leads is crucial.

• Are they answering calls in a timely manner?
• Do you know what medium drove the call? Instagram? Google Paid? Email?
• Are they pushing to close and working around objections to find solutions?
• Are they even answering the phone?

With cost per click getting higher and higher in most paid searches, losing calls to weak sales associates, laziness, and being swamped is just not an option and absolutely is costing you dollars.

Setting up call tracking is something we do for every Momentum Digital client and it’s an easy way to diagnose how leads are being lost or mishandled at the human level.

With call tracking you can and should be doing the following:

• Missed calls can be called or texted back from a desktop, laptop or other smartphone,

• After hours calls can be sent to a certain number so no potential customers slip through the cracks.

• Have calls ring two numbers simultaneously from a certain campaign or during a certain time frame.

• Swamped on the weekends? If your staff can’t answer past three rings have the call go elsewhere – a call center, a manger – or even right to you.

• Know EXACTLY how many calls each ad, landing page and marketing effort (online and offline) is yielding.

We can set you up with this entire system relatively inexpensively, and if you are in the market to make a big push online and want to be precise about which marketing dollars are driving the best return, call tracking is probably the fastest thing any business – even if you are selling dorky puppy costumes on Shopify- can implement in 1-2 hours that will clarify tons on how existing traffic is being dealt with.

Whenever I’m looking at a potential client or even helping a friend with their own ventures I always look for these three aspects of the user experience.

Segmenting traffic and making sure conversions can be and are tracked and tracking calls is something that should be implemented to capitalize on existing traffic before working on the meat and potatoes of SEO and pulling in more organic traffic.

Thanks for learning some key concepts to optimize your local business for conversions!