One of the oldest questions in sales is how to convert visitors into buyers. This question applies to any type of business, whether a car dealer or an ad agency or a great online store with some really groovy products. Chris Richardson attended the session and did a few conversions of his own.

Detlev Johnson, VP and Director of Consulting at Position Technologies moderated this affair. Michael Sack, Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Interceptor and Bryan Eisenberg, Co-Founder and Chief Persuasion Officer at Future Now Inc. provided plenty of insight into turning looks into purchases.

Most of the session was dedicated to targeting the correct keywords and adjusting your site layout and its content accordingly. Both speakers were incredibly knowledgeable and beside targeting the keywords, both strongly suggest using a good web analytics package for your site. These analytics will give you the necessary knowledge to make the appropriate adjustments.

Bryan Eisenberg from Future Now imbued the audience with his knowledge of the tricks of the trade. He said producing persuasive online copy was important. Be aware of your sites analytics (how it performs with visitors) and make appropriate adjustments. You need to know the visitor behavior when they visit your site.

He also said improve the navigation. Bad navigation ranks as one of the worst problems in ecommerce. Also, splash pages are bad and will drive away visitors from your site. Home pages should be simple and invite your visitors to venture further into your site.

About 10% of visitors leave a site after the first page. If a user lands on a page that contains the keywords his looking for, then visitors are more apt root around and conversion rates rise exponentially. Conversely, if page doesn’t have what they are looking for, they won’t look through the site and they usually leave.

He emphasized that links should propel visitors towards their goal in most cases and that this needs to be as instantly gratifying as possible. The longer a customer has to navigate through the site after the landing page, the greater the chance of them bailing on your site.

Query language infers intent and you should prioritize the traffic and target those more apt to buy. Become familiar with the traffic potential for a term you are targeting and learn how well the target word converts.

Use eyetracking principals when positioning content. Inform the customer their item has been added to their shopping cart when they choose to do so. If they have to check and see themselves, they can and will stop the process. Also substance over style when delivering content meaning white backgrounds, blue borders, underlined links etc.

Improve the download speed and page load time. Once again, waiting customer means losing customers. If it takes too long, conversion rates are lower. Also make sure you give users plenty of information about the product they’ve selected. Don’t be stingy with it. Understand your visitors motivation for visiting your site.

Mike Sack from Inceptor added a lot of additional information. He quoted Fortune magazine saying, “Conversion rate is the most powerful Internet metric of all.” He emphasized some of what Eisenberg said and added his own comments.

First he said, you have to prepare your site. Do conversion benchmarks by comparing your site to successful competitors. Study them and imitate them. Don’t reinvent the wheel, sites brag about their conversion rates. The information about conversions is out there. Understand what on your site actually converts and bring this to the forefront. Know what people are looking for and make your site fit these queries because you can’t change how people search.

Next he said target your traffic. Most people won’t go to a third page. Target the proper keywords because the more specific a search, the higher chance of converting. Also, give your audience what it wants by delivering them to what they’re searching for as directly as possible. Take your customers to what they’re searching for, don’t leave them to do it for themselves. Make sure you test different layouts, including calls to action and landing page info.

Then track your conversions. Tie conversions back to keyword searches; see the buyers’ click path and this includes direct and deferred conversions. Track offline conversions as well. Nine out of ten conversions happen offline. Also if you don’t track those online conversions, you might make unnecessary adjustments that deter your offline conversions.

The offline conversions mentioned happens when a some goes to a Lowe’s website, for example, and finds the product they need. Then the customer doesn’t order it online, they travel to their local brick & mortar store and purchase the product and take it home. A lot of business happens this way.

Then test, analyze and adjust. See what works and continue to improve upon it. Get rid of what doesn’t work and look for new things. This can really apply to PPC campaigns because the right subtle change can greatly increase that conversion rate.

In the end, he said use the power of suggestions. Route traffic towards other items of interest (like items on the initial landing page or the checkout page). These entice visitors to hang out for a while continue to buy. In some businesses, they call these add-ons or upsells. But these little things can increase your sale totals. Make these products that tie into what customers look for like flashlights and batteries for example. These little things make all the difference in the revenues, which is the name of the game anyway.