How to make your website pay, lever by lever

What makes a website pay: an equation with five terms

A website earns what its qualified visitors bring, multiplied by the conversion rate, multiplied by the average order and the margin, minus what it costs to bring them in. Each lever on this page works on one of these terms. A site that does not sell almost always has one term close to zero: nobody finds it, or the people who find it do not act, or every sale costs more than it earns.

The first finding on our own sites is harsh: over 90 days, only 11% of the pages that appeared in Google got at least one click. Having pages is not enough; you need pages that win a search and make people want to click.

• Qualified visitors: being found on the searches of people who have a need, not on searches made out of curiosity.
• Conversion rate: the share of visitors who buy or ask for a quote.
• Average order: what each order brings in, bundles and add-on products included.
• Margin: what is left after the product, the payment and the delivery.
• Acquisition cost: what a customer costs, in advertising or in content work.

Lever 1: be found on the searches that buy

A visitor who searches for a product page example wants to learn; a visitor who types the name of a product with a size and a colour wants to buy. Profitable search work starts with these precise, often long searches: each one has little volume, but they convert better and competition on them is low.

On our sites, Google hides the query behind 93% of clicks, a sign that most traffic comes from rare searches. Among visible queries, those of four words or more account for 39% of clicks.

For a shop, Google Shopping is free: the free product listings of Merchant Center show your products without paying for the click. “Google Merchant Center” is searched 9,900 times a month in France. And Bing matters more than people think: on our selling sites, 52% of visits from a search engine come through Bing and the engines that use its index.

Lever 2: pages that sell

A page that sells answers the visitor’s question in one sentence, shows the product or service as it is, gives the price, removes doubts with true facts and offers one clear action. We remove more than we add: fewer menus, one buy label, no permanent promotional banner.

The product page is the heart of a shop; the service page, the heart of a tradesperson’s or a practice’s site. Both follow the same rules: original text (never the supplier’s description), clean and light photos, real reviews, and reassurance that tells the truth about delivery, returns and payment.

Lever 3: a frictionless payment

Every step between the button and the payment loses buyers. On our sites, the buy button leads to the payment page in one click, with no account to create; the email is offered, not imposed; personalisation details are asked for after the payment, never before. Google Pay, Apple Pay and one-button repeat purchase complete the journey.

Cart abandonment is not inevitable: first reduce it by removing its causes (costs discovered at the last moment, mandatory account, a form that is too long), then win it back with one useful reminder.

Lever 4: the right price and the right basket

Many small sites sell products at a few euros: each sale costs almost as much in acquisition and fees as it brings in. We group small products into coherent bundles and offer the complementary product at the right moment. The price is set on the value for the buyer, never with a fake struck-through price.

In dropshipping, check the margin before launching anything: in a test of 38 expensive products held in European stock, none offered the price gap we were aiming for between supplier cost and retail price.

Lever 5: a clean technical base

Technology does not make sales, but it can stop them. A slow site, pages that no link reaches, duplicates competing with each other or thousands of empty pages dilute all the work. Every week we check that every page sits three clicks or fewer from the home page, through real links.

Pruning is nothing to fear when it is measured: on a van comparison site, removing 8,194 pages with no impressions did not lower daily impressions (104 before, 98 after).

Lever 6: be cited by ChatGPT and AI assistants

AI assistants already send buyers: on our selling sites, 13% of measured visits come from an assistant, ChatGPT in 92% of cases. To be recommended, a site must be readable by their crawlers, rank well and give clear, sourced facts that are easy to quote.

Lever 7: measure, then decide

Without measurement, every decision is an opinion. The minimum: Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for visibility, Google Analytics 4 with e-commerce events for the journey, and a short table of indicators reviewed every month. An A/B test only makes sense with enough traffic; below that, fix what is obviously broken first.

When traffic drops, do not change everything: check the technical side first, then see whether the drop matches a Google update, and improve the pages that have the most to lose.

Service websites: the same method, an enquiry instead of a basket

For a tradesperson, a practice or an agency, the “sale” is a quote request, a call or a booking. The seven levers stay the same: being found on the searches of customers in your area, one page per service that answers straight away, real proof, a short form and a tappable phone number, and the measurement of every enquiry.

Where to start: the order we follow

On a site that does not pay, we always work in this order, because each step makes the next one measurable:

1. 1
   Check that Google and Bing can read the site: Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, sitemap, no important page blocked.
2. 2
   Measure: purchase or enquiry events in Google Analytics 4, to know where visitors are lost.
3. 3
   Fix the buying journey: one click to the payment, no mandatory account, costs shown early.
4. 4
   Rewrite the pages that already have impressions: title, first sentence, proof, price.
5. 5
   Prune or merge the pages that bring nothing, then link all the others three clicks or fewer from the home page.
6. 6
   Then publish new pages, one per real search, each with its own data point or source.