What is a Good Conversion Rate for a Website?
One of the first things we do at GroundStation when we start supporting a new client’s website is start measuring traffic. In almost all cases this means connecting the website with the free services that Google offers that have basically become the industry standard: Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager & Google Search Console.
Each of these services does a different job:
Google Analytics - measures the user activity on your website like how many people are looking at your web pages, where they came from and what they did in surprising detail.
Google Tag Manager - allows you to identify and track specific activity that you consider valuable or important without having to change the code of your website. In most cases these are lead generation events.
Google Search Console - is Google’s dashboard for website owners, providing information about how their websites are performing in their search engine. ie. what searches your website appears on
Once these services have been connected we can start looking at the numbers to assess the website’s health. A useful way to think about this is as a three-stage funnel:
Search Results → Clicks → Leads
Ideally, a potential customer will find you in a search then click on the link to go to your website then contact you. However many people might see your search listing and not click on it and many people might visit your website without making contact. Once we start measuring these statistics we calculate the conversion rates and report them back to the owners of the website and predictable they ask “Is that good?”
Benchmarks for these metrics vary enormously and depend heavily on the industry/product/service/season. It is difficult to be precise but there are some general rules of thumb that we use internally at GroundStation when deciding on the priority of actions we need to take to improve the performance of a clients website. The magic number is 1%.
Search Results to Website Visits
We measure this in Google Search Console and you generally want to see a click through above 1% across the all the keywords you are appearing for. There is complexity below the surface of course. You may be the first result for a certain keyword and be getting a high conversion rate but if that keyword is not searched very often it won’t affect your traffic. Your website may appear further down the page on another term but generate more traffic because it is more popular.
So we think if you are getting below 1% click through rate from Google search then that probably needs some attention. 1-2% is farily typical. Anything about 2% is great.
If we are seeing low coversion rates here we will look at
creating stronger page titles
improving the meta descriptions
look for competitors with more compelling snippets
Clicks to Website Conversions
Setting up Google Tag Manager properly is important here because you want to track all the ways a potential customer can make contact with you from your website. This means contact forms, clicks on a phone number, clicks on email address , chat bot interactions etc. Each of these actions represents someone trying to take the next step and make contact your organisation In the Google world these are know as “key events”.
So what percentage of visitors can we expect to generate a key event? Again 1% tends to be the level you would see without any optimisation. Below 1% means something is wrong. Local business websites tend to be a little higher and 5% is possible for some industries.
What Should You Aim For?
From an end to end, organic perspective, a healthy website often converts around 0.05% to 0.30% again depending on search intent and industry. This source of traffic will generally be the lowest rate given the visitor was unaware of your organisaiton to start with. If the visitor searches for you by name or typing in your website address directly into the browser because they already knew it, then the conversion rates will significantly hire than this.
