tommyt

I was hoping on could get some thoughts and advice on how to increase my conversion rate on https://www.wildaboutbirds.com.

I started up the website a few months ago and so far my conversion rate sits at just under 0.4%. I get a little higher conversions from google shopping engine (0.8%) but still not enough to pay for cpc and other shopping engines (bing, amazon, pricegrabber) have been horrible. Organic traffic has been a little higher but social media traffic hasn't converted at all.

I've tried driving traffic to my product pages, category pages, promotions page, home page, and I've seen differences in metrics such as bounce rates and pages/session, but haven't seen a significant difference in actual sales.

Is there something I'm doing wrong or is this a typical conversion rate for lower priced items such as mine? I'm basing this on ~4000 clicks so it seems like I should have a pretty decent sample size.

I sincerely appreciate any advice you may have.

savidge4

I think this is not so much a "CRO" type of question as it is a targeting one.

I personally build and sell "Round Birdhouses" and more specifically "Round wood Birdhouses" or even a step deeper "Round Reclaimed Wood Birdhouses" - incase anyone is wondering I build birdhouses as a form of relaxation and often times a moment or 30 out of the office to have some alone time to think. Very soothing to sit there with a saw and jigs with reclaimed barn wood and build something.

If you look up say "Birdhouse" in Google it returns 1,600,000 matching results. but you look up "Round Birdhouses" and there are only 526,000 and even deeper "Round wood Birdhouses" and there are 503,000 and then the last term here is only 111,000 matches.

The ideal here is to create a page in your case for each bird. Throw in some text about the height needed to hang the birdhouse. morning sun afternoon sun, protected in trees. next to whatever side of the house. In groups or 1 birdhouse by itself. What size the hole needs to be, and the ideal length of the perch blah blah blah. And then display the matching products to that term.

I would even go so far as developing a pdf by bird with some nice images and the above information to get them on a mailing list - so that long term you could sell the birdseed and feed etc.. and close outs on houses etc.

So as a more specific example.. I would imagine that a good seller for you might be "Bluebird Nest Boxes" which happens to have very little organic competition, and more specifically if you were to target this with paid traffic, there is very little competition at all.. and I would suggest that people typing such a term would actually be in the market to make a house... ( these are the folks that pdf is targeting - with again the long term advantage of getting a mailing list started to sell the "other" product ) or to BUY a house.

So it becomes a matter of targeting the ad specifically to a type of bird, and then matching the landing page to that bird, and become that source of information that people will use and trust.

As a side note here. Your site looks really nice. Nice big images overly visually appealing.. very well laid out. Add in those other details and you could make a ral go in the market. I am sure you know most in the market are just your basic text list of details boring boring boring!

Hope that Helps!

tommyt

Thanks for the great, actionable advise savidge4. That helps a lot.

You're right that I've been trying to compete with the big boys and bidding on keywords like "bird feeder" and "bird house". I'm going to change my strategy as you've suggested to longer tail keywords such as you've suggested. If I look at my organic keywords, my top 5 are "hummingbird feeders", "oriole feeders", "squirrel proof bird feeders", "oriole feeder", and "bluebird houses" so I might start with those.

I also like your idea of creating a landing page for each type of bird. I can see sections on identification, nesting, food preferences, and product suggestions throughout. Maybe the free information will turn into some good will which will turn into more sales.

Thanks for the complements on the site layout. Its always great to hear. I'll follow up in a few weeks and let you know the results of the changes.