Beware! The Following Could Harm Website Conversion Rates

Website optimisation helps increase sales and keeps visitors coming back for more. But even though your efforts may be well intended, some of these tactics may do more harm than good when used incorrectly. Before making any changes to your website, it’s important to understand what works and what doesn’t when it comes to website website optimisation and conversion.

Keywords – Misuse and Overuse

Adding keywords and phrases that visitors would most likely use to find goods and services similar to yours can definitely help drive more traffic to your site. Misusing keywords and phrases, however, may have the opposite effect. The number one rule to using specific words is to weave them into the text as naturally as possible.
Search engines have become very sensitive to paragraphs filled with phrases that don’t make sense – carelessly add words to your article without giving any thought to how these words might affect its readability and search engines will punish you by lowering your page rank.

Overusing keywords can also cause search engines to lower page rank. The general rule is one or two keywords per 100 words (1% to 2% keyword density). Visitors to your site want to read quality content that contains lots of useful information. If they feel the content was placed on your site just to get them to visit, they will leave and never return.

What Do You Want Me to Do?

Even though you might not want to be pushy or create some cheap sales campaign to compel people to make a purchase, your site still has to turn a profit. Most visitors expect to encounter a sales pitch or order button while browsing through your site.

Make all calls to action very clear on your site using buttons, call out boxes, pop-ups, landing pages, and links to ordering pages so visitors can click on them at any time to place an order or sign up for your newsletter. Don’t make people guess what to do next after they finish reading articles or watching video clips.
Failure to express what you would like visitors to do will result in fewer sales, fewer people on your email list, fewer people completing online surveys, and fewer people downloading free whitepapers and other content.

Video Clips, Articles, Links, Pop-Ups…It’s Way Too Much

Overcrowding web pages with content will cause many visitors to leave. In addition to looking cheap and unprofessional, websites with too much content cause visitors to forget why they visited in the first place – to find solutions to their problems. Limit content to one article and a video clip or a long, detailed article with photos or diagrams per page. It’s fine to list multiple articles on your home page, but instead of displaying each article in its entirety, include the first paragraph along with a link to a new page.