• High Rankings Advisor , Thursday, July 31, 2008 2 PM

"The question is a rather odd one: 'What's your conversion rate?' The correct response would be another question: 'Which conversion rate?'" says Karon Thackston. "What most people are really asking is how many sales have you made? But the sales process - in almost all cases - takes more than one step."

Thackston outlines the many micro-conversions a Webmaster can (and should) track to gain a more complete picture of how well a given site is performing. The first conversion stems from the page's title and description, as getting a user to click on your result in the SERP kicks off the entire process. If you're not getting organic traffic, then you'll need to tinker with the title and description tags to entice searchers to convert into visitors.

The landing page or home page is the next conversion front, and each contains a myriad micro-conversion points. "You are likely to have numerous conversion rates that result from visitors leaving your home page and clicking deeper into the site," Thackston says. And if the number of users going from the home page to a page for product x is greater than the number heading to product y's page, then you have some questions to ask yourself.

"Compare the two pages," Thackston says. "Are they designed the same? Have similar copy? Whatever the reason, test to see how changes to copy affect the conversions from this page." Once you've waded through the micro-conversions, you've likely garnered some actual sales, and it should now be much easier to determine how and why those visitors became buyers.

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