There are two ways to increase your sales; spend thousands of pounds more on marketing, or convert your existing visitors using conversion optimisation.

In fact, no matter how much traffic you’re able to send to your website, if it doesn’t convert then you’re wasting money. If you engage in any kind of marketing activity, the level of your success (or failure) can often come down to your website and how well it converts; improve your conversion rate from 0.5% to 1% and you’ll halve your CPA across all marketing mediums.

At Active, our team of usability experts are able to learn from your customers, using own intelligent, analytics software to gain an insight into why they are leaving without making a sale. We then use this information to develop your web pages, and design landing pages that convert using a strict methodology aimed at funnelling your visitors, with a clear proposition, a strong incentive, and focussed on a single, call-to-action.

Here’s our top 10 guidelines to help you understand how your customers interact with your website and how to make some changes to improve your conversions:

1. Nail the design

Visitors really do ‘judge a book by its cover’. Based on layout, consistency, typography, colour and style the way they perceive your site will determine if they get in touch or even if they decide to return at all.

2. Give your customer the information to make an informed decision

If you’re purchasing a product, you want as much information about that product as possible. Give your customers what they want; detailed information on the product in manageable chunks, supported by images and you’ll increase your chances of gaining another sale!

3. Add faces and real people

People instinctively focus in on people’s faces and studies reveal that if the face is looking elsewhere that we’ll try looking in that direction as well. This can be used on your website to lead users to the areas of the page where you want them to go.

4. Above the field form labels

Usability testing identify that the most effective placemement of form labels is above the form field. This may seem a minor thing but its key to a potential customer making an enquiry with your business.

5. Limit search boxes to 27 characters

The optimum character width of a search box is 27 characters as opposed to the average  which is 18 characters in width. 27% of queries are too long to fit in a box limited to 18 characters so by extending it to 27 characters, up to 90% of queries will fit within it.

6. Reduce scrolling

Studies reveal that only 23% of visitors are willing to scroll down your site and this drops even more on return visits, making it even more important to take into consideration the hierarchy of your content. This doesn’t mean cluttering it up but get the most important things in there like your company name, what you do, how to contact you and the main navigation of the site.

7. Link in blue

By default any online coding application will create links in blue. Why? because its what people are familiar with. Although sometimes we’d like to colour our links so they are consistent with the palette used on site. Stick to what people know.

8. White space is as important as content

White space allows your content to breathe and aids its comprehension by the user. Doing so has been proven to increase readability by 20%.

9. Forget banners
Jakob Neilsen reports that most users are blind when it comes to ad banners. This isn’t great news if you rely on them for generating revenue. But from the findings it seems that visitors avoid anything that looks like an ad even if it isn’t one. So if aspects of your website look like they could be an ad but are in fact navigation you may want to redesign them.

10. User testing, no matter how limited, can help your site

A study by Jakob Neilsen revealed that by testing your site with just 5 users revealed up to 85% of the problems. Whereas 15 would find just about all the problems. If your unable to do extensive user testing then get at least 3-5 people to test your site before it goes live, and flush out those problems.