What's a Website Conversion?

Original Article from IntelliSites, the smart choice for web design (and SEO!)
For a change of pace, let's talk about real estate open houses today.

When a home is for sale, realtors hold open houses to get it sold. There are tours and balloons and snacks and it makes for a super little Saturday.

While a seller's agent would certainly enjoy seeing a house full of open house visitors, the ultimate goal of the open house is to sell the house, not to throw a great party. So while a full house is great, the real estate agent is likely to gauge the effectiveness of the open house by figuring out how many attendees actually took a step toward buying the house as a result of their visit. How many took home brochures? How many scheduled another viewing? How many made offers?

As You Probably Guessed, I'm Really Talking About Websites

Think of your website as that real estate open house. If your SEO is going well, chances are, you've got an open house full of people visiting your site. But what you really want is for those people to take steps toward giving you business.

These steps are called “conversions.”

Let's say your website sells water guns. When someone clicks from your homepage to the page about your new model, that's a conversion. When that person adds the new gun to his shopping cart, that's another conversion. And when he completes the process and actually buys the water gun, that's also a conversion.

Real estate agents want lots of visitors to their open houses, and business owners want lots of visitors to their sites. But just as realtors need visitors to do more than just chat and chow down on the open house food, business owners need visitors to do more than take in the beauty of their sites. Real estate agents want to give out pamphlets and collect bids, and business owners want website conversions.