By Jackie Edwards

Every small business owner would like to find that silver bullet - a simple thing they could do to improve their sales without increasing their marketing and advertising spend. The crazy thing is, for most of us the answer is right under our noses. Improve your web conversion rate by just a small amount and you could see big benefits.

Conversions are those visitors to your site that take the step from just looking to becoming actual customers. In many respects, once they have arrived at your site, the hard work has already been done, so any tweaks you can make to increase your conversion rates will simply have the effect of adding revenue directly to your bottom line. Sounds simple enough in theory, but what can you actually do to push up those magic numbers?

The visitor’s perspective

The biggest and best tip is to look at your website from the visitor’s perspective and work out how you could improve his or her shopping experience. Think of the parallels between visiting a website and walking into a physical shop, and what you need to do to optimize the percentage of people who walk through the door and end up making a purchase.

The first thing is getting the right customers in to start with. What would bring someone to your website, what would they be searching for in Google? They will be asking a question or looking to solve a problem or meet a need. What is it, and when your website pops up on their search results, does your homepage convey the message that you can answer the question or meet the need better than anyone else?

Once they are in your “shop” is everything organized and easy to find? Can visitors clearly see what they are getting? Are there product photos from multiple angles, or better still video images?

Make conversion the natural choice

If you have all the above in place, with a clearly defined value proposition and a well laid-out website, a larger proportion of customers should already be eager to convert. So, make it easy for them to do so.

Many websites fail at the final hurdle by having shopping carts and payment systems that are complex, or even worse, that do not work properly on mobile devices. This is the equivalent of choosing what you want to buy, then

encountering an enormous queue at the checkouts and deciding to just go elsewhere. The majority of web searches are now conducted on mobiles, so it pays to make absolutely certain that your site loads properly from tablets and smartphones and that all the buttons and links work as they should across all devices.

Now working as a writer, Jackie started her career in finance and banking, but after becoming a mom refocused and decided to spend more time with her family. When she's not writing, she volunteers for a number of local mental health charities and also has a menagerie of pets to look after

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