Why Your Website Isn’t Converting (And How to Fix It)

Most tour operators think they need more traffic. But what if the real problem is your website isn’t converting the traffic you already have? In this episode of The Tour Operator Growth Podcast, we break down how to turn your website into a booking machine by focusing on conversion rate optimization, not just design or SEO.

You’ll learn how small changes in clarity, trust, and user experience can dramatically increase bookings and revenue without increasing traffic. If you’re getting visitors but not seeing results, this episode will show you exactly where to look and what to fix.

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https://www.resmarksystems.com/growth-engine-survey

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Email Nikki: nikki@resmarksystems.com

00:00 – Why your website isn’t converting visitors
02:30 – Traffic vs conversion: what’s actually the problem?
04:00 – Biggest mistakes tour operator websites make
06:40 – How to audit your website for conversions (5 steps)
11:00 – How to make your website clear in 3 seconds
15:30 – How to build trust on your tour website
23:50 – Why your booking process is losing customers
29:30 – How to improve conversion rate with testing and data

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of the Tor Operator Growth Podcast. We are so excited today because today we are starting at the next stage in the Resmark Growth Engine, which is the planning stage. So the last several episodes, we were talking about the dreaming phase. How do we get our company just in front of people, right? They're maybe not thinking about the trip just yet, but we're getting them to. But now it's time to go into the planning phase. And the first element within the planning stage is how do we build a website for conversion or how do we make sure our current website is built for conversion? So I'm so excited to be here with my awesome co-host today to talk about this. Great. Let's say you already have an established website, you already have traffic. What's the problem?

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Yeah, most operators think when this is happening that they just need more traffic. But actually, it's a conversion problem, right? So today we're going to be talking about website conversion. And hopefully we can lend some insight into things that could be going wrong with your website, things that you could be doing on your website to improve conversion. Because when you optimize your conversion rate on your website and improve it, it can make some really great impact really, really quickly. So just a few things I want to touch on with conversion and what might be going on is the first things I think about is you have poor site structure or bad user experience. So your your website's just not set up for success in general. It's hard to navigate, whatever it might be. You don't have clear call to actions and it's not clear what the path is, the funnel that you're trying to lead them down. And then once they get to that funnel, you might have a poor checkout experience. So if it's hard for someone to check out, they're more likely to abandon and go somewhere else. And then decision fatigue is kind of the last point that I would think about is are you bombarding them with too many choices? Which will kind of contradict a little bit of what we might talk about, because each person is at a different stage when they come to your website. And so you're gonna have these different decision points, but you have to make sure that your your main call to action is kind of in the right place at the right time versus everything at once because you just don't know who's coming to your site. So we'll we'll talk about that hopefully as we go throughout this. They're just not turning into bookings, right? So this isn't really like a marketing problem, I don't think. It's more of a structured problem or the things I talk about, but like what can you do to improve your website to get more conversions? And so just to kind of frame this whole episode of what we're gonna talk about, let's say you have 10,000 visitors coming a month to your website, you have a 1% conversion rate, that's a hundred bookings, right? So if your tour costs $100, that's $10,000 in bookings that you just got. If you can increase that by a percent, that's an extra $10,000 you just made. You can improve it to 3%, that's another $20,000 that you just made. And so that money can either be reinvested into marketing, reinvested into gathering leads, or you can use it however you want. But if you funnel that back in and try to get more visitors as you're improving your conversion rate, then now that's when you're really gonna start seeing the benefits. So it's not a only focus on conversions or only focus on visitors, it's really do both, but do both. Don't just focus on getting more visitors. So before we get into the tactics, Nikki, like when you look at Tor websites, what's the biggest thing that they get wrong in your opinion?

SPEAKER_01 4:08

One, they're not focused on conversion rate optimization. So if you hear us say CRO, that is basically what we're meaning is building a website for conversion. They think too much about the design. And design is important. Greg, your background is obviously design, so you're very good at this, but we have to have a smart, sophisticated, beautiful design that has conversion in it. Just because you have a great website doesn't mean it's built for conversion. And sometimes what I see too often is a site will feel like a brochure, not a sales tool necessarily. So they're looking at this piece of material with so much information on it and no clear direction on what to do next. So your website needs to be able to take somebody into the next step. What do you want them to do? And not only that, they need to be able to know what to do quick. So you have only a few seconds to put them in the direction that you want to. So the one thing I want people to focus on is your site, sure, it should be educational, it should have a lot of great value on it, but it should be built for conversion. You have to tell people what you want them to do. Book now, or maybe check availability, anything like that. So the core issue I think that we see on tour operators' websites before Resmark Web, our team, really recreates them for conversion, is there just no clear structure on building on how the website was built to begin with. So I think that's the big point here is you could have a beautiful website, but if it is not built with these cool things in mind, which we'll talk about later, I think in just a little bit, it is not going to convert. And you could have all the traffic in the world, as Greg said, but if your conversion rate is just really low, what's the point? And I'm gonna give an example a little bit later that's very specific to just a small conversion rate increase without any additional traffic, it's going to yield in so much more revenue. All right, Greg. So I said that you would give some uh specific examples. So walk us through maybe a simple way that people can evaluate their current website and see, okay, is my website built for conversion right now?

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Yeah. So I want to kind of lay out a five-point audit that you all can do to check your site to see if it's optimized, which once you do that, then you can optimize it further. But it's kind of just five basic points that will hopefully get you starting to improve your website as well. And so if you only remember one thing from this episode, it's this. Um, I'll run through the five questions and we'll kind of dive into them a little bit. But the first one is is your site clear what the like what the tour is or what you're offering is within three seconds? What do you offer? And once I'm on a tour page, what is this tour? Can I see price and duration immediately? So when I'm on that pricing page, or maybe I'm on your home page and you have you know tours listed, can I see those immediately? Do I trust this company right away? This comes with design, this comes with the language and the way that you're you're displaying and presenting your company. Fourth, can I check availability easily? And fifth, do I know exactly what to do next? So let's go back to kind of the first bullet of is this clear um what the tour is in third in three seconds? So I always talk about how home pages are really your billboards. Each kind of section of your homepage is a billboard. In billboards, like when you're doing those for advertising, it's a three-second rule. People are driving fast, they need to be able to read it and understand it in three seconds, right? So it's that same approach on the homepage and other landing pages as well. If I only had three seconds to look at your site, what am I gonna go away with? No matter what page I'm on, am I gonna understand either what you do or how much this is, what the tour is, when it's offered, what am I gonna get from it? The more clear that messaging is and easy to navigate and scan, then the better it's gonna be for someone to make these decisions because there's less, you know, cognitive dissonance in there of like trying to figure out what it is that you do. So that falls with like the price and duration, being able to see that immediately falls into that same idea, right? If I'm comparing trips, I might have three or four tabs open of different companies and I'm comparing prices and duration. I'm trying to put an itinerary together and figure out, okay, well, I'm going on a you know, hike with my family. At this time, I have three hours to do a tour, and it's this three-hour block. Like, does your tour fit within there? If I can see that quickly, I'm more likely to then keep going and exploring your website. So the trust of the company, we've talked a lot about this in the past, but it's super important to see that. And it's not just, you know, the design and layout, like I mentioned, but also trust badges. What awards have you won? How many reviews do you have? Do you have thousands of great reviews? Like show the stars close to the price and duration on your website. So these type of things are going to really help people build that trust. Another great one is can I cancel? Like, I might, I want, I'm really interested in this trip, this tour, but maybe I won't be able to go on that. What's your cancellation policy? If that's right next to the book now button in that same kind of area, it's gonna give me that trust of like, okay, I can book this, I can feel good about it. And if something comes up, I have some time to figure that out. And then the check availability, like having that button very prominent, right? How what's the flow when I click a button that says check availability or book now? Do I easily know what's available, what's not? Or do I have to kind of dig and figure it out? And then do I know what to do next? If you don't have that clear call to action throughout the funnel, then people are gonna be like, okay, I clicked this button now. What do I do? I don't know if I should click here or here, or what to do, and they're gonna abandon. So as you go through this um episode, we'll we'll touch on some of these things, but these are these are just five bullets that you can go through and run through on your website, check them, and make sure that you're doing these things as a good starting place for everything else we're gonna talk about as well. So let's break this down a little bit. Start with the first one, which is clarity. Nikki, could you talk a little bit about clarity and how beneficial it is on your website?

SPEAKER_01 11:08

Yeah. And the first thing I want to say is not one size fits all, right? But when we're going through these five points or when we're talking about some of these bullets, there is tried and true methods that work for every tour operator. Every tour operator's website needs to have clarity. They need to have trust, they need to have these certain things. But then how you go about it, we use data to tell us, right? And we'll go into that in just a little bit. So I'm gonna hit a little bit on clarity. Every tour operator's website needs to be easily understandable. Do not make people guess. Don't let people think, oh, what is this tour actually? Um, who is it actually for? Is this just for women or is this for people under the age of 18? Can I bring my children? Can I bring my family? Like, is this a group tour? Is this a private tour? So a lot of what we're talking about goes both for multi-day tour operators, for day trip operators. So this is kind of a catch-all for everybody. It's really important. Most information should be really visible immediately. So the information that people are looking for, make sure that it's really easy for them to find on the different pages, especially your core pages. The structure of your website should always have a headline, visual, and key detail. So this is important for every website, for every page, following a hierarchy of best practices, which we talked about in a previous episode as well.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

Sorry, I didn't want to interrupt, but could I just share a quick story about the the key details and this clarity? So I went on a like a van tour where you you go in a van, you go and see different parts in a national park. Um, and me and my wife thought, hey, that'll that would be fun, right? Let's go on that and go and see this. It was a little weird because we were the only ones young. Everyone was like probably 60 plus on the trip, except for us. And like we still had a good time, but had we known that that was kind of gonna, that was gonna be like the the group we were with, we probably would have done something else. So not saying like turn people away by being like, this is for old people or this is for young people, whatever, but that might help people have even a better experience that they know that going in as well.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

Yeah. Another quick story, since we're on the bandwagon of stories, is so, I mean, if you listen to this uh podcast, I've I've I've said this before that for my dad for Christmas, I got him a trip to go whitewater rafting with uh Western River expeditions. And we're going this summer. And my dad is not an adventurer, he's not a traveler, he is not somebody who would typically go whitewater rafting. But before we booked this trip, I'm showing him the website, and we're able to answer those questions that, you know, kind of ease his mind and also say, this trip is for people over the age of 60. And yet this trip is also for people in their 30s. I'm getting all of these answers, showing him, giving myself answers that I didn't even know questions that I had. So that website really had a clear structure and was able to answer our questions and help us with our fears, which is a whole other conversation. But, anyways, you're exactly right there. But another important thing, so clarity is really important. And we'll go over ways that maybe you could test this clarity. Like, you know, maybe you have a secret shopper or, you know, you're just going through your booking flow every few weeks or months or any time a change is made, making sure you're doing that. Um, but one of the things the biggest things is trust. You have to get people to trust because, like we talked about, you're getting visitors to your website, you know, maybe they've been to your website a few times now and they're ready to book, or you're in the question, but your competitor is providing more trust than you. So, how can tour operators, Greg, reduce hesitation by adding trust factors and just creating more trust?

SPEAKER_00 15:32

Yeah, before I touch on that, I just want to add one more thing about clarity. You mentioned like a secret shopper going through the website on your own. One thing I love to do is find someone that's not tech savvy, which is harder and harder to do now because more and more of people know tech, right? But like my mom, my dad, they're not as tech savvy as I am. And so having people like them go and test out whatever I'm working on, they are like great at being like this is really hard to get through or this is really easy. And I used to always say, if your grandma can do it, then anyone should be able to do it. Yeah. Um, so it's a good way to not just saying they have to be older, but even kids. I'll I'll actually test with my kids sometimes and say, hey, can you go through this flow, this prototype I just built, and tell me, like, I'll just watch you, right? So I user test with these these people that don't quite either know the technology or understand the process of what needs to go through. And if they can still figure it out, then you're doing a really good job. If they can't, then figure out where they're falling apart and go and adjust and try again. So using other people user testing is fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

And the important thing is implementing those changes. So you have a list of changes you need to make. Obviously, make sure that they're sound and make sure that they make sense and are going to be beneficial, but you really don't know until you are looking at the data. But make sure you actually implement those changes, especially the ones that are very low-hanging fruit.

SPEAKER_00 17:04

Yeah, and we'll touch a little bit on A-B testing later, but don't just rely on one person and change everything because that one person.

SPEAKER_01 17:12

That's what I mean. That's what I mean.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

Well, you you if you only have one person to test, it's better than no one. And so test with that one person and then use your best judgment on like what you should or shouldn't change. But the more you can, more people you can test with, the better for sure.

SPEAKER_01 17:26

Well, I promise you, you have you have more than one person to test because we're here. Just shoot us your domain and we'll test it for you.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

Absolutely. Um, all right, so we're talking about trust now and how that reduces hesitation, reduces that need to maybe move on to a different website, right? So, as we all know, travel is based on trust. If I don't trust a company, there's no chance I'm gonna go and like potentially turn my safety over to them to take me on a bungee jump, right? Like zero chance if I don't trust you, I'm not bungee jumping with you. I might not bungee jump with anyone ever, but if I don't trust you, for sure, never gonna do that. Um, but most people, when they are researching, when they're in their planning phase, they still don't really know your brand. So you need to sell that trust to them. And in a world where like Amazon has so many five-star reviews now because people are paid to give good reviews. Um and it's really easy to like inflate how good you look. People often will just only show five-star reviews. And I personally like I don't trust reviews very much anymore because of that. So that's where like video reviews are great. That especially in the tourism industry, right? Like it's really easy for Amazon to say, hey, you know, do a review on this product. It's still a video review, it's gonna be fine because it's in someone's house. But it's a lot harder to do a fake review or whatever with someone that just went on your tour. Like they're not gonna be like, oh, this was fantastic if it wasn't. So getting video reviews is gonna be huge, putting those on your site. But then putting all these different trust signals. So different trust signals are your reviews, having like real photos and videos, whether that's just of your tour in general or like real photos and videos of your guests. How long have you been in business? How many guests have you served served? These type of items are really good trust factors to have, like the best of state awards or TripAdvisor Awards, whatever it might be, they're going to create that credibility that is also really easy to just glance and find, right? So the important part though is putting these in the right place so that people see it at the right time, right? If I go and throw a bunch of five, like a five-star kind of layout in the in my footer, and that's the only place it is, probably not the best place for it. I have, you know, 3,000 five-star reviews. Cool. No one's gonna see that. So make sure you're putting that by the call to actions as well. So if you're on a tour page, you have a section that's like your price, your call to action, your trust signals, the cancellation policy. Putting these things together makes it that much easier to glance at this one spot and see, do I trust this company? Do I feel comfortable giving them my money? Yes, I'm gonna click the button and I'm gonna go and give them money. So it we all know it's important to build that trust, but building that trust in the right way and putting it in the right places is what you need to go and test, right? Maybe you have your number of guests served over on one side of the site and you change it over here and just test and see what works better because you just kind of are going with the flow, and maybe moving it is gonna change something. I used to work at a a large ad agency in Chicago. We had a whole analytics team that did all this for us, but we had retargeting ads on uh websites and stuff, like the old annoying kind of pop-ups that show up on websites. And they would analyze and test everything. Shades of the button, like not even different colors of the button, but shades, like this green versus that green. And we would hone in on what was working or what wasn't until it was just so optimized that it was just like doing such a great job. So don't feel afraid to to test, and we'll talk about that more. But if you're if your site looks good but doesn't feel trustworthy, I've talked about this in previous webinars and and in podcasts as well. Like people just aren't gonna book with you. And if they are booking with you, there's gonna be some hesitancy. Um I've heard people say, like, I just booked this trip and now I feel like I'm like my money's gonna like it's fraud. Not actually gonna even show, I'm gonna show up and it's not even gonna be a tour. Should I get a refund? How do I get a refund? And you don't want people feeling like that right after they book. So make sure that you're you're building that trust throughout the entire flow and after that booking as well.

SPEAKER_01 22:20

With that, this is where the bigger picture comes into play. Because yes, we're talking about building trust on your website, adding videos on your website, and we're talking about conversion rate on your website. But if you now have are building trust on social media and emails and other places, that's just going to aid to the trust that people are gaining on your website because now they're jumping off your website, seeing that you have a well-established social media. I'm not saying you have thousands of followers, but you have a consistent social media and they have you have this, you have that, you have reviews on Google Business Profile. They go back to your website, it all tells the story together.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

Yeah, absolutely. And there's sometimes where it really depends on the type of tour you offer as well, how much trust you really need to build with them.

unknown 23:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

If it's a quick, you know, segue tour, probably a lot less trust that needs to be built. If it's a, you know, 14-day trip through the Alps, I'm gonna need to trust you pretty much, like very, very well. So there's different levels of trust for sure. But the basics of what we're talking about, everyone should be able to use to build that trust on their website. So once you build that trust, Nikki, how do you get people to actually book?

SPEAKER_01 23:39

Imagine this going to a website and you're excited. It's a good looking website. So you got the design down, everything looks nice and sound. You have trust badges, you have great videos. You go to hit uh book now and it goes to a learn more page. So you have now information. Then you go to hit book now and then it goes to another page, and all you want to do is just book the tour. This is creating friction, right? We want to reduce as much steps as we can so they can go straight into the checkout flow. And even the checkout flow shouldn't have friction, right? So we want to make sure we're not losing bookings because people are bouncing from one page to another, to another, to another, to the final page that says, call to book your tour. Like I actually saw that on a tour operator's website when we first start, when I first started with Resmark, we uh brought in a client who's still a client and he's amazing, and his website is uh doing really well. But his website was like that. It was going from one page to another, to another to learn more. And then at the last step, it was call to book the tour, uh, which I always found really funny, um, or email. You can email him too. So less steps is better, reduce friction. But the other part to that is make sure that it is easy to book or easy to go to the next steps on mobile. Imagine this somebody's on your website and maybe it's just filling out a form. We don't always have to talk about booking the tour. Maybe they're trying to fill out a form to download a lead magnet, but for some reason they can't submit the form. They're gonna get frustrated and just come off the website all altogether. Learn from my mistakes that happened to me before. So just make sure that you're testing everything, desktop, mobile. You want to reduce friction. You want to reduce frustration.

SPEAKER_00 25:32

I know in this industry too, it's a little bit harder with the booking flow, right? Because most everyone is using a third-party app. Probably most of you don't have your own, you know, built booking platform that you can just change and make it work however you want. So you're relying on companies like Resmark to provide that service for you. So it's really doing that research as you're looking for the Torop or the booking platform as well to see do they fulfill these things? And we've had problems in the past with our own booking flow that we had to fix because things break at times when you're developing or whatever. And when you're testing it, you're like, oh no, we broke that. Let's fix it. And so making sure that the company you're going with is actually working on that as well and not just letting it, you know, fall apart. Sometimes things happen though, and if it does, like talk to them, say, hey, I saw this on mobile, submit a bug so that they can fix it. And most likely they're gonna be like, oh, thanks. We didn't know that we didn't catch that in our own testing. Thank you for providing that detail. We'll go and fix it.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

Yeah. Especially if it's reducing or prohibiting you from getting bookings. That's obviously a priority. Greg, before we go on to testing, um, can you touch at all on the new booking flow that Resmark is introducing for clients? I don't like to make this a salsy podcast, but it is really, really cool. So it might be worth mentioning.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

Yeah, we actually just released recently a new booking flow that's only available as of now for websites we build. Like if we build your website for and you use our Tor booking software, then you can use this just because of the way it's built. But it is taking everything we've talked about. We're putting the trust factors throughout the booking flow. We're putting, you know, placing them in the right spot so it's easy to see. And we're trying to really help with that flow. The the one of my favorite parts about it is it stays on your website. So it's not an overlay, which is what our old um booking flow is. And it stays on your website, it can be designed to look just like your website as well, which is really awesome. So it feels part of your website, feels part of your brand still instead of going off to something else. So I think that's powerful. But then also the flow that we're we've presented, I think is really strong and really easy to go through. And we've also incorporated some things that allow you to easily book, you know, multiple tours or add people to the tour later and things like that. So it was an awesome project to work on. And I think we're seeing some great results. It's we only have a couple sites using it right now so far, but we're implementing it on everyone going forward. So excited to see what the results are as we we pull this out.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

If anybody wants to check it out, go to MoabAdventureCenter.com to see what it looks like. But as Greg just finished that, he is going into the testing phase, which is exactly what we're doing with Moab Moab Adventure Center. Because we have this checkout flow, we want to see how it performs. Yes, it looks awesome. It's beautiful, but how does it perform? So, Greg, let's jump into testing. How do we take the data? How do we look at the data? What tools do we use? It's so important.

SPEAKER_00 29:00

Yeah, I talked about this just a little bit before, but before we get too much into the testing part, I want to talk about just how conversion rate optimization isn't like a one-time fix. So don't feel like you're gonna go in, you're gonna test it once, and you're done. It's really just continual testing is gonna improve and improve and improve, right? Um, there might be times where you test it and you break something, it makes it worse, and then you revert it and you go back, right? So, one example I want to share is this was about in 2019, maybe. Um, I was working on Western River Expedition's website, and me and my coworker Chad, we were trying to solve a problem that we had, which was our own software at the time, uh Resmark, had a limitation in not being able to get people like to the next year. So if it if it's 2019, people had to go and click through all of 2019 to get to 2020 to book a trip. Um, because with Western River Expedition, they often sell out trips in 20 a year ahead now. And so we had to kind of solve this problem of how do we take a limitation of the booking software and improve the user experience on the website, right? So we went in and we tested a few other things that just weren't quite working. But then we came up with this idea that just simply when someone clicks a book now button, pops up a modal that has a drop down that you could choose between 27 or the current year and the next year, right? And if you chose the next year, then it sent you, we found a way to send them to that date. And so it it really eased that burden of having go through, which some people might be like, it's not that hard to click, you know, eight or nine times through to the month you want in there, right? And so that one little change made such a huge difference. Just presenting the two years and going straight to the year made a huge difference. We immediately saw fewer phone calls, we immediately saw a huge uptick in sales, and it was like such a great success. And since then, like I mentioned, it's not a one-time fix, right? We iterated on it, we added different things. We added some sections on there that talked about like almost sold out for the year, or we even listed dates that were available for the current year because it was so almost sold out, right? We added things, we iterated, we tested, and then we ended up getting rid of that completely and moving to a list view, which now when you click the button, you go to this list view, and it literally just has two tabs, one for the current year, one for the next year, and shows all the available trips. And that's been even better than what we had before. So it's a great example of a very small change, to be honest. It was like an hour of coding, probably, to get it to work. Um maybe a little bit longer is a while ago. I can't remember, but it wasn't very hard. And then we took that and made improvements on it throughout the years to be even better. So it doesn't have to be huge things. These small changes really add up to like great success. Were you gonna say something, Nikki?

SPEAKER_01 32:20

Yeah, the other thing too is what worked five years ago might not work today. So you have to really remember when you're looking at the data and you're testing things and you're making improvements, sometimes you might have to go back or revert back to something because something is changed. Now the way people are are viewing your website is different. So just keep that in mind. It is living, breathing, and you have to adapt quickly.

SPEAKER_00 32:49

Yep. So just a short list of some other things to test, right? There's there's so many things you could test. But if you don't know where to start, start with headlines. Okay, you have your H1s, your H2s, these supporting texts that really are helping people decide. Test those and see if if it says this versus this. Um, we've talked a lot about our ICP process, our ideal customer profile process that we use with AI to pull in reviews and get content from that. Like use a system like that. Go and figure out what people are saying and then create your headlines to talk to those people and test which one works better, which one doesn't. Um, images versus video. So maybe you have some static images, try putting a video there and see if it if it helps people, you know, drive to conversion better. Um, another easy one is your calls to action. Does your demographic, does book now, work better than it, let's say check availability? Maybe. It depends on on what your demographic, the people coming to your website are. I touched on color as well. Like what are the what's the color of your button? It can really affect how people are are finding and clicking on your button. Let's say the main color on your whole website's blue and your button's blue is more likely to blend in. If you make that complimentary color, like orange or yellow, we'll say, maybe that's not a brand color, so it's something different. But if it stands out more, maybe that's going to draw more bookings. Maybe not as well. So test it, figure out what's working, and move forward. And then obviously layout as well. Moving your reviews up to the top of the page instead of at the bottom. Or, you know, just moving things around, maybe the layout of the content itself. If you have like really long centered text, maybe try left aligning it and making it not as wide so it's easier to read. Those type of things can really be beneficial. The one thing I want to touch on is don't do them all at once. You will not be able to test unless you're doing a redesign. That's different. But if you really want to know, does this headline work better than this headline? You have to do it one at a time. You can't go and change your headlines and your CTAs and the layout to decide if the headline's working or not. Um, and then lastly, if you have the budget, use A-B testing tools. They can get a little bit pricey, but it's gonna be the fastest and best way you can decide because now you can show, say, 50% of people this headline, 50% of people this headline. If one of them's working better, then it's automatically gonna switch and start using the one that's working better. So if you can't do that, definitely test and just test one at a time. If you have a lot of traffic, it happens a lot faster and you can see the results. But definitely do what you can to be testing and just iteratively improving your website. So, with that said, let's move into the next section, which is data. What's actually working? Um, and how can you use that data to improve it even more?

SPEAKER_01 35:55

Yeah, I want to touch on where to get the information on what's working and what's not working. And the tool that our team uses is Microsoft Clarity. There's other tools called Crazy Egg. But you know what? You could I simply look at your Google Analytics account and see, well, what what pages are getting a lot of traffic and what pages are getting traffic and not converting? Is there a reason why? Do we have maybe it's a uh maybe we have a blog, a simple blog that is getting a lot of traffic. And we have some call to a call to actions near the bottom, but nobody is converting because it's near the bottom. So let's move that to the top or let's, you know, so you can look at the data actually from Google Analytics. You could also use tools like A-B testing tools, Microsoft Clarity and whatnot. And once you have that data, data, what do you say? What do you call it, Greg? Data?

SPEAKER_00 36:51

I call it data.

SPEAKER_01 36:52

Data, data. I don't know. I don't know what I call it until I until it comes out of my mouth. The data, the data. You let us know how you pronounce it if you're listening to this. I don't know if there's a right or wrong. Anyways, once you have that information, you could utilize it and make those changes. And I'm gonna give you a couple numbers here that I was excited to share with you from the beginning. So let's say, so first of all, you need to know your conversion rate. What is conversion rate? How do you determine that? It is the number of conversions divided by total visitors on the site times 100. And your conversion rates could be for bookings, your conversion rate could be for form fills, lead magnet downloads. You should know these numbers. So we have a client. He is not a web and SEO client, but his conversion rate is 0.65%. That is very low. That is very, very low. Um their average order value is about $80. Their monthly traffic is about $600 visitors. So with that, they're only converting at 0.65%. Their revenue is $41,000. Again, we don't do their conversion rate in SEO right now. But listen to this. Let's say that their traffic does not increase at all. Their traffic stays at $6,600, but their conversion rate increases just a tiny bit to 0.85. Again, that's still well below industry standard. So this is a very conservative number, 0.85, not even 1%. Their revenue ends up being $53,000. That's about a jump of $12,000 per year. Not bad, right? By making some tweaks based off of data they're looking at and whatnot. But now let's say we increase their conversion rate and we increase their traffic to their website. So I'm gonna go the opposite of conservative and say we're increasing traffic to 13.5 that 13,500 visitors per month. Their average order value is still $80, and their conversion rate, we'll keep it at that 0.85. They're now at $107,000 in revenue. So I know that's a lot of numbers I'm throwing out here, but the moral of the story is you increase conversion rate, you increase revenue. You increase conversion rate and website traffic, poof, you really increase your revenue. So it's it's a simple math equation. So if you're not working on your conversion rate right now, or you haven't looked at it, you just think you're sitting on your website because it's nicely designed. Maybe you're doing some SEO, but your SEO isn't focused on conversion rate. You need to take a step back. And we did as an agency. So we build websites and do SEO for our clients, paid ads as well, coaching, booking software, digital waivers. We do it all. But we also have CRO as part of that. We have it kind of within our SEO umbrella in terms of SEO, AEO, ranking in AI, and CRO because it is all so important. It all works together. So just keep that in mind when you're, you know, after you're listening to this episode, I want you to ask yourself is my website built for conversion? What can I do right now to help help it be better? Help me increase my conversion rate. So, all right, Greg. With that, I'm gonna have you close it out and let us know maybe a summary of what people should be working on right now.

SPEAKER_00 40:49

So if you remember at the beginning of the podcast, I know it's been a few minutes, we touched on five things. I'll just say them one more time. These five items that you can kind of audit your website with, right? So the first one, is it clear what your tour or your page is about in three seconds? Can I see the price and duration immediately? Other core, like vital information? Can I see it quickly? Do I trust the company right away? Can I check availability easily? And do I know exactly what to do? The reason I have these also positioned is I is I want you to go once you're done listening to this, if you're at your desk, next time you're at your desk, I want you to put yourself in the shoes of a visitor, of a guest, of one of the people that you're trying to target, your ideal customer, and go through those and say, can I, as that user, do these things? Is it working for me? And as you put yourself in the shoes of your visitor, then you're going to see what they see. You're going to be able to understand your website maybe in a different way than how you're seeing it, right? It's really easy for someone like myself who loves to like design websites and make it look really nice. It's really easy to fall in the trap of like, well, this looks really good, so I'm going to do it this way. Um, but maybe it's actually way better to have this section in a different place or the button a different color. And so making sure you're putting yourself in those shoes of your actual ideal customers is going to make the biggest change that you can in conversion and then as you actually implement those type of things as well. So remember that the answer is not always getting more traffic or better rankings. It can also be in improving how your website is working for you. Make it work harder for you. The traffic, better rankings, those are all supplemental. When they all work together, you're going to be the most successful. But you can go and do some really simple things on your website today that are going to make a difference tomorrow. And they are going to have an immediate impact, whereas SEO takes time, right? So don't forget to focus on this. If you need help focusing on it, if you don't know where to start or you'd like help starting, give us a call, schedule a discovery call. Or don't give us a call, but schedule a discovery call and we'll talk with you. Well, you can call us too, but I don't know why I said that. Usually we have discovery calls. People aren't calling us nearly as much as they used to. But yeah, feel free to call us. Not my personal phone number, but call us and we'll hop on a call with you. We'll walk you through your website. We'll help you understand how we can, you know, help you as well, if that's something you're looking for. So hopefully everything that we talked about today was helpful. And I hope that you go and implement something today.

SPEAKER_01 43:48

Awesome. That's another episode of the Tour Operator Growth Podcast. Please be sure to like, subscribe, give us feedback. And if you want to be a guest on a future show, make sure that that you reach out. I'd love to have a conversation about that. We'll see you on the next episode.