67% Conversion After Site Redesign

I mostly work in niche markets. I like big evergreen markets where I can sell adspace and do some lead generation. I recently redesigned one of my lead generation sites and found that my conversion rate went up to 67%. I was really psyched because it was down around 20% for quite a while. I don't do CPA, these are real leads for a real service.

These are the changes I made. Perhaps someone can get some value from them as well.

First I went to look at the highest ranking sites in my niche. I went to Google and just searched for my 3 biggest keywords. Then I looked at all the sites that came up to see if there were any commonalities. There were some, so I wrote those down on my yellow legal pad. (Thanks Costco, for the multipack, I use these a lot)

I decided what colors to use. Calm, grayed out kind of palettes. CoffeCup software sells a color picker that will also do one click brighten and darken, and saturate and desaturate. It also gives color schemes like from art school, triadic, complementary - those kinds of things.

Then I swapped from html to wordpress and I set a static page for the home page. I didn't delete any of my old pages I just installed WP into the root. But I put my old content onto the new home page.

I use Flexsqueeze. I am not a super technical sort of person. It isn't that I don't like doing technical stuff; it's just that I spend most of my time writing or promoting my sites. I like Flexsqueeze because it is easy for me to understand for the most part. And I tend to like simply designed sites anyway. And if I want to fiddle around with the CSS code a little, I can do that with no big issue.

I shrank my header down. It is now full width but is only 110 pixels tall. I am also not a Photoshop guru by any stretch of the imagination but that kind of thing I can do. Had to fix my fonts and stuff but it turned out pretty well.

Then I put my lead generation form in the top feature area of the page centered between the sides. I added an image to each side of lead gen form that was complementary to the topic of the site and at about the same height as the form.

I forgot to add that I used one of the built boxes that comes with the theme to insert the form into. This let me put a border around tehform in a contrasting color so that it would stick out and be noticed.

Then I made sure that my form in the top feature area of the page pushed the rest of the content below the fold. I know that below the fold is very different on all the different monitors and devices that are available now, but I still think like that.

I took off the navigation bar, because nobody needs to read anything else on my site. They aren't there to learn about this topic, they want to buy.

I set the format of the page below the feature area so that my sidebar was on the left hand side. I could have made it no sidebar, but I have another banner in the sidebar they can click on if they want to read more and scroll down to the content.

The content is about 400 words and I broke it up using H2 and H3 tags that use some secondary keyword phrase.

I put in a couple of images and made sure they had keyword phrase in the names, titles and alt tags.

At the bottom of the content I put one more call to action.

And I have all my admin links in the footer.

I already rank on page one for some secondary keywords and now I am going to spend some time promoting my site to move it up for some other phrases.

I can't say these things will help everybody with any site, but hopefully someone can get some use from some of these ideas.