This article was contributed by Marry McAleavey.

If you’re looking for ways to up your conversion rate, there’s lots of information to wade through – case studies, conventional wisdom and old wives’ tales – but what will work for you?

The one thing that’s sure is that there’s no magic pill solution and no one size fits all advice that can be given here.

If you’re reading a case study that says one website or other has increased their conversion 600% by moving an image a bit to the left, know that you probably won’t be able to replicate their success.

The only hard and fast rule for increasing your conversion rate is test, test, test! Tweet this.

Find out what works best for your website and your business on your own.

While reading this post, keep in mind that this is not a list of foolproof methods that, upon implementation, will give any website 100% conversion rate. Rather, these are some suggestions of things to try onto your website. They’ve all worked for other businesses, and they might work for yours.

Bigger Buttons = Bigger Sales

Calls to action work – this is a no-brainer. SAP increased their conversion rate by placing a “DOWNLOAD NOW” button on their homepage where previously a small blue text link was. Lo and behold, downloads increased 32.5%.

One marketing firm, Impact, reported that they increased conversion rate by creating a new CTA – an in-line form that will allow users to convert on a form without clicking off the page in place of the outdated sidebar on their blog. The increase was 71%. Here’s what their homepage looks like now:

The lesson: stronger CTAs and more convenient, prominent forms and buttons work to increase conversion. You can do A/B testing with new designs to find out what design works best for your audience, but make sure it’s not a boring hyperlink — these, almost definitely, are the worst way to drive traffic.

Consistency is Key

So, you’ve got a big button on your site now, and it seems like more people are clicking it, but you haven’t quite reached your conversion goal. What you need to do first is check your page content. If the CTA on your button says “download,” but the CTA throughout your page says, “get the ebook” and “read this,” go in and make some edits. Consistency is key.

The language you use should not deviate, and it should be targeted at the right crowd. An educated market may like words like “receive an optimized version” where the general public will likely prefer “get a copy of the latest…” Making sense?

Specific Numbers Generate Higher Conversions

Highrise, a CRM software rotated five headline and subhead combinations to measure which increased conversion the most. The highest performing one was the one that emphasized the 30-day free trial in the headline and the less-than-sixty-seconds sign up in the subhead.

How many businesses? How much do they spend? Who cares? Here’s a marketing website that could benefit from following suit. Note the many confusing text links in this body text. There are about nine too many links, too much text, and no CTA. It’s confusing! A reader doesn’t know what decision to make.

The lesson: precision gets results. Numbers don’t lie, and you’ll do better by featuring specific, numbers-based promises, along with CTAs instead of giving vague descriptions surrounded by a wordy message.

K.I.S.S – Keep It Simple Sally

In the example used above, the company removed their site sidebar and replaced it with an in-line form, but simply removing the sidebar also increased 25.9% more opt-ins for Conversion Rate Experts. They used Crazy Egg to see how clicks were distributed on their homepage, and saw that their sidebar was distracting some people away from what they wanted them to focus on.

AssesmentDay also found that reducing content on their landing page increased conversion rate. After removing the FAQ and screenshot sections yielded them 62% and 56% increases in sales respectively. However, after removing both sections at the same time, they saw sales drop 3%.

The lesson: less is more. Removing non-crucial content will allow the visitor to place their focus on where you want it be.

Leverage the Use of Engaging Video

Treepodia, a company that creates video for ecommerce websites, tested the efficiency of video usage for jewelry vendors. They report that conversions for these sites increased 247% and that 8% of visitors chose to view the video.

Dropbox, the file-sharing and storage website, found an increase in conversion rate by 10% from adding video. Common Craft, a company that creates videos for websites, reports that the Dropbox video has been viewed 1million times total, and gets 30k hits a day.

They also say that it’s a little difficult to measure the effectiveness of the video alone in increasing conversions, since some users might have already come to the webpage with the intention to sign up. So, be sure to make use of analytics to read the data, paying attention to new visitors vs return visitors when testing for video engagement.

Know the Rules of A/B Testing

When you’re making changes to your page copy and you want to know what’s working and what’s not, you need to isolate your changes to one at a time. Analyze your conversion data about a week or two after implementing a change. By doing this, you will be able to tell which changes had an impact, and you can reuse those ones in the future.

Final Thoughts

Going through your page copy, from time to time will ensure that you’re getting the most out of your site content. The magic of copywriting happens during the editing phase. Online, editing should never end. Right now, you can start generating higher conversions by implementing the advice above.

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Marry McAleavey is a content writer at the essay service. Engaging and valuable content is what she is always aiming for.