Should You Improve Your Website or Get More Traffic?

There are two areas to focus on when you're wanting to convert more customers through your website: Your traffic and your website conversion.

Your traffic is the amount of people you get coming to your site, whether that be through Google Ads, blog posts, or backlinks from other websites.

Your website conversion is how well your website works to move visitors into paying customers. It's how you present your products and services, how you talk about your business, and how well that converts users to a sale or sign-up.

If you're not getting enough traffic, it doesn't matter how much time you spend refining your website, as you're not testing it with enough people to know if it's actually improving.

On the other hand, if you're not refining and improving your website, you can put your website in front of thousands of potential customers and only convert a couple to a sale.

This means that both increasing the amount of traffic your website gets AND improving your website conversion is equally as important. If you focus on only one, you're only going to get so far.

It’s not enough to think your website isn’t working if you don't even have enough traffic coming through it. Some people think they have a website problem, when they actually have a traffic problem.

If your traffic is in the low hundreds per month, then you don't have enough volume yet to be confident about your numbers. That's why you need a high volume of potential customers coming through onto your website before you can actually gather enough data to improve your website.

To know what you need to focus on, you need to know which problem you have.

‍

Do you have a traffic problem, or a conversion problem?

Every decision you make for your website should come back to the data you have on it. In this case, you want to be looking at your analytics, so if you don't have Google Analytics set up yet, you want to do that first.

‍

Here we can see the data on the amount of unique visitors I have visiting my website this month. If I've had 430 visitors this month, and I know how many people contacted me in this time (or in your case it might be bought something or signed-up), then I can figure out my conversion rate.

11 conversions / 430 total visitors = 2.5% conversion rate

Understand that there is no healthy number for what your conversion rate should be. It's always best to just start where you are, compare it to industry standard, and work up from there.

Keep in mind, services will have much lower conversion rate compared to digital products, as the difference between a free sign-up and a $4,000+ project results in a lot less customers moving forward.

What to do if you need more traffic

Despite any reservations you have about traffic when you're stuck in gridlock, website traffic is wonderful when it comes to converting. Not surprisingly, the more the better, so you want to make yourself as findable as possible.

‍

You can look at how you're currently acquiring visitors through different channel sources in the acquisition page of Google Analytics.

When in doubt, figure out how to put more energy into your top channels of acquisition. If that's where you're acquiring most of your traffic, then it's not going to hurt to double down on those channels.

Here's some more things you can try to get more traffic:

• Set up more Google or Facebook ads
• Generate content such as blog posts - and don't forget to post it around!
• Work on SEO to appear higher up on Google Search
• Figure out what channels other businesses in your industry focus on to get more traffic

‍

What to do if you have a conversion problem

Pretty happy with how many people you get through but not so happy with your website conversion rate? Then it's time to improve your pitch.

It's easy to waste time tweaking your website without knowing what it’s actually improving within your situation. This is why it's best to have tools set up so you can understand how your website is being used.

‍

This is when it comes in handy to have HotJar set up, so you look more into how customers are using your website. HotJar makes it easy by using heatmaps to show you more about what visitors are hovering over and clicking on, as well as user recordings so you can go through individual sessions.

Once you know how your website is being used, it's a lot easier to make changes to your website that you know will improve it.

All you want to do is reflect the design on the way your visitors use your website to help them make a sign-up or purchase decision.

Here some other ways you can get data to refine your website:

• Set up user testing via your friends, or paid testing through UserTesting.com
• Set up A/B testing to compare how well different design changes perform
• Add a feedback button to your website and ask what your visitors are looking for
• Add a chat button so visitors have a way of quickly asking questions

‍

Summary

I've just covered a couple of the different ways you can improve your traffic and website to convert more visitors, but you need to know which one to focus on first.

Either way, it's always important to be focusing on getting more visitors to your site, and refining your website's pitch.

If you're spending any time generating content, then you want to make sure it's having enough of an impact on your traffic. If you’re spending any time tweaking your website, you better have the data to back up the fact that it's actually working.

Know your numbers, and you can thrive.