Sometimes, despite good SEO, high-quality products, decent website traffic, and competitive pricing, your site receive no sale. What goes wrong? Does it seem like you have been facing the same problem with your online store? Are you struggling to generate sales even when you have a soaring website traffic?
This post aims at analyzing this situation and providing a list of all the possible reasons that could be killing your CRO, in spite of having an excellent SEO. We will also look into the possible solutions that can be adopted to neutralize the problems.
Possible reasons for zero conversions despite a whopping website traffic
1. Your store looks clumsy
It’s awkwardly possible that your website might not have a professional look and feel. Sounds basic and generic but is a pretty common and dangerous behavior by the website owners. They either push the task for future and future never comes, or ask for a help from someone with little HTML and CSS knowledge. Finally, ending up with something that is more like a deformed architecture.
The importance of professional web designing is that it makes the visitors feel confident about buying from you. The part that triggers the confidence comes from how your pages communicate their professionalism to the users. How they look and which kind of images are used on the page.
You won’t call a home-page professional if it shows a big banner skewed to fit the page width. A professional web designer would have utilized the proper image size and resolution to fit the image in a correct aspect ratio.
2. The unprofessional theme and navigation
It’s a proven fact that look and feel of your website plays an important role in communicating confidence among the users. Point 1 explains the same. Moving a step ahead I would come your website theme. Yes, the theme, template or whatever.
Users don’t buy from the online stores until they are confident enough. But what is that confidence about? It’s about:
- The first impression your site creates on a first-time visitor
- The ease of navigation for the users across the site.
- The feeling that says “This site looks secure”
- The feeling that also says “The site looks professional and they are serious about the business”
Well, a clumsy looking website with weird color combinations and unguided flow of movements is never going to achieve the confidence factors listed above.
How would you feel about buying from a site that sells “bike parts” and looks like a flower shop? Flower shop? I am indicating towards the website theme.
A theme plays a great role in various aspects of conversion rate optimization (CRO). A well-organized theme can make your store, while a wrong choice of theme as break everything from CRO point of view.
Choose a theme that complements your business domain and communicates the professionalism for better user engagement and trust generation. It should leave enough white spaces to differentiate the elements and space for showing the logo of trust.
Never ignore the Primary Call-to-action buttons when you are looking out for a great theme that suits your business. There have been enough talks about the appealing CTA buttons all over the internet. One thing that is common in all of them is they all suggest you to A/B test your button before deploying it. A heatmap tracking could also be useful in this mission.
Next, comes the website navigation which highly depends on the website theme structure. Always choose a theme that easily adapts the current website structure without breaking the navigation. For example, if there are 5 menu options in the header, they should remain intact even after a theme switch.
Moreover, navigation mistakes are very common in the checkout funnel. When a customer enters the checkout funnel, your main aim should be to complete the process without any mid-way distractions. Amazon’s checkout process is a really good example of how you can keep your customer in the funnel until the checkout process is complete.
Once you start the checkout process, you will not find a single distraction in the form of related products, other offers, discount coupons, or anything. The whole focus is concentrated on completing the checkout with whatever there in the cart.
Not like the Angry bird’s store which is a bad example of distraction-free checkout. From the header menu to the Footer links, everything is active even on the checkout page. Moreover, showing related products on the checkout page is also not a good strategy.
Definitely, you would not want your customer to jump from the checkout page and check out other related products. Neither you would want to them to skip the process and sign-up for the newsletter before they exit without completing the process.
Read Also: 10 Best CMS for Ecommerce Website
3. Have you checked the source of the traffic?
Talked a lot about CRO mistakes and their rectifications in the previous two points. Now, it seems like I have ignored a very basic metric like every other website owner.
Well, bad CRO is definitely a factor when you do not receive conversions and sales. Images are important, check out page optimization is more important, CTA roars like hell, and website navigation can’t be ignored. However, I have skipped a very important check that I am going to mention now.
It’s excellent that your website receives a good share of website traffic, but do you even know the source of your traffic? Yes, the source, the referrer, and the link to land on your site.
What could be the sources?
- It could be a spam referral traffic that makes you feel that you have a soaring traffic, but in the actual scenario, you have nothing of relevance.
- It could be the traffic of people checking out your store from a link they found on the forum as you have posted there.
- It could be the traffic from Facebook page suggestion and these users are just clicking around to see what your site is all about.
So, if these visitors did not have a good impression on the first visit, why in this world would they visit your store again? That’s where you lose the repeat visits and also the sales. Moreover, these users also spread the negative word among their acquaintances and rest is obvious.
Did you know?
75% of purchases come from repeat customers.
So, first get your traffic sources sorted and try to pull spam free referral, organic traffic, and website landing with buying intention. Design the respective landing pages for all third-party, blog, Ads, and email referrals.
Bottom line is, it’s important to recognize your target audience and what they are looking for. For example, if you are blatantly putting up the promotions for your products on an SEO forum, you are targeting the wrong people, and more likely to receive no sales from it.
This example and the whole scenario has very little to do with the CRO or SEO but rather a lot more to do with online promotion etiquette. The manners to promote right thing in a right way on a right platform.
Clear the dust from your Google Analytics account. It’s time you start using it to track this important website metric- traffic source. You need to understand your audience and also understand the online promotion etiquette.
Google Analytics can tell you about your traffic source, geo-location, and demographics of your audience. You may refer to your SEO partner for reading the same if it’s tough for you to do it by yourself. But it’s important and you have to do it one or the other way.
4. You are giving away your sales to the rivals
It’s important to take the customers into confidence so that they feel safe while shopping on your site. They take no time to bounce back if you can’t impress with your trustworthiness in a few seconds.
Did you know?
For every wrong impression and mistake you make, you lose your customers to your rival sites. There are several mistakes that you might have been making knowingly or unknowingly. Identify these mistakes and make sure at least you are not giving away the sales knocking at your door.
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Unclear or no value proposition
Sometimes you’re doing everything perfectly, but you are selling the products that no want. That happens when you fail to communicate your value proposition.
Not telling why your product is best and why one should buy from you when a lot of alternatives are already available, is the lack of a strong value proposition. And it is the same as selling a valuable yet unwanted product. Valuable because it’s actually valuable, unwanted because you haven’t told why it’s valuable.
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Slow loading site
Today, it’s on the tips of the mouth that “40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.”. However, we never actually care about this stat and keep doing what we have been doing from eternity- promotion, sales, sales, sales, and again promotion.
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No reviews
I was talking about Amazon’s worthiness in the last point. That was to explain that this giant possesses a lot of the USPs to get a favored treatment and Amazon’s product reviews are one of them.
Read Also: 4 Common Mistakes Made When Creating an Ecommerce Shop
A strong reason to trust on Amazon is it’s highly effective, and honest product review showcase. Can it be said for your website too? Do you allow your customers to write reviews about the products they bought from you? Do you honestly showcase all these reviews without hiding the negative ones? That’s what Amazon did to become a trusted brand and is still doing.
You have to understand the basic customer behavior. If a particular product doesn’t have a single review on your site, and the same product is available on your competitor’s site with even a single review, the favor would always go to them.
Words to Conclude
Finally, there could be unlimited reasons for why your high traffic store is not able to make potential sales. Other than this, not tapping the customer base of the mobile users is another reason that might cripple your conversions. Thus, having a well-designed website is not enough.
Whether you use a mobile app builder or you hire a development company, make sure that your app is optimizing the user experience. I am certain that neither your CRO expert not the SEO partner would deny these. Hopefully, checking out for these reasons and rectifying them would surely start bringing sales and conversions to your online store. Rest depends on your marketing, website optimization, and SEO to tackle the competition factor. Happy selling!!!