So, you’ve got your product sorted, hired an SEO agency to promote your site, and got a steady stream of visitors checking out your site. Now all you have to do is wait for the sales to start rolling in, right? Well, you could do that, but if you invested some time in conversion rate optimisation now, you’ll find that you get a lot more out of your marketing efforts.

Any good SEO agency will tell you that marketing efforts are wasted if you aren’t bringing the right people to your site, and if you aren’t funnelling those people through the right pages, encouraging them to sign up to your list, or buy your product. That is exactly what conversion rate optimisation can help with.

One common mistake is for people to build a sales page that focuses exclusively on how great a product is. Pages like those get your prospective customers thinking “hey, that’s cool” – but they don’t make the customer buy. A good sales page needs to nudge the customer into purchasing, perhaps by reminding them that your stocks are limited, or that you are running a special offer. They need to know that if they don’t buy now, they might miss out on a great deal.

Your SEO agency can help you with conversion rate optimisation. They have a lot of experience in managing key words, designing effective sales pages, and troubleshooting common issues with conversion. If you find that a lot of people start the purchase process, for example, but then never complete it, then perhaps you have a bug or an error on one of your checkout pages, and you’re losing people because of that.

If you’ve already hired an SEO agency for other parts of your website’s marketing, then it makes sense to also use them for conversion rate optimisation. After all, you’re paying to get visitors to your site, so you may as well make sure that those visitors do what you want them to. Bringing in the wrong people, or attracting the right people but losing them before they engage with your brand, is a waste of time, money, and server resources.

Re-designing your sales page may be something that you can do on your own, but if you bring in an SEO agency to help you with it, you will be more likely to get good results. Any changes you make with the goal of conversion rate optimisation should be tracked carefully to make sure that they are improving results. It’s also a good idea to make changes one at a time, so that you can be reasonably sure that the results you are seeing are related to the specific changes that you have made. If you don’t have experience in handling web metrics, then you could easily fall into the trap of making erroneous assumptions, and waste time and money on ineffective – or even harmful – changes to your website.

About: This post was written by James Harper on behalf of Boom Online Marketing. James writes on issues relating to online marketing and e-commerce.