One common mistake you can make as a marketer is to focus only on design.

Granted, you need to impress visitors with beautiful headlines and artworks, but it does very little to drive traffic and sales to your site.

If you want to increase your sales, the best thing to do is optimize your site organically.

Of course, it is always ideal to start off on the right foot, but even if you missed out on some things before launching your site, there’s no such thing as a wrong time to improve your site.

So if you are looking to optimize your conversion rate, here are 4 checks you must cross off your list:

1. Optimize for speed

It’s 2019, and speed is still everything.

In fact, studies have shown that the quicker a webpage loads, the more likely it will convert.

It is no small matter.

Companies are losing millions of dollars because of slow speed.

Take Amazon, for example:

The e-commerce giant discovered that just 1 second of load lag time could cost them as much as $1.6 billion in sales.

That’s a huge amount by any count.

Luckily, the fix is the obvious one:

Optimize for speed.

Walmart found out that optimizing for speed increased their conversion rate by 2%.

This figure may seem small at first, but let’s imagine that Walmart rakes in $100 million a year. A 2% increase in conversion will mean an extra $2 million to their coffers.

A lot of things can slow your site’s loading speed. The fact is, the more texts, images, etc., you put on your site, the more time it takes to load.

Fortunately, there’s a way to increase your site’s speed with Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

First, enter your URL to analyze your site. It will take a couple of seconds, and once it has finished analyzing, you will see your site’s speed score on a scale of 100.

If it falls between 90 and 100, then your site is fast. Less than 50 is below average.

If your site can do better, PageSpeed Insights will give you some actionable ideas to execute.

You can hit ‘Mobile’ or ‘Desktop’ to view your report for any of these devices.

2. Put mobile before desktop

The use of mobile devices to access the web has skyrocketed over the years.

In 2017, statistics showed that 63% of Internet visits came from mobile devices versus the 37% that came from desktops.

Why is this relevant to conversion optimization? Because Google considers mobile experience when indexing sites.

Before now, Google only indexed sites based on content on the desktop version, but this changed when mobile began to pull more traffic than desktops.

With Google deciding to split mobile and desktop into separate indexes, it only makes sense to optimize your site for mobile.

And it’s not only in searches that you will reap the rewards.

A report shows that 76% of people searching for a product on their mobile device end up visiting the company that sells that product within a day, and 28% of them will buy the product.

This means that, apart from improving your site’s design and your chances on search engines, optimizing for mobile will lead to more purchases.

To start with, use AMP markup for your webpage.

AMP means accelerated mobile pages. With it, you can amplify your reach by putting a ton of content in one search result.

If you are using WordPress, you can set it up in a few steps:

  • Install the WordPress plugin
  • Get Schema markup to validate

Once that is settled, make sure that you have chosen a responsive web design, as Google is big on mobile design.

If you know little about codes and programming, you can opt for responsive themes to use for your website.

After that, you will want to work on compressing your images to free up space.

Be sure to take note of the file format of images you upload to your website in the first place. PNG is most often recommended because it still retains most of its quality after considerable compression.

There are several other ways to optimize your website for mobile, and you may not touch all of it at once.

What is important is that you take action to optimize your website to resolve mobile queries, and you do it now.

3. Post content regularly

Every brand that is doing well today has one thing going for them:

Content marketing! Yes, that’s right.

As far as I’m concerned, the fastest and easiest way to bring in organic traffic is to post tons of right content on your site, and I’m not the only one that thinks so.

According to data from HubSpot, blogs that post up to 16 times every month get more than 3 times the visit than companies that post less.

This makes sense because people want to see that your business is active, and posting regularly shows them that.

Aim for long-form content, as statistics show that they perform better on Google.

While you are at it, target long-tail keywords, which your customers are most likely to search for. That way, when they are ready to buy, their search takes them directly to your page, which will lead to more conversions.

You can use a tool like Moz Keyword Explorer for your search.

When you type in a general keyword or phrase, it gives you a result of target keywords based on a number of aspects, such as monthly search volume, difficulty, priority, etc.

4. Optimize your landing pages

Landing pages are a must if you want to drive sales.

Conversion Rate Experts revealed that Moz made a million dollars in a year from just landing pages and some email marketing.

This could be you too, if you make sure your landing page is optimized for search engines by:

  • Finding long-tail keywords
  • Optimizing your title tags and Meta tag description
  • Including useful content with headlines
  • Adding testimonials, trust signals, and actionable CTAs

Final Words

If you want to drive the majority of your traffic to sales, then you must focus on optimization more than design.

Speed is the first factor that can make a difference in how well your visitors stick with you. If you haven’t considered optimizing your website for speed, you need to.

Then where do you go from there?

Design your website for mobile, as most of your customers will come from there; stay active by producing and posting a ton of helpful content; optimize your landing pages to capture specific needs; and watch your conversion rate climb up the chart.