In the world of internet marketing, traffic draws a lot of attention. Small business owners know that without visitors to their site, it’s unlikely they’re going to be able to increase or sustain their businesses.
I’d assert that the focus on traffic isn’t helpful unless it’s coupled with a focus on conversion. After all, you might be able to draw thousands of visitors a month – but if none of those site visitors are buying from you, what’s the point? You’re paying for traffic without receiving any genuine return on your investment.
Having said that, here are some of the most effective tools I know to help you boost your website conversion rate and turn your traffic into revenue.
Content Research Tools
A great conversion rate starts with quality content. If you’re not sure what content attracts the most traction, then these tools can help you find out.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is one of the best tools I know for understanding what kind of content to publish. You can enter a keyword and get a list with links to the most linked and shared content related to your search query. You can then analyse and explore what makes the content sharable.
You can apply for a free trial. After that, the plans start at $99 per month. That might sound like a lot, but there’s no minimum subscription period.
Similar Web
Which sites are most similar to yours – and from where they’re getting their most traffic? If you want to get the answers to both questions, you should try Similar Web.
Similar Web will give you which of your keywords are generating the best traffic and tell you ideas about where to post and share your content online to improve conversions. They have a free plan and a paid plan, which is based on volume. You can get in touch with them for pricing details.
Land-Book
One of the fundamentals of a high conversion rate is an optimised landing page – but how do you know if your landing page is driving what you want? I recommend Land-Book.
Land-Book is a free store of some of the web’s most successful and impressive landing pages. It’s a great option if you’re not sure where to begin with your landing page.
Really Good Emails
Do you want to increase the conversion rate of your emails? Really Good Emails does for commercial emails what Land-Book does for landing pages.
Navigate their vast, free collection of effective marketing emails and use them for inspiration. This is an especially beneficial platform if you’re new to writing emails and want to hone your game.
Tools to Capture Leads
What I really enjoy about HubSpot is that it fuses lead capturing with detailed metrics to help you perceive the user experience on your website –which can, in turn, help you to grow conversions.
Sumo is a collection of tools that you can use to make action-focussed popups that include a Welcome Mat popup, a scroll-triggered popup, and a Smart Bar to help you attract more email subscribers.
Their free version is likely enough for most small businesses, but if you need even more analytical tools, you should consider their premium plan, which comes in at $49 per month.
HelloBar is another tool you can use to generate leads. They offer a free plan with limited options that you can employ to display a popup opt-in form to every 10th visitor on your site.
Their paid plans start from $29 to $49 per month and offer a number of additional features that can help you convert your website into a lead-generating machine.
Heat Mapping & Mouse Tracking Tools
A visitor’s actions on your site can give a lot of information about why your conversion rate isn’t as high as you wish it to be. Here are some tools that can render you the data you need.
Clicky offers free and paid plans that will give you detailed statistics about how long visitors stay on your site and what they do while they’re there.
I like that this tool provides real-time data that incorporate heat mapping. It’s an ideal starter tool if you’re new to this type of conversion optimisation.
Crazy Egg is a well-respected tool that provides a full series of tools that include heat mapping, scrollmaps and click reports.
Though Crazy Egg doesn’t offer any free plan their premium plans start at only $24 per month, making it a sound investment if you want to learn about your site visitors.
Analytics Tools
Reviewing your analytics is necessary if you want to boost your conversion rate. These tools will help you get down and dirty with the numbers.
Google Analytics is a service I use daily – and one I’ve talked about a lot. It’s free to anyone with a Google account and offers a plenty of detailed metrics you can utilise to raise your conversion rate.
If you want even more information, you can contact Google for pricing on their premium accounts.
Kissmetrics is a point of reference in premium analytics tools. It’s most suitable for optimising email conversion and includes built-in A/B testing and data sets.
They don’t display prices for their plans, so you’ll need to contact them if you’re interested.
Visitor Feedback Tools
There are few things more valuable than direct feedback from your site visitors and customers. Here are some of my favourites.
User testing can be expensive, but Five Second Test offers an affordable method that allows testers to download an app-based version of your website and rate their experience.
Prices start at $50 per month. You can choose from a variety of testing methods, including basic UX, heat maps, and surveys.
Intercom offers you the convenience to chat in real time with your site visitors. You can also use it to scrutinise leads and share chats with the other members of your team.
Intercom’s prices start at $87 per month.
Testing Tools
Finally, you’ll need to test every aspect of your marketing to further your conversion rate. Here are some tools that I recommend.
Optimizely is the widely popular testing site. In addition to traditional A/B testing, they also offer multivariate testing options and detailed analytics.
Pricing is based on your needs, so you’ll need to contact them for more information.
Effective Experiments is a tool that makes it easy to track your testing and content experiments. It’s useful to have a place to keep everything organised instead of trying to juggle multiple spreadsheets.
Pricing is based on your company’s needs and you can contact them for a quote.
Conversion optimisation should be an ongoing process because there’s always room for improvement. The tools I’ve listed here will help you fine-tune your content and marketing, so that you can grow your business.