You’ve done your part. You have a great business offering solid value. You’re even out front of the pack when it comes to website traffic.

Somehow though, you’re still struggling with conversion rates, and you’re feeling the crunch. You’re not alone. In fact, only 22% of businesses are pleased with their conversion rates.

Believe it or not, many experts consider conversion rates between 2% and 5% good, and 7% to 9% elite.

So, how do you convert website traffic into more sales?  

If there were one silver bullet, it would be to vigilantly budget for an optimal ratio of traffic and conversion marketing, something that’s often ignored. Beyond that, there’s no one technique for optimal conversion rates, but by choosing the right strategies for your business, you’ll have a better chance at boosting sales.

This guide shows you how to solve the most common conversion issues, from turning visitors into leads to coaxing traffic into sales.

Conversion Rate Analysis: The Sales Funnel Leak Check

First, of course, define the problem. If there aren’t glaring issues, you want to do a full conversion-rate analysis to find common sales-funnel leaks. This is a great alternative to jumping straight to the conversion fix du jour pushed on the Web. Not only do you avoid wasting money and time, but you also learn far more about your conversion rates than with the hit-and-miss quick fix.

Here are some typical steps to perform when checking for drippy sales funnels.

• Funnel audit to understand what content leads to sales
• Competitor analysis to know why traffic bounces to rivals
• Conversion roadmap to navigating traffic-to-sales paths
• Content improvement plan to direct traffic through those routes

With the problem defined, you’ll want to look at a couple of the more common problems. (These are also smart places to start even without a full leak check.)

Search Engine Optimization: Keywords and More to Attract THE RIGHT Traffic

SEO is arguably the best way to attract the right traffic to your site, using effective keywords to draw-in buyers rather than tire-kickers. That goes doubly if most of your website’s traffic comes via search engines, though link building is often an important part of that process, too.

With SEO, there are so many approaches to take, and steps involved, from basic analytics to full SEO audits, and keyword research to link building. It’s hard to know where to begin the process. Here too, you need to deploy what works best for your business in just the right way.

SEO often informs your content analysis and sometimes vice versa, so even if you skip to this next step, you’ll want to go back and improve SEO.   

 Content: Relevant to Humans AND Search Engines 

Whether you’re creating a fresh article or updating an old one, tailoring content for optimal conversion rates is a great investment, and doing it right offers benefits that last. You want to dive deep into content evaluation and work from there. 

Tactics like topic mapping show you what’s relevant to sales and what’s not, saving you big on content creation. Updating blogs will work to that end, too. Though, there are things to consider, like which type of content to update, seasonal or evergreen, and whether to update older or newer content first.

If you have the choice, go with updating older content that’s already indexed first to see faster results in search engines. Though the evaluation will show you new and exciting content needs, newer content can take weeks for Google and the gang to crawl….