Traffic Or Conversion: Fix The Right Problem

If your website’s not making the sales you hoped for, the first instinct is usually… 

“I just need more traffic.” 

But what if traffic isn’t the problem? 

In this episode, we’re asking a smarter question: 

Do you really need more visitors? 

Or do you need your current visitors to actually convert? 

I’ll walk you through how to tell the difference, what signs to look for, and how to stop pouring energy into traffic before your site is ready to convert it.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Traffic Or Conversion
• 2:25 Signs You Have A Conversion Problem
• 4:02 The Homepage Tweak That Doubled Sales
• 4:29 Essentials Before Driving More Traffic
• 6:49 Trust Signals And Blogging Cadence
• 7:49 Align SEO And Social Messaging
• 8:50 Course Invite And Community
• 9:36 Three Quick Fixes To Boost Conversions
• 10:15 Closing And Next Steps

Transcript

Carrie Saunders: 0:49

If your website's not making the sales you'd hope for, the first instinct usually is I just need more traffic. But what if traffic isn't a problem? I want us to ask a smarter question. Do you need more visitors or do you need your current visitors to actually convert? I'll walk you through how to tell the difference and what signs to look for and how to stop pouring energy into traffic before your site is ready to convert it. I'll also share one story where a client had plenty of traffic, but one homepage tweak doubled their sales, and you won't want to miss it. Struggling to turn website traffic into real sales, you're not alone and you don't have to figure it out all yourself. Welcome to Smarter Online Business, the podcast for course creators, coaches, and e-commerce entrepreneurs who want their websites to convert visitors into buyers without the tech overwhelm. I'm your host, Carrie Saunders, a website strategist and conversion expert with over 20 years of experience. Each episode delivers simple, proven strategies to help you generate more revenue and make your website your smartest sales tool. Welcome back to the show. Today we're talking about do I have a traffic problem or do I have a conversion problem? So, in other words, do we need more traffic to our website or do we need to convert the traffic we have better? And one of the reasons we want to think about that is more traffic isn't always a great fix. If your website isn't converting already, isn't, you know, having those elements in there that helps it convert, more traffic isn't going to help you. It's just going to be a waste of time, energy, and cause you a lot of burnout. It's like pouring water into a leaky bucket. If you have holes in your bucket and you just add more water to it, you're not going to get really anywhere very fast or very far. You're still going to leak that water out the bucket, right? So we want to make sure that our website is converting those customers. So what are some signs that we might have a conversion problem rather than a traffic problem? You're going to want to look at some analytics software. You want to look at are you getting visitors, but are your opt-ins low? Do people click around but they don't take action? How long do they stay on your website? Do they, you know, only stay there for just a few seconds? If you're not staying very long, there's something wrong with the website. Whether it's the copy, whether it's the layout, something is wrong to make them not confident on the website. Another thing that could be happening is you could be attracting the wrong visitors to your website, ones that aren't a good match for you. So this is kind of a you have to play around with this to figure out what actually is the problem. And this also is a red flag. If you're running ads and your sales aren't increasing, then you're probably having something wrong with the conversion of the website. So when you bring in, so as long as your ads are written well, this is a good test. If your ads are written well and they attract the right people, but you're not getting sales from those ads, then there's usually something wrong with a website. So that's one way to try to determine whether you have the wrong people there or whether your website isn't converting right. So if people are asking for your website link or you know they're getting there, but they're still not buying, your messaging is probably off, or your user flow is off, or is confusing and they're just not quite sure what to do. And that one client I mentioned, that homepage had great visuals, but zero clarity on who they helped. One small copy update and a stronger call to action, and they started converting their existing traffic almost immediately. So then what do we focus on before driving more traffic to our website? We want to make sure you have one clear, compelling headline at the top. We want to make sure you convey exactly who you serve and what you do and how you help them. Think of this benefit driven, not um feature-driven. And then we want to have an obvious next step. What is that next call to action on the homepage? Something easy to find. We want that call to action to be a button color that stands out from the rest of your design. It still goes with your design, but it's the color that you don't use very often. And then we want to have easy to follow navigation. I recommend usually for um service providers, course creators, and coaches, five to seven max links at the top of your website. If you're e-commerce, then you will have more links than that, but we still probably want to keep it under 10 to 15. If you're e-commerce, we want to just have those main focal points you want people to click on. And then we want to make sure we are mobile friendly and fast loading because most people will shop on your website first on mobile. They may complete the transaction on mobile or they may go to desktop, but many times we have our devices in our hands when we're curious about something or want to search for something, and we want to make sure we look great on mobile and that it's fast. And then we want to have trust building very early on and throughout your pages. We want to have social proof photos of you if you're a um, you know, your own brand, um, great photos of your products if you are e-commerce, um, testimonials, reviews of your products or services, all these things build trust. You also can build trust by having a blog that is regularly updated. So let's say you have a blog but you haven't updated in like six months. It's somewhat better to not link to it. This gets a little tricky with SEO, though. That's why I kind of hesitated there. Um, it's almost better to not link to it from the homepage, at least not prominently if you're not updating it, because that you know erodes trust in customers if you haven't paid attention to your website for over six months. But if you do have a blog and you're updating at least once a month, that shows the customers that you regularly update your site. You're always there, you're you know, working on things. It also helps Google and the search engines to see that you value your website and that it's really important. So then I also talked about earlier on you might not be bringing in the right visitors. That is related to search engine optimization and or social media posts. So we want to make sure that our search engine optimization, um, the keywords that we are being picked up by the major search engines match what we do and who we serve. So if your website is just disjointed, so if your messaging isn't quite right, if you're not speaking to your ideal client, that's going to affect who you bring in from search engines. So while it's not something super fancy you need to do to optimize for SEO necessarily for this, we just need to make sure that our website copy is really dialed in to our ideal clients and who we're serving because that helps the search engines find you for the right people. Now, there's obviously more to SEO, and you can like search on our uh podcast website, smarteronlinebusiness.com, for more SEO-related specific uh podcast episodes, but just keep in mind in general, you may you must be speaking to your ideal client to bring in the right searches and optimization um leads. Same for social media. If you're not if your social media messaging is disjointed, if it's not the same type of messaging, style of messaging, um, words you're using as is on your website. If you have a social media post and they expect one thing, but then they click on the link and go to your website and they see something else, that's going to erode trust as well. So we want to make sure our messaging is consistent across all platforms and all the ways that we get in to our website. That helps build conversions, that helps build trust, and that helps make your website a lot more effective. So if you're tired of posting, promoting, or even running ads and you're still not seeing results, it may be time to stop worrying about traffic and start optimizing your website to convert. And that's what we do inside the converting website course. I help you build a site that works for you. We work hand in hand, side by side with QA calls where I'm on the phone with you answering your specific questions. And it's one that turns visitors into buyers with clear messaging. We work on smart structure and better flow. So if you're interested in that, go ahead on over to smarteronlinebusiness.com forward slash TCW. And you're always welcome to join our free Facebook group. Just go ahead on over to SmarterOnline Business.com forward slash Facebook. And then that bonus tip I want to tell you about. There are three things that I want to do after listening to this podcast episode. I want you to check if your website is ready to convert before pushing more traffic to it. So first off, look at your head homepage headline. Does it say who you help and what you offer? I want you to check your buttons. Are they clear? Not just learn more or submit. Are they actually clear? And then is your opt-in above the fold and easy to find? Or if you do e-commerce, is your contact information easy to find? Fix those three things alone could make the next hundred visitors more valuable than the previous 1000. That's all we have for this week's episode of the podcast. I hope you thoroughly enjoyed it and I hope it gave you some action steps on what to look at to help your website convert better. Small tweaks can make really big impacts. Make sure to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and we will see you next week.