If you’re looking to improve your conversion rate optimization – whether it’s sales, subscribing, or more – check out our top tips!
What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
Anything that improves the conversion rate of your website, landing pages and blog whether offsite or onsite. Your conversion rate is the number of conversions on a web page divided by the number of unique visitors to a page of your website. So, if you have 100 unique visitors to that page and 3 people take the action you wanted them to take, your conversion rate is 3%.
According to Hubspot, good conversion rates depend on a number of factors, including industry, niche, traffic channel, and audience demographic.
For example, the average conversion rate of ecommerce sites in the food and beverage sector is 5.5%, whereas the average in the hair care sector is only 3.5%.
How to Improve your Conversion Rate Optimization
Here are four points to consider:
1. What are your Goals?
Be clear about what you are trying to convert the user into doing. And remember that isn’t JUST about sales. Here are some different types of conversion:
- Completing an online form
- Subscribing to a newsletter
- Making a reservation
- Downloading a printable
- Joining a membership site
- Getting in contact
- And of course, making a purchase
What is the ultimate goal of the page?
2. Planning
Each step in building your online business will affect your conversion rates, so good planning is a must. Therefore, choosing the right platform for your website will also help conversion rates. Just because your designer likes a certain platform, that doesn’t mean it’s what’s best for your company.
Each platform has its advantages and disadvantages, but you should choose what platform best fits the needs for your business, such as:
- Are you going to sell directly to customers through an online store?
- Are you going to offer memberships?
- Are you going to have a social aspect to your site like a forum, blog or social network?
- What kind of information will you want to collect about your customers?
Every business is unique, so when considering conversion rate optimization you should list things that are most important to your business. This means that you’ll be selecting the best platform for the features you need.
3. Great Website Design
People put more trust in a professional-looking website, but there are also some specific things you need to accomplish:
Logo: This is important for your branding. People will recognize it on social media websites, directories, and wherever else you talk about your business.
Top Image: On most sites, there’s a either a large slider with multiple images or one large image at the top of your homepage. This image should tell them that they’re in the right place for exactly what they need.
We recently redesigned the AndiSites website, and included this awesome animation of our team as a friendly welcome on our homepage.
Other Images: What if a visitor lands on an interior page rather than the homepage? The images there should achieve the same thing as the images on your homepage.
4. Traffic Sources
Before building a website, you should consider how and where you’ll market your business. Knowing who and where to connect with is the most important factor to CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization).
Places like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter, etc. are the places you start the conversation. You continue the conversation on your web page.
But you have to know where you’ll start the conversation. Are you going to use social media, sites like Reddit and Quora, local business directory listings, or are you going to distribute press releases and submit other content to other websites? You can’t know how to continue the conversation if you don’t know how it’s going to start.
What Affects Conversion Rates?
How Does Social Media Affect Conversion Rates?
Social media a great place to start the conversation. But this way, you get to converse with your potential customers quite a bit more. You can use social media a lot like you use search engines by posting links to your products and your blogs or even deals. And if customers have questions, you can begin a literal conversation there.
How Does SEO Affect Conversion Rates?
Like with social media, the conversation starts with the search engine, then the conversation is continued on the web page your potential customer lands on. Your potential customer uses a search engine, then they see your title and the description of your site in the search results.
If the title or the description is what they’re looking for, it’s likely they’ll click on your link. Essentially: what they typed into the search engine was the hello part of the conversation. Clicking your link is the handshake and the question; What do you have for me? or How are you going to solve my problem?
Therefore, this means you should target the right keywords as well as using effective and unique titles for each page of your site. Good SEO is good for conversion rates optimization.
Check out all our SEO blog posts.
How Does Content Affect Conversion Rates?
Great SEO includes great content. This doesn’t mean bombard users with your achievements as soon as they land on your website. Remember, by arriving on your site, they’re asking you how you can help them, or what you can do for them, not how accomplished you are.
So try and keep all your bragging and accomplishments located in the “About Us” section, or a “Portfolio” section. Because if they click those links, they’re asking you to tell them about your accomplishments.
How Do I Continue The Conversation?
Now you know where the conversation begins (i.e., the keywords people search for and what type of content you’re going to share on social media), but now you need to know how to continue it. This means carrying out whatever purpose you intended for the page, such as downloading, purchasing, subscribing, etc.
Wherever the conversation started – search engine, business directory, social media – your content needs to answer the question you got them to ask. “What do you have for me?” or “How are you going to solve my problem?”
If you’re able to answer their question, you will be making great progress in your conversion rate optimization.
Want to read more? We like this article on CRO from Hotjar!
Or check out all out blog posts!
