Website Conversion: 6 Ways to Force the Issue

3. Prioritize where you'll get your biggest scores once you determine your conversion sources. It's not ideal to look at overall conversion rates because they're very misleading. What's more, they don't tell you what to fix.

Say, for instance, your overall conversion rate is 4 percent and you have a catalog business. Is that good or bad? How many customers are ordering from your catalog pages? How many are finishing and converting? If you're sending a lot of offline consumers online to place orders, they should be converting a heck of a lot better than someone who doesn't know you from Adam.

4. Ask for the order. If you want the order, you need to ask for it — gorillas don't get into cages on their own. Don't think that just because you have a site users will know how to navigate or buy from it. Users have neither the time nor inclination to learn anything about you or your site and its intricacies. Just because you have the best product, best service or biggest line of widgets, that doesn't mean a thing when it comes to conversion.

If you want conversions, fight for them. Add a perpetual cart/lead form; employ more buy now/add-to-cart buttons. There should be at least one in every page view. Strengthen your action bar, flesh out your navigation and so on. If you ask for the order and aren't getting it, figure out why this is happening and where you're losing people.

5. Know where people are stopping in your pipeline. Many times companies do all the right things until the checkout (including the view cart page); then all hell breaks loose. You need to develop a funnel. The top of the funnel is the traffic coming to your site; the bottom (the small part) is the orders, quotes or leads you're getting.