As the saying goes, we all need to start somewhere, and if you have a small or start-up business, the likelihood is that your current website – if you have one – won’t be receiving much traffic.
This presents various issues in terms of improving your conversion rate – after all, when you have no or very few visitors, it is difficult for you to gain a sophisticated understanding of those visitors and determine what does and doesn’t work in terms of attracting and engaging them.
So, what techniques can you use?
If your website is a low-traffic one, it may be difficult to undertake the A/B tests that your high-traffic competitors do, for the simple reason that it is difficult to measure any statistically significant differences when changes are made. However, a lot of the other techniques used by high-traffic websites can still be used by even the smallest online businesses.
Possibly the most fruitful of these approaches is user testing, which doesn’t need to be any more sophisticated than asking a friend – or anyone else you can get hold of – to try out your site while you observe them, noting any issues that arise.
You may even go as far as having usability tests carried out on the websites of your industry competitors and comparing the results to those for your own site. You may find through this process that there are certain issues on your own site that the competitor has found a good way of addressing on their site.
Another potential approach for boosting feedback on a low-traffic site could be to increase the incentives for visitors to complete surveys to attract a higher percentage of responses. In addition, you could place your phone number in a prominent position at the top of all of your site’s pages to encourage a greater number of calls, and even possibly charm some of your callers into carrying out long-term usability testing for you.
Testing doesn’t necessarily need to be out of the question
Business owners with low-traffic websites often presume that testing isn’t the right way to determine what does and doesn’t work with their site, because it would take too long to generate genuinely significant results.
However, that isn’t necessarily the case. By testing only the major pages of your site and testing the biggest and boldest possible changes, you often can get meaningful results, even from testing on a low-traffic site. In any case, it is good to get into an early habit of frequent A/B testing, so that you can also realise its benefits at the earliest possible stage.
Don’t allow yourself to be too fatalistic about your low-traffic website! Get experimenting with and testing your site on a regular basis, and you may well see quicker-than-expected results. With our own in-depth expertise in website design here at Piranha Designs, we are well-placed to cater to your needs in this area, including if you need a site to be designed from scratch.
