If you have a website for business, there’s a reason why you maintain it: You want visitors to take some action when they arrive on your site. Usually it’s to spend money, either by buying a product you have to offer, or making arrangements to engage your services.

In other words, you want to convert them from casual visitors to paying customers; conversion, in other words. Your conversion rate is the ratio of visitors to actual sales. If you have 100 visitors, and ten end up buying something or scheduling an appointment with you, your conversion rate is ten percent. This is actually high for the industry. The typical conversion rate is between one percent and three percent, but this differs for some markets.

If yours is lower, you’ll want to increase, or optimize, your conversion rate. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a combination of art and knowledge, and is one of the services our CRO experts here at 101 Management, Inc., provide to our clients. Please contact us if you’re not getting the conversion rate you’d like. Meanwhile, here are a few things you can do on your own.

1. Make sure your website is easy to navigate

It does no good to have the world’s most beautiful website if visitors can’t find their way around it. When visitors arrive on your landing page, they should clearly see what they’re looking for, whether it’s on your homepage, or on subsequent pages. If the latter, make the menu easy for them to find, understand and use. Another aspect of this tip has to do with page-loading time: If your page takes longer than three seconds to load, you’ll lose most of your visitors.

2. Make sure your website is user-friendly

The old days of everyone working on a desktop computer may not be gone entirely, but now your visitors are as likely to be working on a mobile device as a laptop or desktop. Periodically test the usability of your site on various mobile devices as well as on a conventional desktop or laptop. And avoid those annoying auto-sliders, the rotating slides that make it something of a frustrating challenge for visitors to click on the correct slide. If you must have them, configure them so that placing the mouse over the slide will stop the rotation. And tell this to your visitors.

3. Make it easy to buy/schedule an appointment

Known as the “call to action,” visitors should clearly see what to do if they want to purchase your goods or services. Where is your “buy now” button? Or your “contact us” button? Is it prominently featured at the top of your landing page, and on all the rest of your pages? Is it highlighted with a bold color that’s different from the predominant colors on your website? Potential customers shouldn’t have to hunt to buy what they’re looking for.

For more help in conversion rate optimization, please get in touch with us. There are literally hundreds of ways to boost CRO, and our CRO experts can show you how.