Learn simple ways to improve website conversions and get more visitors to subscribe, buy, inquire about your services, and hire you.
As a site owner, you put a lot of effort into driving traffic to your website. You create content, invest in optimizing your website, send an email newsletter, and hustle on social media. You follow up with automations, write guest articles and lead guest expert trainings, appear on podcasts, and maybe even throw some cash at Google AdWords or Meta ads.
It’s a lot of flippin’ work and after all that effort, you want to see website conversions. The worst thing that could happen? An ideal clients visits your site and leaves without taking any type of action.
Ugh, the heartbreak!
Once someone lands on your site, your job is to grab their attention, give them what they need quickly and easily, and persuade them to stick around longer. You need to help them progress in their buyer journey, build trust, and get them to take action — not tomorrow, not later, but now.
A website that’s optimized for conversion makes every click count and ensures your site works just as hard as you do.
Your website must:
- Help people realize they are in the right place.
- Direct their attention to the information need and want.
- Build trust and reinforces your expert positioning.
- Use social proof to boost confidence and desire.
- Nudge visitors to subscribe, sign up, apply, inquire, or buy.
Getting traffic is great, but getting results (and new clients) is even better. With that in mind, here are the most effective ways to increase website conversions and encourage visitors to act:
1. Optimize Call To Action Positioning
If you want your calls to action (CTAs) to perform well, they must be visible and strategically placed. The old advice to put your CTA above the fold is outdated because scrolling is now second nature. Placement, however, is still critical. This isn’t an Easter egg hunt and no one has time to go looking for your offer.
When deciding where to position your CTAs, consider:
- What the visitor experiences on that page.
- The logical next step for them to take.
- The best place to make the offer.
For a blog post, article, or podcast episode, for example, the natural places for CTAs are:
- Embedded within the content. This works great for contexual content upgrades.
- At the end of the content. This works great for CTAs that offer the next logical step.
- An opt-in pop-up triggered by a specific visitor action.
- As the only item in a sidebar or as a sticky sidebar widget that stays visible as visitors scroll.
Take Action: Evaluate your CTA placements. Are they visible, intuitive, and easy to act on? Or are they playing hide-and-seek?
2. Provide A Clear And Compelling Value Proposition
Your future clients are constantly bombarded with sales messages, marketing campaigns, ads, and in-your-face calls to action. With social media, multiple screens, and everyday distractions, it can be difficult to capture and hold their attention. Now, think about websites you’ve visited before that had you scratching your head and thinking, “What exactly do?”
When someone visits your website, you have only a few seconds to capture their curiosity. If they can’t immediately grasp what you offer and why it matters, they won’t stick around to figure it out and you’ll lose out on conversions. That means your website needs to tell visitors in a couple of sentences or less they have found what they’re looking for and why your business is the best choice for them.
You do that with a crystal-clear unique value proposition. A value proposition is a specific, concise statement about what you do and sell.
- It communicates the benefits, value, and impact of your services.
- It differentiates you and tells visitors why its you’re the perfect partner.
- It answers the question they care most about: “What’s in it for me?”
- Financial benefits: Samples have boosted sales in some cases by as much as 2,000%.
- Behavioral benefits: Samples can convince people to buy things they don’t need or never used to buy.
- Special bonuses
- Fast-action savings or pay-in-full savings
- Exclusive resources and experiences
- Checklists and worksheets
- An accelerated timeline or priority scheduling
- Savings on additional services
- Free membership trials
- Private client-only training or events
- Special gifts or upgrades
- Book 12 months and get 2 months free
- What do I need to know?
- What is the best solution to my problem?
- Why this product?
- How will it help me?
- What are the buying benefits?
- What exactly do I get?
- Have others had success or positive experiences?
- Limited-time offers: Save 50% today only!
- Low-quantity notices: Only three left!
- Time-sensitive deals: Order in the next hour for a bonus!
- To be entertained.
- To be informed.
- To be part of a community.
- To solve a problem.
- To fulfill a desire.
- Use numbers: Headlines with numbers perform better than those without.
- Ask a question: Question headlines earn almost five times the number of clicks as non-question headlines.
- Communicate a threat or risk: Play into the natural need humans have to protect themselves and their loved ones.
- Make it time-sensitive: A time-sensitive headline gets readers to take immediate action.
- Use social proof: Show that others are already experiencing the results you’re promising.
- Save them time or money?
- Make things faster or easier?
- Create more opportunities or grow a business?
- Make them feel smarter, more confident, or position them as an expert?
- Provide more freedom or eliminate fear?
- Eliminate frustration or reduce stress?
- Every time a new post is published, a new searchable URL is added to your website.
- Publishing a new post just once each week for a year will add 52 new indexable, searchable URLs to your website. Twice a week will add 104, and three times will add 156.
- Increasing your publishing cadence will add that many more opportunities for a potential customer or client to find you online in a single year.
Take Action: Review your primary website entry points. Do you use a strong value proposition in your primary headline or someplace highly visible? If you do, is it obvious and clear? If it’s missing, add one today.
3. Offer A Free Sample
Baskin Robbins’ pink spoon samples are legendary for a reason — free samples help consumers move from consideration to decision faster. They give prospective clients an opportunity to experience a taste of what they’ll get before committing.
When you sell services, most people won’t be ready to buy right away. But a free sample can move someone from the consideration phase to the decision phase of the buyer’s journey much faster.
According to The Atlantic, offering free samples has:
“Reciprocity is a very, very strong instinct,” says Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University. “If somebody does something for you — such as giving you a quarter of a ravioli on a piece of wax paper — you really feel a rather surprisingly strong obligation to do something back for them.” Ariely adds that free samples can make forgotten cravings become more salient. “What samples do is they give you a particular desire for something. If I gave you a tiny bit of chocolate, all of a sudden it would remind you about the exact taste of chocolate and would increase your craving.”
Take Action: Is there a way to offer prospects a free sample of what you’re offering? Is there something you can offer on a small scale that gives them a taste of what they’ll get if they hire you?
4. Incentivize Action
Another way to move a potential client from the consideration stage to the decision stage — from thinking about hiring you to actually reaching out to learn more about your services and working with you — is to offer incentives to sweeten the deal and make their next step a total no-brainer.
Popular incentives for service providers include:
Just remember that any incentive you offer will cost you time, energy, effort, money, or resources, so make sure that the incentive you offer relates to the item you’re selling and actually gets prospective customers to make a purchase.
Take Action: What incentives do you offer prospective customers? How successful have they been? Can you do better? If you haven’t yet used incentives to boost sales, what can you offer that provides high value to your audience without eroding your profits?
5. Use Customer-Centric Messaging
The biggest mistake freelancers make when writing their website copy and creating marketing content is making it all about themselves. The harsh reality? Consumers don’t care about you until they know you have what they need or can solve their problem.
The second biggest mistake is making it so much about clients that you lose yourself. Yes, you need your website copy and content to resonate deeply with future clients and speak their language so they see themselves as ideal clients. But you can’t do so at the expense of helping them connect with you and get to know, like, and trust you.
A customer-centric website designed to convert visitors into leads takes everything clients want to know about you and your services and presents it in a way that is relevant to them. It packages your expertise, experience, perspectives, and personality, in a way that aligns with what potential clients are looking for, how they feel, why they’re on your site, and what information they need to feel confident taking the next step.
Your freelance website should answer these questions:
Also, remember they are busy and distracted, so get to the point quickly and clearly and use simple, jargon-free language. Writing at a seventh or eighth-grade reading level ensures your content is easy to read, understand, and connect with. The only exception? Industry-specific or niche websites where jargon can signal expertise and help visitors feel like they’ve found the right place.
Take Action: Evaluate your website copy and headlines. Are they tailored to your prospective clients and what they care about most? Or is it a not-so-subtle brag fest?
6. Use Ethical Scarcity and Urgency
No one wants to miss out on an opportunity, and if people believe they’re going to lose out, they’ll be prompted to act more quickly. Scarcity happens when a product or service has — or is perceived to have — limited availability, which increases its perceived value and desirability.
People generally place a higher value on something that is scarce and a lower value on what’s abundant, especially when they believe others also want the same product or service. When demand is high and availability is low, scarcity creates urgency to purchase.
You can use scarcity to boost sales with:
Just make sure to use scarcity ethically. Don’t create fake urgency by claiming there are “only three left” when selling a digital product anyone can buy at any time. Customers are smart and will notice if scarcity tactics aren’t genuine, which can hurt your brand more than help your sales.
Take Action: Is there an opportunity to ethically and honestly use scarcity in your marketing to increase sales? Can you offer a limited-time deal or highlight low availability to prompt action?
7. Write Strong, Engaging Headlines
David Ogilvy famously said, “Five times as many people read the headline as they read the body copy.” Today, headline skimming is more prevalent than ever, and links are shared across social media based solely on a headline. This makes writing attention-getting headlines more important than ever.
A headline is your opportunity to make a first impression, garner attention, establish a connection, spark curiosity, and earn a click or a share.
All headlines need to address one of the most basic human interests:
If you want people to click your link in the search engine results or leave social media to visit your website, your headlines need to be relevant to your clients and bold enough to capture their interest. Just make sure to avoid click-baity or misleading headlines. Trick people into clicking, and they’ll remember — just not in the way you want them to.
When writing headlines:
Take Action: Set aside time to revise and/or refine your headlines to make them more powerful, compelling, and attention-getting. Would you click on your own headlines? Be honest.
8. Focus on Benefits Over Features
Yes, consumers need to know about the features of your service or package, but it’s even more important to communicate the benefits of working with you and the potential impact your work can have on their business or life.
Why? Consider this: Do you get excited to read the owner’s manual for anything you buy? Doubt it. Do you always read the instructions for assemble-it-yourself toys or furniture? Rarely.
Clients’ buying decisions are based on emotions (their heart) and justified by logic (their brain). This means that buying decisions based on the perceived benefits and how a prospective client feels, then justified by the features and the confirmation of a good value exchange.
When leading with benefits, ask yourself, will it:
When you only market with features, you make visitors do all the work to figure out they’ll be better off after working with you. And when you your website makes people work, it negatively affects conversion rates. If you want more visitors to sign up, subscribe, buy, or hire you, your website must do all the heavy lifting.
Take Action: Review your sales pages, opt-in pages, and landing pages. Make sure you lead with emotional benefits and impact to connect with your audience’s heart, then follow up with features that speak to their logical brain.
9. Publish New Content Regularly
Publishing new, helpful content on your website — blog posts, videos, podcast episodes, infographics, and articles — is the fastest way to expand your online footprint, create more opportunities to get discovered and build your email list, and build brand equity you can tap into later to attract even more clients.
Consistently publishing new posts keeps your brand in front of future clients and your website in front of search engines. It gives people and search bots new reasons to come back to your website, which creates more opportunities for conversions. And no, publishing once every six months doesn’t count as consistent.
Take Action: Aim for at least one high-quality post per month. Even better? One per week. This will keep your audience engaged and search engines happy. Plus, consistency builds trust, and trust leads to conversions.
The Truth About Increasing Website Conversions
No one wants a buying process that feels like applying for a mortgage.
Increasing website conversions isn’t about tricks or gimmicks — it’s about strategic optimization that makes it easier for visitors to take the next step. Simplifying the process, getting to the point quickly, and ensuring every action is intuitive can make a big difference. Place the most important information at the top, reduce unnecessary steps, and make checkouts or sign-ups seamless.
By refining your calls to action, offering clear value, and using ethical persuasion tactics, you can turn more visitors into email subscribers, engaged leads, and paying clients.
