Even though your site might not seem broken because you’re making sales or getting leads, trust me: it’s broken.

I don’t mean to discourage you but, rather, to help you understand that as long as you aren’t converting 100% of your visitors, there’s room for ongoing improvement and room to make more money or generate more leads.

No one has a perfect sales process online that is mapped out to every individual, idiosyncratic buying process of every potential customer. You can’t just fix your site in one shot and say it’s perfect; it’s literally impossible to do so.

To put this in perspective, most websites are converting less than 3% of their visitors and are therefore pushing away 97% or more of their visitors. If they can just convert a slightly larger percentage of their visitors, think about the dollars this opportunity translates into.

There will always be new questions you realize your customers are asking, that you may not be answering on your site in the appropriate places. You need to be able to translate those findings into your web site in the appropriate places, where the visitors needs to find that information.

Where to Get Started

You can start improving your website’s conversion rate by thinking about how you’re going to find out where the conversion and persuasion challenges lie within your site.

Before you do anything else, take a look at your analytics program to check the site’s performance and to try to understand what’s happening throughout the site. Although you’re likely tracking unplanned scent trails, your analytics can still give you an idea of where things are broken. Even basic analytics information at various key points in the site can help you better understand how to give the site’s visitors what they want. It’s the first baby steps toward analyzing your website.

Instead of looking at your overall conversion rate, look at it on a micro level and track each individual click to see how you can improve micro-conversions.

• Where is your traffic coming from?
• Where is this traffic landing on your site?
• Once the traffic lands on your main landing pages, what are the most common links they are clicking on next?
• Once the visitors click through from the landing pages, to the most commonly clicked pages, what is the drop off rate on these pages?
• Are you persuading them to take action with a clear call to action on these pages and giving them other text links to move forward or are they leaving your site because they don’t have any scent to follow?

Persuasion Tip: If you can’t figure out what the most common questions people are asking when they come to your site are, ask your customer service reps what questions people are calling in with. Go onto message boards to see what people are saying in your industry. And go to your competitors sites and see how they’re funneling visitors around.

Take a look at your shopping cart and/or forms, and ask yourself:

• What is the drop-off rate for those individuals who are entering your shopping cart but not purchasing?

This will give you an indication of whether you’re making it easy for visitor to complete purchases or become leads.

Be the investigator. If your visitors are not taking the actions you want them to, look at the micro landscape and find out why that might be.