We recently rebranded our company and within the past week have launched a new website.

Our old website has decent rankings which haven’t yet transferred to the www.propelmedia.com as we haven’t yet applied our 301 redirects so needless to say our traffic is quite low. 

Our old website’s contact page had a fairly long form asking questions regarding the type of services someone was interested in, whether their site had been optimized for natural search or not, with required fields including their domain name, email address, phone number and full name. We initially had a long contact form so we would eliminate spam requests but also to gather enough information so our first phone call with a client would be a lot more productive.

Our new contact form is quite simple, three fields, name, email address and remarkes. The send button is above the fold on most computers to have as little drag as possible.

The increase in conversion rate has been astounding, while I’ve “known” a simple form creates less drag, I wasn’t prepared for the enormous difference in conversion rate. How much to attribute to a better company name and a better site design is an unknown, however we’ve seen a 400% increase in the first few days which brings me to my point about optimizing your website to capitilize on existing traffic.

Let’s face it, there are ten positions more or less within natural search on Google, Yahoo and MSN. That means ten or fewer companies are going to get 80% of all search traffic for a given term. That doesn’t leave much on the table for the millions of other websites.

To remain competitive within the rankings search engine optimization is an ongoing battle.

However improving conversions or sales for your existing traffic is much more within your control via web analytics.

Even small sites with small budgets can participate via Google Analytics which has a very low cost - free. Webanalytics is not just measuring clickstream, it’s much more than that. Determining your success metrics will vary from website to website but is well worth the investment of time or money or both. The web is arguably the most effective non human sales tool, is an excellent source of customer data, can serve as a focus group, provides excellent customer feedback and can be your most effective sales channel.

Getting your website to be your most effective sales channel will require that you master the challenges of measuring your site via web analytics and listening to what your customers are telling you.

Going back to our own case study, what would your bottom line look like if you could increase your conversion rate by 400%?