Conversions are extremely important for those who put up websites to conduct business online. However, conversions are rather elusive for many website owners. They could get heavy traffic and still end up holding an empty bag because no one bought anything or subscribed to anything. Their sites could be filled with exceptional content and a gazillion backlinks, yet sales remain tepid at best. To make matters worse, they could be offering the best rates or prices for a particular product or service, yet no one seems to be biting.

If you’re a website owner and you can totally relate to any of the situations mentioned above, then it’s time for you to test if your website can convert.

See if your site’s design affects conversions

Now that you know that your SEO techniques are all working and are bringing in good traffic, there must be something about your site that stops people from actually buying anything while they’re logged on. There’s a possibility that the design is to blame.

Let’s say that your site has a fluid design, which means your site’s content stretches out to fill the space created by expanding the browser window. Assuming that the conversion point on your site is somewhere in the upper right hand corner of the page, it is almost certain that as users expand the browser window, that conversion point becomes naturally out of sight. That means it is affecting conversion, and that is something you must fix by putting that conversion point in a place where it won’t be affected by screen resolution changes.

Get your mother to test the site

This may sound a bit out of the ordinary, but getting your mother—who has to be not Internet-savvy for this test to work—to check around your site could tell you if your site has usability issues or not. It doesn’t even have to be your own mother. As long as it’s a woman who’s 50 years old or older, this test if your website can convert will do just fine.

Don’t give her specific instructions on what to do. Just give her one generic task, say, subscribing to your newsletter, sit back and see what happens.

You’ll know your site has usability issues if your mother has a hard time finding the subscribe button. Considering that your mother’s age group forms a significant portion of today’s Internet users, that quite explains a lot why your site is not converting the way you expected.

If this is the case, you need to move the subscribe button where it can be easily found by users your mother’s age. If, by some stroke of luck, your mother actually manages to buy something, keep a close watch on her reactions to the prices or the shipping rates. If she raises hell upon seeing them, you might want to rethink your rates, or at least let them be known earlier in the purchasing process.

In the end, SEO is just one component of what makes your site successful as far as conversions are concerned. Your website design also matters a lot. You would also do well to spend some money on analytics and site reviews. By making them part of your campaigns, you will be able to ultimately see the way your visitors interact with your site and learn what factors make them become customers as well.