What is a Good Conversion Rate for a Website?
One of the first things we do at GroundStation when we take on a new client’s website is start measuring traffic. In almost all cases this means connecting the website with the free Google services 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 pages, where they came from and what they did.
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 we are talking about measuring leads here.
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 for.
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 your link and then contact you. However the reality is that many people might see your listing and not click on it and many people might visit your website without making contact. Once we start measuring these statistics we can calculate the conversion rates and report them back to the owners of the website. The next question is always “Is that a good conversion rate?”
Benchmarks for the conversion rates 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. 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 for another term but it might generate more traffic because it is more popular search.
So we think if you are getting below 1% click through rate from Google search then that probably needs some attention. 1-2% is fairly typical. Anything around 2% is great.
If we are seeing low conversion 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 with your organisation. In the Google world, these are know as “key events”.
So what percentage of visitors can we expect to trigger 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, your conversion rate for search traffic will be generally quite low. Again, this depends on their search intent and your industry. We need to remember that these visitors who found you via a search were unaware of your organisation to start with. If the visitor searches for you by name or typing in your website address because they already knew you, the conversion rates will significantly higher.
However the potential volumes involved can be significant so it is worth the effort to continually imprive these conversion rates.
