Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies & Tips That will Skyrocket your Conversions

Thank you, Matt. It’s a pleasure to be here.

There are so many different strategies that you can implement. I will find a client or clients come to me and say, we’ve got this website, and we want to make money on it, but it’s not doing anything. I get many contractors, brick and mortar, retail or WooCommerce sites that either, like, we’re not seeing as much traffic or traffic has dropped off. Everybody’s a little different, and so everybody needs a different strategy. A fully customized strategy is what we come up with for our clients. There’s no magic one size fits all. No magic bullet, if you will. I’m not sure if that’s the right phrase.

The first thing I do is look at what they’re doing at their baseline. So the baseline is the Google My Business listing, where they’re listed online. So I’ll go on to SEM rush, and I’ll do a full search online to see where they are, what those things are, and lay eyes to most of them because I find that a lot of times, a client will have like the wrong phone number on a site or they have not listed all their information on their Google My Business listing. My baseline and what I found over the years is that Google loves when it comes down to off-page conversion rate. How many phone calls are we getting on Google? Where are we listed on Google? Even if I can mask my IP or if I can take my IP and I put it longitudinally and laterally in a different city or something. I’ll go and drop that into my Chrome browser and go, okay, home renovation companies near me. The near me is always a tag I use when looking at any company. I have a local company that is a pallet company, but there are not a lot of them out there. But it’s in the southeast valley here in Arizona, which is a little less metropolitan, a little more suburban. So I’ll start there. I’ll do the baseline and all the touch points of where’s this person and where are they losing business on the front line? That’s my first step. The baseline of; Hey, where’s this coming in, and is this okay? I find a problem there, then I write that down and go back to the client. Then I go the next thing, and I go, okay, what are we doing for social media? What are we doing for marketing? Are we doing any online advertising? Are we doing any periodical advert? Where else are we advertising, and where are we trying to reach? Where’s our output trend, and what’s happening there? Are we running Facebook ads and those sorts of things?

Yes, that’s the second thing I do. I go through their website, start with one, and move on to the next. Because you have to move through everything to make sure, if we don’t have all the right sources coming in, we can’t convert. We won’t have a central point we can bring it to. It’s like when you’re troubleshooting anything electrical. Start the switch and return to the box if you’re working on your house. So, my dad was an electrical engineer and built stuff for NASA that went into space. And so, over the years, he taught me all sorts of cool things. And troubleshooting is one of the things that do best in this world. So for me, that’s why I love working on websites and finding issues on stuff. So I start at one point and work my way backward. So on the website, I’ll go into it and test it when it comes down to a form. Then I’ll go to another browser, I’ll go okay, is this working across everything? And depending on the ecosystem that the form is, let’s say like, it’s an HTML form coming out of Keep, HubSpot, or another CRM. I’ll look at the data and then physically test it to see if it’s working. And then I’ll look at, what do we advertise? What is it? Is there value here, or are we throwing up any old pop-up to have a pop-up? Because even though in this world of pop-ups, we all hate the pop-up, it’s very effective. I have explained that to my clients. I launched a site a week and a half ago, and I’m like, Hey, you have to remember, everyone hates the pop-up, but it works with the right marketing with the rate. You’re trying to build your list and get your touch points with your clients and customers. It doesn’t work if it’s not the right offer or way to get people to engage with you. It doesn’t work.

So if you ask the right questions, you get the right answers. That’s something somebody told me a long time ago, make sure you ask the right questions because if you don’t, you won’t get the right answers.

You can add different analytics. There are a bunch of different products. There’s not one go-to. Often, I’ll end up having a client with something in place that they’re currently using or want to use. So then we’ll add some JavaScript to track the form to see if they’re clicking there to exit out of it or exiting away from it. I often use Hot-jar on a site, and Hot jar is a heat map on the page. Wherever the mouse stays the longest, or there’s a click, it will register that on there, which is an effective way of doing it. Also, we’ll do AB testing. We’ll look at the design because design matters on some level. Traditionally with marketing, if you go back to the early days when people were doing advertisements in magazines and original print, everyone said yellow was very soothing. So you want to use certain colors, which don’t always match up with branding. So then you have to ensure the form and the page are set up so that things attract and make sense that makes people want to click the button. The days of just plain Jane pages of web forms are gone. So, if it’s not something engaging the person and makes them feel like they’re getting something or they want to click that button, there’s no way those people will touch it from the field and a grammatical standpoint. Because in this day and age, everybody’s worried about information getting tracked. Everybody’s worried about where their email address is going. They’re going to get full offensive lists. So it makes sense to give somebody warm and fuzzy to make them want to be on that page, share that information, and to have that interaction is so critical. You were talking about on that other website, people worry about sizes, the little things in this day and age, because there are so many things online, and there are some things people need to think about.

It depends. I don’t have one go-to. We use Elementor Pro a lot, and you can do AB testing there.

In your split testing with Elementor Pro, you can go in there, and there are integrations and all kinds of great stuff you can use. You can set it up to go this is, and this is B. Then there are even some you can do more than just A and B, you can add a C too. So there’s not one go-to tool. And sometimes I’ll inherit a site from a client that is like, yeah, this is built in just pure WordPress, and this is the tool we use. So now I’ve got to look at it like a puppet maker. And then sometimes you must upgrade the license and figure out the right tools. So if I put up a site on my own, I’d love to go through Elementor Pro and add whatever into it to make it make sense. So, it depends on the metrics of what people are comfortable with. Some clients want to see the raw data. So I want to see the raw data. But first, you have to set up reporting. So like, SEM rush has great integrations that you can pull in for clicks and all that stuff. Google Analytics is fantastic, and I know they’re upgrading much of that next year.

In the initial setup.

That’s probably the easiest way to do it.

Gravity forms are one of the easiest ways to do it because when you’re using an HTML form, you have to add a tracking code into the form to not break the page on top of what’s happening. So for anybody setting it up, Somebody who’s an intermediate to beginner user, I would say, take the Gravity Forms. So there’s a very good plugin for keep that you can add your Gravity Forms, it’s an add-on, and then it has an API call straight to keep. I’ve done that integration for a couple of sites, and then you can add the tracking code for clicks and everything else, which is great. And Gravity Forms I like a little bit more, and it’s easier to use because it has more drag and drop. Then like contact form seven or one of those that traditionally it’s a little more code based. So probably the easiest way to do it.

Yeah, and sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes people just want to see it all in the CRM, or they want to see it on Google because they’re like, I trust Google, but I don’t trust my CRM. It depends on the end user. So I can look at the data in many different places and still pick it apart because I know the base I’m looking at. I’m looking at clicks, traffic, and where the track that’s dropping off on the site. So there’s a lot of data to take in, and it’s all pseudo when we say pseudo quotes. Pseudo is universal because the metrics are similar when you go from platform to platform. Sometimes you have to look up the exact way they’re calculating things, but for the most part, you know what you’re looking at regarding your conversion rate.

I’ll tell you what, the biggest thing is they don’t test it, or they don’t test it right. I have found over the years that you have to test it at least three to four times. Because what happens often is someone will test it once, and they’ll get an initial response and walk away from it. And then something changes, whether server-side or they go into something else on the site, suddenly changes something. And then their ultimate end goal for what they’re trying to do is not making sure that it’s happening. So I have a site, a very high-traffic site that we relaunched last year. We tested it, and Google Tag Manager wasn’t set up properly on the site. And so, we weren’t getting real-time analytics out of the gate. And so, we tested to ensure we were getting all the data through the analytics coming through the site. So we tested it, we thought it was working when we first set it up. And it was tracking off their old site and not their new site.

Oh, it depends on the site because not all traffic’s built the same way. You’ve got for a WooCommerce site versus an informational site. If you’re driving traffic to an informational site and getting a couple of hundred users daily, you will find a drop-off here and there. I try to look at it as percentages. If you’re getting a drop-off of something and you have 1000s of pieces of traffic, still look at it. So if you look at a site that gets 20 to 30 pieces of traffic daily and then drops to nothing, you’re not getting clicks, conversions, or purchases. Look at that because you have to get the baseline and a feel for what’s happening. When you relaunch a site, you’re not going to have the same amount of traffic because then you have to track it. And when you’re tracking traffic from day one to day 30 or even day 60 is when you’re going to get your best numbers, your truest numbers, because people are relearning your site or acclimating. And it’s not like when you’re driving on the road, suddenly they put in a roundabout. Okay, so you’re going to a roundabout, you have to know where to get off on the roundabout. So, with a new site, it’s the same thing. It’s like, I’ve been purchasing from this commerce site forever. Okay, all of a sudden, they don’t have men’s and women’s on the landing page in a place where I can find them easily. So they’ve gone to something more graphically versus verbally, and it’s like, okay, now I have to find out where to go. And then you have to see if that makes sense from a conversion standpoint.

100%. In my opinion, you can’t just look at numbers. You can’t just say, okay, I’ve got X amount of traffic and X amount of checkouts. You’ve got to go. Maybe we can save a step and get more people to buy if we do a one-page cart versus a multi-page Cart Checkout. Or there are different ways you can do it. So if you are tracking the user and what they’re doing, and if you’re like, God, is there a way to make this easier on them? Because the train of thought and what I’ve always been told is to get the person from the second, they hit the site to whatever it is you’re trying to get them to accomplish. So let’s say we’re talking like a WooCommerce site, from the second they see something to where they buy it. This is why we have many marketers who went from direct email marketing, targeted marketing, redirect marketing, and emails, to getting them to click on one thing and go straight over to the product from an email, which is one of the greatest things marketers ever did. It frustrates us all at some point because we’re getting flooded with emails, but it’s one of the most effective ways. So to get them from point A to point B is the key to track, and that’s why it’s so important.

Oh, it’s huge. It’s everything. You don’t have a journey if you don’t know your result. My dad used to say this, if you can’t write your plan or what you are trying to do on a piece of paper, they have no business doing it. Because if you can’t track that and I’ve had clients all over, like, no, we’re trying to do this. No, no, we’re trying to do that. But no, you didn’t understand our point and said, Oh, no, I’m like, we need to make this as simple and straightforward as possible. Because if you don’t know the result, I’ve had two-hour conversations with people where I’ve sat down and said, okay, what are you trying to do? And I sit there, and I take notes. So, I just said, What do you want your site to do? What do you want to do in six months, eight months, or a year? What do you want to happen here digitally for you? They are like we want more business. Well, why do you want a business? What’s your website doing? And I say why and I think it’s hard to say why. Like, stop saying why. Why is it always a big one?

I do. What I like to do is, I like to look at what they think is working with the client. So it’s more of a customer journey. And I’ll bring this around in two different ways. So there’s the customer journey, the client, and the customer buying from them. So what I tend to do is I will set up a hot jar on the site first. It’s just beautiful to watch how people think. So then what I’ll do with the client is play a game with them and say, okay. I’ll take a screenshot; I’ll say, okay, where do you think people are currently clicking on your site? Where do you think people are going with this? And the client and I will do that first. And it’s interesting to see because only a handful knew what their customers were doing. And it’s funny because you sit there and try to guess what people do. And then sometimes you’re slightly right, and sometimes you’re wrong. We are finding that at one time, it was a pop-up. An insurance company was trying to capture email addresses to market to those people. They were trying to gather email addresses so they could go, okay, how do we go out and market to them? How do we have a group of people we don’t know, and we know that we have permission to send information that wants to hear about things we’re working on or ways we can help them with their business or home? So we’re finding they were clicking past it initially, and we made it a lot harder. So we said, okay, let’s make it harder for them because it was too sensitive of a click. So you had a screen. So like the screen, I’m in now. So we have the entire thing taking over the page, and it was this nice little pop-up. And it said- would you like more information and offers we provide to our clients? And it said put your email address here and then submit, but it was a dark background. We said okay, this could work. And we had a few come through here and there. And then we did Hotjar, and we found people clicking outside of it here and there. And they weren’t hitting the X, so I tried to set up an experiment, you go, okay, where’s this person going and why? Because then you have to think of, okay, the result is we want this email address right here, instead of somebody clicking out and going to find information. How do you entice them more? So maybe a little harder for them to click, we hit the X outside of the box and a little bit darker, but you can still see it. And we’re finding that people were more apt, and it is a crummy way of doing it. I know it doesn’t give me warmth and fuzzies to say this as a marketer, but they started filling it out. And they hit next and went to the next page, it was this mental thing. And a mobile too was the same way. So I tried to test it across all platforms to see what was working and what was not. Then I tell the client that you must invest money to make this work. So then, the client and I were like, this is not the greatest, let’s change what we’re offering here. And so we ended up saying, join our monthly email list because our clients get a lot of value out of this. We changed the wording after, and it went up even more. So, you’re only going to get a certain amount of people to do certain things. So you’re only going to affect things in a way. But my base is testing something that makes sense or trying two different pop-ups showing you’re giving information for people to click.

We touched on it a little earlier.

We touched on it a little bit. So the first thing we do is, it’s not like a quote-unquote traditional way of doing it. A lot of people say I got this process or this. We developed it over the years by just looking at all the baselines of everything. Well, we go in SEM rush, we run the reports. Who’s on there? Who’s showing up on the site? Are we getting the right analytics for what we’re trying to show? And now we go into, what’s our Google My Business doing? What are we getting refused? What kind of traction are we getting? What are we doing outside of this? Are we doing YouTube videos and social media stuff? What is driving traffic, and is it effective? So again, it’s the troubleshooting starting from the switch back to the box. I could say that not everybody’s built the same way. We all have the same basic tools. If you have a retail business, like a brick and mortar, you will always have your Google My Business Lesson. You’re going to have your Instagrams and all those things out there. But you have to take all that in. This is where we are. This is everything we have going on out there. And let’s look at each piece. And what pieces are missing? I had a client that wasn’t gathering reviews on Google. And we found one of the tricks to conversion is those reviews. If you don’t have good reviews out there, people aren’t going to find you trustworthy. And they must be current reviews, they can’t be two years old. So I tell people if you have an off like a third party rate, like some of our contractors that we work with have housecall Pro. What are those? They have an external site that has really good value. They have a good domain value of a higher ranking domain because they’re not spammy. they’re supposed to get information. So when you have a third-party site like that, tracking reviews, bringing in reviews for you, and then pushing your reviews a lot of times over into Google, that are mostly four or five-star reviews or mostly five-star reviews, which is a good way of doing that. So you’re getting this additional kick, as I call it. For some reason, the magic equation, if anybody’s listening and looking for a way to kick their business, get that third-party review going. If you have third-party writers to your success, that’s getting reviews, there are all kinds of stuff out there.

That’s right. They don’t.

It is so easy to do it. First, you want to know, where you track your calls when you are not on calls, how do you track that? Well, I don’t, it just comes on my cell phone. So what if we use Twilio or Google My business? So, let’s find a tool to track. Because if you don’t know what’s going on, how much are you losing? You are spending money and leaving money on the table if you don’t know. It makes no sense.

I worked in Property Management years ago, and one of the things I always found fascinating was when they would come to shop; they would record the call. You could hear yourself on the call, and it was always in one of the initial training because we would have trained a few times each year, which was a part of your bonus. They would be like- you did great on this call, you didn’t do this and this. So why didn’t you try to set the appointment? There are so many things that can come training-wise from those calls. It’s so huge. Even lead follow-up, and I’m talking about the CRM. You paid all this money and have all this energy. All this automation concurs that you are converting. So why aren’t you following up? I always tell people to get somebody on the phone as quickly as possible. Because there are those you want to email back and forth with, and there are those you want to text message. Those people are out there, but most people want their information fast these days. You access the internet so quickly that if you don’t get to somebody on the phone quick and don’t set an appointment and if you don’t find a way to put them in touch with whatever they are looking for, you are not going to get them. and that’s one of the biggest things I see with offices. Like calls come in, but they don’t get connected. The biggest thing I see right now is doctors’ offices. They have all these applications for phones, but people are so busy. They need one person just to call and follow up.

Thirty-three percent increase. It didn’t feel good at the time then it was like, boom. It jumped up. One of my first clients from many years ago was not on Google My Business, and when I got back to the lab, it’s quintessential for business owners these days. Almost everybody has a phone number you are calling, and for people not to be set up correctly and to grow that, have you seen the movie Internship with Vince Vaughn?

It’s funny because it’s all about two older guys who will work as Interns. In the movie, they are trying to help a small pizza business that has the potential to grow. And it’s like, okay, the potential is there, but what’s funny with Google is that your local brick-and-mortar business can grow much more. Because when you start, the first second you list it, let’s say in three or four miles radius or maybe a little bit more depending on how many there are in your industry in your area that is in proximity. You can grow that into other neighborhoods depending on how busy you are and how much business you will draw. You don’t have to be a God on there to get business if you are doing all the things that make sense, set the goal, get reviews, and have an off-site review. Putting those reviews on your website and then optimizing the website for speed and performance. So, that will grow with all the metadata and everything you put on a site to make it hit all the things you want. So when you get on Google, and you are searching for a business, for instance, if you are searching a larger geographical area, when going through that search, you’ll see certain businesses pop up. It’s not the ones with a hundred reviews, it’s those getting traffic to their website, the reviews, and calls from the reviews. So you’re marketing in a way that Google is like, hey, what kind of work do you do? We are going to make your area bigger. It’s not like somebody is paying a lot of money to Google, although Google loves that, and there are over three hundred points that we don’t know about that google likes from an SEO perspective that helps a website do well and rank.

Yes, their algorithm is amazing. I am sure someday, many years from now, we may not be around anymore, but we’ll know what the algorithm is.

Do not underestimate the simple things you can do right now to help your business grow. Make sure you track every step of your actions and look at the numbers. Because if you don’t know where you started and you don’t know where you are today, and you don’t know any of the information. You don’t know where the journey is taking you, and you don’t have an end goal. That’s the biggest thing you can do in your day-to-day business, whether it’s calls, leads or emails. So whatever that analytic is for whatever industry you are in, it is very important to track all the information. Because if you don’t track it and know what it is, you don’t know what your return on investment could be. You don’t know what your return on anything is going to be. So make sure you are taking the time to look at those things because it is very easy to get caught up in your day and not look at those things that are so important to help you grow.

There are a few ways. You can go to our website, johnnyonthespotwebdesighns.com. You can call us directly. I can give you my cell if you would like?

Yes, I am on LinkedIn, John Raslavsky or Johnny. I have a personal, John Raslavsy, if you want it. You can email me at john@jotsweb.com.

My pleasure Matt. It’s been great being here.

You too, buddy.