Four months after we'd been working with an e-commerce site we'd doubled his business, but the traffic was more or less the same. We'd doubled conversion.
How? All sorts of things, but the first task is to stop people arriving and leaving immediately .. that's called the bounce rate.
After visitors have decided not to hit their back button, what do they see that persuades them to look through your site? Photographs help, great photographs help greatly. Video perhaps. A great headline. Does the site look like it means business? Does it engage?
Then it's things like usability (simply, is the site usable), is it well organised, does it help the visitor or hinder them? A Million Tweaks favourite is when a company talks about themselves on their website rather than the customer, we've seen something like this: "Want to buy a pump? Click the range you want: chaffinch, busby, dodo". How's the client supposed to know? They have to click all three to find out. Well that's just not helpful. Usability tests find this stuff out and if we act on the findings it makes a big BIG difference.
Finally there's the slippery slope to getting the credit card out. That had better be smooth. Final questions answered. Trust established.
A good tweaker will diagnose the main problems and tweak them out of existence. We're fabulous tweakers, just let us at it.
John Allsopp, Tweaker Extraordinaire