Just like your favourite streetwear designers create clothing with the wearer in mind, stepping into your users' shoes can help you construct a website that people want to visit, engage with, and return to. After all, a high converting website strikes the right balance between functionality and design.

We sat down with Matthew Webb, Marketing Lead at Hype & Dexter and co-owner of conscious fashion brand Matthew James, to discover what drives website conversion. It’s about appealing to your audience using the best tools available, Matt explains. Let’s take a closer look at the top 5 essential elements of a high converting website.

Improve Your Site’s Search Engine Optimisation

To begin optimising your site for high conversions, you need to make it easy for visitors to find you. Two crucial factors of positive SEO (search engine optimisation) include long-tail keywords and page loading speed.

Structuring your site's headers and sub-headers with long-tail keywords will help make it easy for website crawlers to direct people to your site. So will organising your website's architecture into topic clusters that include a central pillar page. Not only that, but intertwining your website with hyperlinks to your other pages will help guide users around your site with ease and encourage longer interaction times. 

To further help boost your site's SEO, make sure your page loading speed is within 2 seconds. Otherwise, you risk people bouncing from your site before your homepage has even appeared on their screen. And not only are users unlikely to return, but high bounce rates have a negative impact on Google search results.

To improve page loading speed time, Matt suggests compressing images and reducing large amounts of rich content such as gifs, embedded videos and fixing broken links. You can also make use of URL analysis platforms such as GTMetrix. After all, the more people who land on your site, the greater your chances of converting them to customers - which leads us straight into the next tip.

Optimise Your Website Design

Ensuring your homepage is clear and appealing is crucial to keeping users on your site. Otherwise, you risk users bouncing from your site within the first 5 seconds. People naturally want to explore a site that pairs easy-to-read fonts with well-chosen brand colour combinations.

To create consistency across his fashion website, Matt conveyed his brand's classy, elegant style with edgy images and neutral colours. And that thoughtful consistency has been key to building trust and credibility with his customers - plus, it helps to minimise clutter. Avoiding complexity is fundamental to high converting websites. Matt’s key tip is to make sure your site module spacing is consistent.

Lastly, don’t forget to make your website device friendly! Optimising for mobile, desktop, and tablet ensures your audience can interact with your product or service no matter what device they prefer.

Make Use of Video Content…as well as Chatbots

Not only are videos highly engaging, but they can help take the guesswork out of your product or service. 

Including a 30-45 second video on your homepage that explains your service or demonstrates your product helps to identify your company’s core offering in a short amount of time. Demo videos can also be used for future distribution in ads, EDM’s and landing pages. Plus, they can help solve your customer’s pain point in under a minute. 

Speaking of solving customer problems, having 24/7 chatbot support is an easy way to instill trust in your customers. Chatbots help simplify things by keeping conversations flowing in a cool, calm way. Not only can chatbots help solve smaller queries, but they can push through to live support to help resolve immediate issues, too.

And just like efficient virtual assistants, chatbots are able to provide visitors with the information they are looking for, as well as highlight specific products and services that help convert visitors into customers.

Create Compelling Calls To Action

To improve the flow of your website, increase user duration and boost conversion rates, be sure your website contains compelling calls to action (CTA’s). Your CTA’s must make sense and guide your audience to their next step clearly. For example, a simple Contact Us form makes it easy for customers to get in touch.

Another effective CTA example is pop up forms. In HubSpot, Matt explains, pop up forms can also be used for exit intent. Utilising the pop-up form tool to sense when people plan to leave your website can result in up to a 3% conversion increase.

Pop up forms can also be used to direct your user to a specific offer - think product giveaways. Which provides an audience with a treat while allowing you to collect pertinent remarketing details (more on that soon). 

Utilise Social Media Marketing…and Remarketing

After aligning your product or service to the appropriate social media platform, be sure to include your social media icons on your website. Another top tip of Matt’s is to consider embedding relevant social media on your website. Not only are the Spotify playlists embedded on his site enjoyable to Matt’s audience, but they help to create a community through his followers' shared love of music, as well as conscious streetwear.

And while you’re thinking about social media marketing, remember the product giveaway from earlier? Announcing giveaways on social media drives more visitors to your website and helps boost your conversion rate. Plus, Matt’s experience marketing giveaways allowed him to partner and promote his offering with other publications, which fed back to his website too.

Finally, for eCommerce sites, Google Display Remarketing can be used to reconnect abandoned shopping cart users. “It takes a few trigger points to get somebody across the line,” Matt explains. Google Display Remarketing can help get your offer in front of your customers again and help convert them.

To sum up, the 5 essential elements of creating a high-converting website include:

• Improving your site’s SEO
• Optimising your website design
• Including video content and chatbots on your site
• Creating compelling CTA’s
• Utilising social media and remarketing tools

And remember, all top 5 tips have one thing in common - your user. Keeping your target audience at the forefront of your mind will help you build a website that helps to solve your customers’ pain points, build community and encourage conversions.

If you’re looking for help transforming your website's conversion rate, fill out the form below. We’re passionate about getting to the heart of businesses to help you transform with technology and realise revenue.