Table of Contents
- 12 Best Conversion Optimization Tips for Small Business Websites
- 1. Build Trust
- Building Trust: Social Proof
- Ensuring Safety
- 2. Value for Value—Create a Match that Satisfies Everyone
- Early Conversions
- Mid-Funnel Value
- 3. Segment Your Audience for More Targeted Messaging
- 4. Remove Barriers
- 5. Optimize Your CTA, Landing Page & Form
- Buttons & Attention
- Landing Page Conversions
- 6. Employ A/B Testing
- Optimizing Conversions
- 7. Use PPC Ads for a Reliable Conversion Spike
- PPC Optimization
- Ad to Landing Page
- 8. Use Tools to Improve Key Conversion Factors
- 9. Add a Pop-up to Your Website
- Key Conversion Factors
- User-Friendly Pop-Ups
- 10. Remove Unnecessary Form Fields
- 11. Add Live Chat to Your Website
- 12. Add a Countdown Timer
- Related Reading
- 6 Best Places To Focus CRO on Your Website
- 1. Homepage: Where First Impressions Matter
- 2. Category Pages: Making It Easy to Browse
- 3. Product Pages: Where Decisions Are Made
- 4. Cart Page: Preventing Abandonment
- 5. Checkout Page: Sealing the Deal
- 6. Blog: Turning Readers into Leads
- Related Reading
- How To Calculate Your Small Business Website Conversion Rate
- Calculating Rates for Single and Multiple Goals
- Pros of Knowing Your Website Conversion Rate
- Cons of Knowing Your Website Conversion Rate
- 10 Best Website Conversion Rate Optimization Tools for Small Businesses
- 1. Boost Your Credibility and Conversion Rates with Testimonial Software
- 2. BuzzSumo Helps You Research Your Content Marketing
- 3. Use Google Trends to Optimize Your SEO Strategy
- 4. Hotjar Helps You Visualize How Users Interact with Your Site
- 5. SurveyMonkey Makes Customer Feedback Simple
- 6. Typeform Collects Data with Interactive Surveys
- 7. Kissmetrics Analyzes Visitor Behavior for Conversion Rate Optimization
- 8. SimilarWeb Analyzes Competition to Optimize Your Website
- 9. VWO Combines Multiple Testing Features for Conversion Rate Optimization
- 10. Optimizely Is an Advanced A/B Testing Tool
- Build a Wall of Love for Free Today with Testimonial
- Related Reading
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AI summary
Boost conversion rates for small business websites by building trust, optimizing CTAs and landing pages, segmenting audiences, removing barriers, and utilizing tools like A/B testing and PPC ads. Implement features like live chat and countdown timers to enhance user engagement and drive sales.
Title
12 Best Conversion Optimization Tips For Small Business Websites
Date
Feb 21, 2025
Description
Boost conversion rates and website performance with conversion optimization for small business website strategies. Optimize landing pages effectively.
Status
Current Column
Person
Writer
You just launched your small business website and await customers to roll in. But after a few weeks of little to no traffic, you’re beginning to feel discouraged. You’ve read about improving your site’s SEO and followed the steps to optimize your pages for Google. But when you finally got a few visitors, you were disappointed that they weren’t turning into paying customers. While you’re happy to see some traffic, you need conversions. Website conversion, or the process of turning visitors into customers, is what optimizes websites for business goals. Focusing on conversion optimization for small business websites can help you not only boost sales but also improve your SEO and enhance user experience. In this blog, we’ll explore the best conversion optimization tips for small business websites to help you maximize your website's efficiency.
One valuable tool to help you achieve your goals is Testimonial software, such as Testimonial’s design-to-code tool. It helps optimize your website for conversions by allowing you to create stunning, custom, code-free testimonials that boost credibility and drive sales.
12 Best Conversion Optimization Tips for Small Business Websites
1. Build Trust
Trust is crucial for conversions. Here’s how you can build trust:
- Create a detailed “about us” page.
- Use text rather than an image for your imprint.
- Avoid broken links.
- Work with transparent prices.
Building Trust: Social Proof
Leverage social proof. Social proof reinforces trust and reliability. Display customer testimonials, reviews, and case studies prominently on your site. Highlighting positive experiences from others assures new visitors that they’re making a sound decision, thereby increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Ensuring Safety
Include security badges, payment seals, or industry certifications to key pages like checkout or sign-up forms. These signals reassure users that their information is safe. Testimonial.to help streamline review collection and management, allowing you to build social proof without the hassle.
2. Value for Value—Create a Match that Satisfies Everyone
Because conversion is not always about making a sale, you must match what you’re getting to what you’re offering. A sale is of the highest value to your business, so a “Buy Now” CTA should offer whatever has the highest value for the customer. That’s money, i.e., a discount. At the other end of the funnel, though, I may only get a prospect’s email address in return for what I’m offering.
Early Conversions
My free content value can compel prospects to join a mailing list or share their contact information. Since early-stage conversions tied to awareness and interest are several steps away from your revenue stream, an equitable trade usually involves something that didn’t cost you much but has reasonably high perceived value.
Mid-Funnel Value
You can use helpful blog content or a checklist, for example. A mid-funnel step to gather detailed profile data requires something of higher value. I may have to offer gated content—some sort of digital asset of higher importance and gains perceived value by being provided conditionally. If you match value for value when seeking conversions, all of your other CRO initiatives will yield better results.
3. Segment Your Audience for More Targeted Messaging
Dividing your audience into groups helps ensure people see messages that align with their place in the sales funnel, making it a key factor in CRO. But there’s more to it. Segmentation is often driven by an extensive customer base analysis, an analysis intended to increase your understanding of customers’ buying behavior and provide insight into ways the business can more effectively personalize the customer experience.
Segmentation is vital in the initial CRO step mentioned above, message refinement based on audience research. So, segmentation ties into CRO in two ways: it’s crucial for high-level audience analysis, and it allows businesses to target people in a specific phase of the sales funnel.
4. Remove Barriers
An essential step in increasing conversions is eliminating all barriers preventing the prospect from taking the desired action. Here are some examples:
- Simplify newsletter subscription. Don’t ask for too much information; make most input fields optional. Once I have contact information, I’ll get plenty of chances to solicit customer profile data through subsequent engagement.
- Make paying easy. Consider your target audience and offer payment methods they’re likely to use. Registration should be optional.
- Speak to the customer’s risk. If taking the desired action involves unwanted risk for the prospect, you must set their mind at ease. Through your content, try to establish your business as a trusted source.
- Offer proof of quality. Quality is not a universal concept. Pay attention to your customers’ needs and values to state your quality claims in a way that will resonate with them.
- Present a privacy statement. Link to a privacy statement containing all the assurances appropriate for the information you require my visitor to submit.
5. Optimize Your CTA, Landing Page & Form
Your call to action is one of the most critical aspects of CRO. A compelling CTA will be directly tied to your content and clearly state what you’re offering. Whether on your site, in an ad, or as part of a social media post, your CTA must attract the user. Employ bright colors and engaging language to energize your audience.
Buttons & Attention
Use a button instead of a simple link as they draw more focus, especially on mobile devices. When someone clicks my CTA and sees my landing page, they’re in a crucial phase, just moments away from taking the desired action, but I have to hold their attention. Research studies consistently show that about 40% of consumers will wait no longer than three seconds for a page to load before clicking away.
Landing Page Conversions
A webpage that takes longer than four seconds to load will yield a conversion rate that’s half what it would be with fast page speed. Stats like that make it clear: page speed is essential to CRO. Your landing page should double down on the value proposition in my CTA and prompt people to complete the desired action.
Whether it’s part of the checkout process or a single field designed to collect email addresses, my form must be straightforward. Put the most critical fields at the top to keep the layout simple.
6. Employ A/B Testing
A/B testing lets you systematically compare the performance of one CTA or landing page with another. This way, you can identify the one that results in more conversions and gradually optimize it for higher conversion rates. In your CTA’s, you should test different color combinations.
Optimizing Conversions
You may want to include your brand color, but you shouldn’t prioritize that over bolder colors that might draw more attention. Experiment with different content lengths. Brevity is key, but you should use enough words to adequately explain your value and what you want the user to do.
With A/B testing, you can assess the conversion rate associated with:
- Different CTAs
- Email marketing initiatives
- Landing pages
- Blog posts or social media
7. Use PPC Ads for a Reliable Conversion Spike
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are an effective way to increase conversions. They’re one of the most expensive forms of marketing outreach, but PPC ads tend to have an impressive ROI. For that reason, they’re favored by small businesses that plan to use them in a limited capacity.
A new business seeking momentum or an established company that wants to supercharge a specific campaign can see conversions soar through PPC ads.
PPC Optimization
You can optimize your PPC ads to maximize conversions. Create unique headlines that catch the users’ attention and clearly state my message. Use everything you know about the target audience to tailor the ad copy and compellingly reflect my value proposition. If a visitor arrives at your website through an ad, there must be a consistent look and feel.
Ad to Landing Page
So, when designing my ads, consider your website's color scheme and visual elements. Ensure that my ad copy matches the tone of your landing page. Addressing these factors will ensure the user experiences a seamless transition from my ad to your landing page, improving conversions.
8. Use Tools to Improve Key Conversion Factors
Some tools will help you with CRO, some free, and others that you’ll have to pay for. It’s a broad market, but here are a few tools to increase conversions. For example, Google Page Speed Insights will help you address all the essential page performance concerns.
Page Speed Insights lets you enter my landing page’s URL and get accurate speed performance data. The tool presents recommendations about how I can improve my stats.
9. Add a Pop-up to Your Website
According to a recent study by Sumo, website pop-ups have an average conversion rate of 3.09%. Still, their research found that the top 10 percent of highest-performing pop-ups average a 9.28% conversion rate, which is exceptional.
Key Conversion Factors
A highly effective website pop-up can dramatically improve my conversion rate and is something our Brisbane Web Designers include on almost every website we build at White Peak Digital. The trick between the average pop-up and the high-performing ones is the few key details below:
- Pop-ups with more context convert higher. They don’t appear immediately instead they often have a 15-30 second delay.
- The best pop-ups have a clear and engaging headline.
- High-converting pop-ups offer something of real value.
- The call-to-action matches my offer (would you click ‘Subscribe’ when a pop-up offers you a free eBook?).
User-Friendly Pop-Ups
A few other quality of life and user experience tips I can give you is to make sure it’s still easy to close my pop-up so that a visitor doesn’t feel stuck on something they’re not interested in. To go along with this, I’d also highly recommend setting up a website cookie that remembers not to show the same pop-up to that visitor next time. This combination will give you a huge boost in conversions while keeping the interruption to my website visitors to a minimum.
10. Remove Unnecessary Form Fields
Too many required form fields are among the best ways to ruin my website conversion rate. Keep my conversion forms as short as possible and only include the essential fields necessary to accomplish my goal. This can be taken too far, though. If I’m not collecting all the information my sales team needs to convert those leads, I’m only pushing my conversion issues down the road, and my close rate will suffer dramatically.
This means I must balance collecting the necessary information and simplifying my forms to get the best results possible.
11. Add Live Chat to Your Website
Many of my visitors may be on the fence about buying my product or service; all it may take is the answer to one or two questions to get them over the line. A live chat option is the perfect way to help answer those questions and have those visitors take the final step and convert. This is also a great way to conduct user testing to see if I often receive the same questions through my live chat.
Receiving the same question repeatedly indicates the need to change something on my landing page, like adding an FAQ section, which will reduce the number of visitors using my live chat and, therefore, save my team time.
12. Add a Countdown Timer
It’s natural to feel anxious when time is running out; you can capitalize on this by adding a countdown timer to my landing page. A study by CXL explains how one brand increased its conversion rate by 332% using a limited-time offer banner and a countdown timer. This is usually quite a simple feature to add to your website, especially if it’s built on WordPress or Shopify for which numerous plugins exist.
Related Reading
6 Best Places To Focus CRO on Your Website
1. Homepage: Where First Impressions Matter
Your homepage is the front door of your business. It’s often the first thing people see, so it needs to grab attention, build trust, and guide visitors toward the next step. To improve conversions, focus on:
- Clear value proposition
- Intuitive navigation
- Strong call-to-action (CTA) buttons
Highlight featured products, showcase special offers, and ensure your site looks great on mobile. Adding trust signals, such as reviews or security badges, can encourage visitors to explore further.
2. Category Pages: Making It Easy to Browse
Think of category pages as the aisles in a store. If they’re cluttered or confusing, shoppers won’t stick around. Ensure your category names are clear, and that product images, descriptions, and price filters help customers find what they need quickly.
You can also optimize these pages by adding innovative sorting options, breadcrumb navigation, and personalized recommendations for upselling or cross-selling.
3. Product Pages: Where Decisions Are Made
Your product pages are where visitors turn into buyers—if they’re convinced. CRO strategies for these pages include testing different messaging, layouts, and promotional offers. High-quality images (or even videos) help showcase your product, while clear, compelling descriptions can eliminate doubts.
Ensure your CTA buttons stand out, your pricing is transparent, and customers can easily find key information like return policies and shipping details.
4. Cart Page: Preventing Abandonment
The cart page is a critical checkpoint. Customers have shown interest, but now they decide whether to follow through. If the cart page is confusing or inconvenient, they might abandon their order. Common frustrations include difficulty reviewing items, unexpected costs, or forced account creation.
To optimize, ensure users can easily see their order total, edit items, and check out quickly. Offering guest checkout and displaying security assurances can also reduce drop-offs.
5. Checkout Page: Sealing the Deal
The checkout page should be seamless. A complicated or time-consuming checkout process is one of the reasons for abandoned carts. If users have to create an account, go through too many steps, or can’t find their preferred payment method, they may leave. Simplify the layout, minimize unnecessary fields, and provide multiple payment options.
Allowing users to save payment information for future purchases can also speed up the process.
6. Blog: Turning Readers into Leads
A blog isn’t just for sharing insights—it’s a powerful conversion tool. Adding relevant CTAs within posts can guide readers toward signing up for your newsletter, downloading a resource, or exploring related products. The key is to make these CTAs feel natural rather than forced.
If someone is reading an article about "The Best Running Shoes for Long-Distance Training," a CTA linking to your top-selling running shoes would be a perfect fit.
Related Reading
How To Calculate Your Small Business Website Conversion Rate
Website conversion rates look at the percentage of visitors to your website who complete a desired goal (like making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter) out of the total number of visitors to your site.
To calculate your small business website conversion rate, use the following formula: (#) conversions / (#) of website sessions = (%) Website Conversion Rate.
Calculating Rates for Single and Multiple Goals
Calculating your website conversion rate is straightforward as long as you know what a ‘conversion’ is for your site. Simply divide the number of conversions by the number of website sessions to determine your conversion rate. If you have multiple conversion opportunities (e.g. downloading an ebook, signing up for a webinar, and subscribing to an email list), then you can calculate this metric in two different ways:
- Separately for each conversion, using only the sessions from the specific page(s) the offer is listed.
- All the conversions combined using all the sessions for the entire website.
Pros of Knowing Your Website Conversion Rate
This metric helps determine whether your website is well-optimized and shows potential opportunities for more significant sales. A higher conversion rate generally means three things:
- You’re attracting the right audience for your product/service.
- Your copy and messaging/calls to action/graphics/etc. Resonate with your audience, and
- You’ve made the user’s journey more straightforward, intuitive, and compelling. Improving your conversion rate starts by improving the user experience.
Cons of Knowing Your Website Conversion Rate
If your session numbers are low, you shouldn’t get too caught up in website conversion rate as it’s not a strong enough sample of data to determine the impact of various changes accurately. Instead, focus on increasing sessions before getting caught up in conversion rates.
10 Best Website Conversion Rate Optimization Tools for Small Businesses
1. Boost Your Credibility and Conversion Rates with Testimonial Software
Testimonial simplifies the process of building trust and credibility for businesses. Our software allows easy collection and display of authentic client testimonials, featuring video and text options, an embeddable wall of love widget, a clever email assistant, and third-party review imports.
Ideal for content creators, agencies, eCommerce, and SaaS companies, Testimonial helps boost your credibility and conversion rates by showcasing real customer experiences. Build a wall of love for free today with Testimonial.
2. BuzzSumo Helps You Research Your Content Marketing
BuzzSumo is a multipurpose tool for researching your content marketing, social media, and influencer marketing efforts. It can be hard to determine your customer acquisition costs when using tactics like influencer marketing without using a popular web analytics tool like BuzzSumo.
Pricing: Plans range from $99 to $499 per month
3. Use Google Trends to Optimize Your SEO Strategy
Google Trends reveals the popularity of search terms over time by tracking the search behavior of real users. It allows you to see what topics are trending and gain insights into geographic and demographic patterns of search behavior. That means you can adjust your SEO goals based on what your target audience is interested in.
Using Google Trends in concert with other Google products, such as Google Analytics, is a great idea.
Pricing: Google Trends is a free tool
4. Hotjar Helps You Visualize How Users Interact with Your Site
Hotjar is a heat mapping tool that provides businesses with various features to help them understand how users interact with their websites. It’s helpful to see visual data about how visitors interact with your site. In addition to heat maps, their key features include session recording, online surveys, form analytics, and customer feedback polls.
Pricing: There is a free plan available, and paid plans start at $29 per month
5. SurveyMonkey Makes Customer Feedback Simple
SurveyMonkey is a web-based customer feedback software that allows users to create, send, and analyze surveys. The reports the tool creates combine all the available data and make your market research a breeze.
Pricing: A free version is available, and the Standard plan starts at $35 per month
6. Typeform Collects Data with Interactive Surveys
Typeform is a survey-building tool that allows users to create interactive forms on any webpage. Their visual editor can create surveys, quizzes, contact forms, and other forms. This, combined with Typeform’s distinct conversational style, makes gathering data from your web traffic easy.
Pricing: A free plan is available, and the Essential plan starts at $35 per month.
7. Kissmetrics Analyzes Visitor Behavior for Conversion Rate Optimization
Kissmetrics is another conversion rate optimization tool that provides data about web page visitor interactions. Like Google Analytics, this software reports on traffic sources, pages visited, and user actions. Users can also analyze how well specific marketing campaigns have performed, which can help you see which of your campaigns have the highest conversion rate.
Pricing: There is a free plan available
8. SimilarWeb Analyzes Competition to Optimize Your Website
SimilarWeb is a unique web analytics tool because it automatically gathers and indexes public data from billions of webpages. This means you can see where your competitors’ website traffic is coming from. These traffic sources are divided into six categories (referring sites, social traffic, top search keywords, etc.).
Pricing: A free trial is available. You’ll have to contact sales for premium plans.
9. VWO Combines Multiple Testing Features for Conversion Rate Optimization
VWO (for Visual Website Optimizer) is a conversion optimization tool that combines A/B testing, heat maps, and visitor recordings. You can test variations of whatever website elements you think are essential, including headlines, images, and buttons. As a result, you can make data-driven decisions about which version of your website to use.
Pricing: There is a free plan available. Paid plans start at $49 per month.
10. Optimizely Is an Advanced A/B Testing Tool
Optimizely is an advanced experimentation and A/B testing platform. It’s one of the best conversion rate optimization tools, allowing developers to conduct multivariate and other tests. Nevertheless, it’s an expensive solution that is popular among enterprise-level e-commerce companies. Therefore, it might not be the best fit for smaller businesses.
Pricing: A free plan is available. For more, you’ll have to contact sales.
Build a Wall of Love for Free Today with Testimonial
Testimonial simplifies the process of building trust and credibility for businesses. Our software allows an accessible collection and display of authentic client testimonials featuring:
- Video and text options
- Embeddable wall of love widget
- Clever Email Assistant
- Third-party review imports
Testimonials showcase real customer experiences and help boost credibility and conversion rates. They are ideal for:
- Content creators
- Agencies
- eCommerce
- SaaS companies
Build a wall of love for free today with Testimonial.
Related Reading
- Website Conversion Rate Optimisation
- Conversion Optimization Strategy
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