The significance of conversion rate optimization and five ways SEOs benefit from CRO
Optimizing your company’s website for conversion rate represents a unique opportunity to gain a competitive advantage over competitors who are unaware of the benefits of conversion rate optimization or have not invested time and energy into an appropriate optimization strategy.
Many businesses and organizations are now beginning to focus on conversion rate optimization. It allows you to lower your client acquisition costs by getting more excellent value from the traffic already on your website. To understand how to improve your business’ conversion rate, we first need to define what a conversion is and why it is essential for your business.
What is a conversion?
A conversion is a significant action taken by a visitor that has a specific value to your business. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a sale but simply a transition from one stage of your incoming funnel to an additional. Two instances would be a website visitor that decides to subscribe to your e-newsletter or a site visitor who fills out a form indicating that they will become a prospect for your company.
The type of conversion can vary depending on your company’s goals, the individual web pages, and the actions that are important to you. Ultimately, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is about reducing acquisition costs, improving profitability, and increasing the overall efficiency of a company’s entire electronic marketing program.
What is conversion rate optimization?
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a calculated and data-driven process designed to increase the percentage of website visitors who take a particular wanted action or “transform” on your internet site. This procedure involves recognizing the motivations of your visitors, boosting website elements and triggers, and validating these improvements through A/B testing. By measuring conversion rates and the pages on which users convert, you can identify areas for further improvement.
Metrics for conversion analysis
To optimize conversion rates, we first need to find the basis for measurement. To do this, we need a baseline of data: what is the current conversion rate? That is done by determining the number of users who completed the desired action your company is targeting as a conversion (e.g., a completed purchase, form submission, or email signup).
This total is then separated by the overall number of visitors to your website. For instance, if your website had 50,000 visitors and 1,000 of those visitors completed a conversion, this would result in a 2% conversion rate. Once you’ve established your baseline, it’s time to start analyzing the following key metrics of your website.
Exit pages
This metric evaluates which pages cause visitors to leave the website. Each page has its bounce rate, which you can easily find out using Google Analytics. A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after visiting a particular page. You should note if you notice that certain pages have a higher bounce rate than they should.
Average time spent on the website
Average time spent on the website is an excellent metric to gauge whether users read and interact with your company correctly, well-written, and optimized. You will have a higher average time spent on the site. Remember, this number is directly related to bounce rate. The lower the average time spent on the website, the higher the bounce rate.
Bounce rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of customers who leave your site immediately after viewing just one page on your site. A high bounce rate can indicate some things, such as slow loading speed or poor design, traffic from weak sources, or pages that are not optimized for conversion.
Average page views
This involvement metric tells you how many pages a user views on average before leaving the site. This metric is not very easy to determine, as it either represents good usage of your website or means that users are struggling to find the answers to their questions and are looking for clarity. It would be best to weigh this metric and others to find the right view for your results.
Interactions per visit
What are your visitors doing? Even if they don’t convert, they may still be interacting with your site at a higher level. What landing page elements do they click on? How far down your page do they scroll? Are they reading product web pages or blog posts? Some good tools help you track and understand visitor interactions, two of which are Hotjar and Crazy Egg. Both tools do an excellent job of helping you understand how visitors interact with your site.
Traffic sources
Where are your internet site visitors originating from? Different kinds of visitors have different engagement expectations, so it’s essential to understand where your visitors are coming from. There are three primary traffic sources: direct traffic (users who arrive at your website by typing your web address directly), referrals (users who clicked through to your website from another site), and also search visitors (customers who discovered your internet site via an internet search engine, such as Google or Bing).
It’s always essential to protect yourself by keeping your traffic sources diverse because if you rely heavily on a single traffic source, you risk losing a lot of your traffic overnight.
Click-through rate (CTR)
Knowing your click-through rate will give you a clear picture of how your offer is received by searchers who have no bias against your organization. If you have a low CTR, it’s essential to focus on finding out why searchers aren’t responding. By making tested and informed changes to your page title tag, you can find out what messages resonate with your target audience and incorporate those messages into your landing pages.
Identify areas to optimize
Now that we’ve established our baseline conversion rate and analyzed data from key metrics, it’s time to identify areas for improvement. First, focus on the pages with the highest traffic or the pages currently delivering the most conversions. While this may seem counterintuitive, these pages give you the most excellent chance of making an immediate impact on your visitors.
Then move on to the most valuable pages of your business and eventually work your way down to any other underperforming pages.
Optimization basics and best practices
Some excellent practices for optimizing your website for conversions are always helpful, but the essential aspect to remember is developing count on, reliability, and website visitors. Below are various best practices that can help achieve these goals.
Social proof and testimonials
Social Proof is “a psychological phenomenon in which people conform to the actions of others because they assume those actions reflect the correct behavior.” Social proof comes in many forms, including certifications, awards, customer referrals, industry experts, social networks, and media exposure. Place these elements in strategic locations on your landing pages to build trust and credibility.
Bottom line: social proof helps build credibility and trust with potential customers.
Develop a customer persona
Before creating content that speaks to your target audience, you must first know who they are? Developing user personas allows you to create content and deliver messages that match your audience’s wants and needs. It can sometimes be hard for companies to accomplish internally, as they still believe their target audience is different. When this is the case, dealing with a company specializing in personas and user experience (UX) design is crucial.
Improve website speed
Users expect a website to load quickly. A recent study on the impact of loading time on buying behavior found that 40% of clients will abandon a website that takes longer than three seconds to load. With this in mind, your website must load quickly. Website speed is also essential for search engine optimization (SEO).
Customize your calls-to-action (CTA)
CTAs are triggers that get users to perform a specific desired action. An example of a compelling call-to-action would be “Sign up for free” or “Send special offers now” instead of “Submit.” Use bright colors and clear, active language to entice your visitors to click.
Use a heatmap analysis
A heatmap visual representation of the actions users take on your page. That makes it easy to see where a user’s mouse went or what they clicked on while viewing your page. Another great tool that heatmapping provides is scroll depth tracking, which allows you to find out when your website users stop scrolling down. You can run various experiments to improve your website’s usability and design with this information.
Visitor flows
Conducting a customer journey analysis can help you identify essential pages during the conversion process. You can focus your efforts on your website’s most important or “valuable” pages. By optimizing these specific pages first, you can achieve the highest return quickly.
Run A/B tests
Continuous testing is the most critical action to ensure that your changes positively impact your conversion rate. A/B testing or (split testing) should be constantly used to test your theories and help you make informed decisions about the design and communication on your website. Once you have the results of your test, make improvements. Repeat this process as many times as needed until you have a fully optimized site.
Professionalism
Simply put, does your website look professional? If your website looks spammy, has a lot of clutter, images of the wrong size, and poor typography, people won’t trust you. Ensure your website is clean and easy to navigate, with professionally designed elements and images, because it should be your most vital marketing tool.
5 Ways CRO Benefits SEOs
While not necessarily directly related to gaining organic website traffic or ranking on a search engine results page (SERP), conversion rate optimization has distinct benefits for SEO. These include:
- Improved customer insights: Conversion rate optimization is all about discovering the right customers for your business. It doesn’t do your business any good to acquire more customers if they aren’t the right customers! Conversion rate optimization can assist you in better understanding your key target audience and what language or messaging best addresses their needs.
- Better ROI: A greater conversion rate means you can do more with your resources. By learning how to obtain the most out of your acquisition efforts, you’ll get more conversions without having to recruit more potential customers.
- Better scalability: While your audience’s size may not grow as your business grows, CRO allows you to grow without running out of resources and potential customers. Audiences aren’t unlimited. By converting more visitors into buyers, you can grow your business without running out of potential customers.
- Better user experience: when users feel comfortable on your website, they stay there.
- Customer experience: CRO looks at what works on your website. Individuals who feel encouraged by your website will engage with it a lot more than some might even become. By taking what works and expanding on it, you improve the ambassadors for your brand.
- Improved trust: For a user to give up their credit card, email address, or other personal information, they must genuinely trust the website. Your website is your most essential sales rep. Like an internal sales team, your website needs to be professional, courteous, and able to answer all of your customers’ questions.
Mistakes in CRO
Once you start something, it’s sporadic that you don’t make mistakes. Just as we discussed the importance of using the proper techniques and staying up to date with new trends, you will also make mistakes if you are not up to speed. It’s essential to learn the proper techniques and strategies to connect with customers. Many areas need to be optimized to improve the output of the online store.
Whether it is A/B testing or web design mistakes, they can hinder your conversions and lower the conversion rate. Therefore, it is always better to focus on the conversion optimization changes and stay updated.
Tips on how to fix CRO errors
Do you want to increase your conversion rate immediately? Well, that’s what every marketer wishes for, but few achieve the goal in no time. You can hit the bull’s eye if you use the brilliant tips to influence your conversion rate in your favor.
Some of the suggestions that you can use to fix the mistakes in your optimization process are:
- Use pop-ups effectively
- Choose a personalized approach
- Work to gain the customer’s attention and trust
- Remove jargon
- Optimize your checkout process and also make it easier and much more.
After all this analysis, we’ve concluded that Conversion Rate Optimization is an ongoing process that changes over time. If you’re a business that doesn’t stay on top of it, your business will fall short, and you’ll fall behind. Learning from the mistakes and heeding the tips from the experts would put your eCommerce business on the right track.
Enhance the lifetime value of your customers and boost your online revenues with SEO Bea’s CRO services. Our SEO company combines pay-per-click marketing with our SEO services to maximize your chances of conversion. We perform website analysis, landing page optimization, and A/B split testing. For more please visit SeoBea
