Need Advice on Home page Conversion Rate Improvement - not much $$s

[JeanYates]

Anyone out there have some suggestions for how I can improve my home page and increase my lousy conversion rate?

I've spent years on the content and SEO optimization of my site and very little time on making a home page that sells stuff. Caveat - I don't have the money to go to one of those fancy companies who do a complete makeover and charge in the tens of thousands.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Jean

http://www.northwest-wine.com

[danatanseo]

Hi Jean,

I've always dreamed of doing SEO for a wine site! Okay, first, there's an awesome tool that you should know about at http://www.optimizely.com  I believe you can get a free trial for 30 days with full access to everything they have to offer. They have really good customer support. After that you pay by how much traffic your site gets and believe me, considering what you discover, it's a bargain (We are a large e-commerce site and it runs us $79 a month).

Now I have a few questions. When you refer to "conversion rate" are referring to your site-wide conversion rate or the conversion rate of the home page specifically? The reason I ask is because maybe it's not your homepage that's the conversion problem.

Do you have a goal funnel set up in Google ANalytics? If not, I'd do that first thing. Not only is it free, but it's going to show you exactly where people are falling out in the conversion process. Perhaps the problem is in your shopping cart and not on your homepage...it's a possibility. It would be a shame spending a lot of time and effort optimizing the homepage when it's not the main source of the problem. That being said, let's assume for argument's sake that your homepage is part of the problem. I'd begin by tagging different links in different sections and perhaps even looking at your heat map and site performance in Google analytics to determine what people are paying attaching to and what they are ignoring.

Above all, don't change too much of anything all at once. You'll never be able to identify what worked and why that way. Make changes to one thing at a time and track the results. Check your ego at the door (I'm not saying you have one, I've just seen it too many times where a split test result came back that the CEO didn't like so the results were ignored and changes never implemented), Let the data drive your actions.

Meclabs (via Marketing SHerpa), Wider Funnel and Steve Krug's Book "Rocket Surgery Made Easy" and his older book "Don't make me think"  are all great resources for optimization webinars, ideas and advice.

Good luck. I'm sure I'm not the only SEO in here who would be happy to work for wine

Dana

[EGOL]

I don't have the money to go to one of those fancy companies who do a complete makeover and charge in the tens of thousands.

I've gotten a homepage and landing page evaluation from Tim and Rachel at SiteTuners for a couple thousand.

Well worth the time and money.

You can throw darts or pay a little for great advice.  We use what we learned now in so many places.

Get a loan from your uncle, sell your baseball cards, get a temporary job at McDs.   You will get your money back.  Do it now.  Opportunities are slipping through your site.

[RyanKent]

I second Site Tuners. Rachel did an evaluation for a client's site and it was excellent. They record the entire presentation and you can play it back as well to ensure you do not miss anything.

[EGOL]

Yep.... they recorded ours too.

Before the first call they studied the site and came prepared to the call.

We discussed the site and the objectives, brainstormed potential changes then left the call.  We got a recording here.

We then made changes and ran them.  Shared changes with SiteTuners.

Then a second call to review what happened, discussed more tweaks.

We learned a lot.

[AndyMacLean]

Try some AB or multi variate testing. It neednt cost the earth, or anything.

You can use content experiments via Analytics.

A few comments on current home page:

• The images on the home page look like ads rather than navigation. I dont think that works.
• What is it you want people to do when they get to the home page? Do a wine search? If so make the wine form search facility more prominent.
• I would include 'any' in your dropdowns. Its feasible people get to your site and dont know what winery name they want.
• Get rid of 'start over' you dont need it until they've done a a search.
• Look at your in-page analytics and see where people navigate to from the home page. That will tell you alot about what you should be featuring more on that page.

Andy