Ensure that your website is doing its job and converting more customers for you with the best CRO techniques. This article will tell you everything you ever wanted to know and more about conversion rate optimization. We’ll discuss the best CRO techniques, CRO best practices, CRO strategies, and how to improve CRO.
Table of Contents
Why Should I Use the Best CRO Techniques?
First, let’s discuss what CRO is and why it’s important.
What is CRO?
CRO is an acronym that stands for conversion rate optimization. Conversion rate optimization is a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website into consumers. To put it in simple terms, conversion optimization is the number of people who complete a desired action on your site. This helps you understand if your marketing strategy is worth the return on investment for your bottom line.
How Do I Determine My Website’s Conversion Rate?
The first step of conversion rate optimization is determining what your current conversion rate is for your website. To calculate your conversion rate, you divide your number of conversions by your number of visitors. Then, multiply that number by 100 to get your percentage. For example, if you have a 25 percent conversion rate, that means that 25 percent of people who visit your website actually convert into customers.
Why Is Conversion Rate Important?
If your conversion rate is low, you might be attracting enough people to your website – but not turning enough of them into customers. That’s where conversion rate optimization comes in to help! There are several full service digital advertising agencies available that specialize in helping businesses with conversion optimization. A CRO internet marketing agency can look at your lead generation strategies and conversion funnel to help see where the problem is and come up with some CRO strategies to help grow your business.
How Are SEO and CRO Related?
If you are familiar with search engine optimization, SEO and CRO are very closely related and have a complementary relationship. SEO is responsible for bringing people to your website. CRO is responsible for turning those people into customers. Next, let’s discuss the best CRO techniques.
Best Practices For Conversion Rate Optimization
Now that you know what CRO is and why it’s important, let’s discuss five of the most successful conversion rate optimization best practices from the experts at SEO Design Chicago.
Limit Your Scope
While it can be tempting to load your website with tons of content and optimize it for a broad audience to attract more traffic, it’s actually better for CRO purposes to limit your scope. Search engines like when your content answers a specific query. So, sharpen your website’s focus. Start with the structure of your website and make sure it’s easy for users to navigate. Then, make sure the actual content on your website is focused. (More on content and CRO in the next section.)
Create Content That Converts For You
Your website’s content is the most important factor that will affect your conversion rate. Any good marketer will seamlessly blend conversion opportunities into your website’s content. While a lot of the focus of SEO is on technical aspects like keywords, for CRO it’s important to remember that your audience is actual people. They already found your website, so chances are they are already interested in your products or services. Now, it’s time for you to use content that will do the work for you and convert them into customers! Make sure to write with a sense of urgency and include several calls to action. One isn’t enough. Even better, add call to action buttons to make it even easier for your potential customers to convert.
Use Visuals
As we’ve already discussed, the words and text on your website are incredibly important. However, nothing will drive your website visitors away faster than walls of text with no visuals. It’s important to break up your text with plenty of images. However, keep in mind that the visuals must be relevant to your website and help serve your purpose. You have several options of visuals to incorporate, from photos, to videos, to graphics. The best websites for CRO will include a mix of all three. Incorporating visuals is proven to dramatically increase readability and decrease your bounce rate. Could a large chunk of text on your page be turned into an infographic instead? If so, the expert graphic designers at SEO Design Chicago can help.
Keep It Current
When was the last time your website was updated? Was it in the last three to five years? If not, your website is most likely extremely outdated. For example, does your website still use large amounts of Flash or other kinds of obsolete technology? If so, it’s time for a website update. If your website is slow or frustrating for visitors to use, you will have trouble converting them into customers. It’s also imperative to make sure your website is optimized for mobile. Most people these days are browsing the web on their cell phones. If you’re not mobile-friendly, you need to be. It might be worth having a full service web design agency like SEO Design Chicago analyze your website and see if it needs updating. If so, we can help you.
Regularly Check Your Analytics
If you are going to put in the hard work to improve your conversion rate, it’s important to set a goal for how much you’d like to gain, then make sure you reach it. How do you do that? By regularly performing testing. If you’re new to web analytics, start with Google Analytics to identify your top pages. You can use your top pages as a benchmark, then identify the areas of your site where most people commonly exit. Then, you can find the problem. Is there content missing from those exit pages that is present on other web pages? Google Analytics also lets you perform other tests to help you increase your conversion rate. For example, you can use the A/B testing feature to test the effectiveness of different pages.
Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies
Now that we’ve gone over several best practices for conversion rate optimization, there are also several strategies available to businesses. However, whichever strategy you choose will depend on the goal of your conversion rate optimization. Do you want visitors to your website to make a purchase? Sign up for a free trial or free account? Fill out a lead form? Click an ad? Become an email subscriber?Your own conversion rate strategy will depend on what your goals are and what your business is. No matter what your goals are, the best way to improve CRO is by employing a full service website design agency like SEO Design Chicago to help you.
How to Improve CRO
While you can look up an average conversion rate for a similar website to yours, each and every business and ecommerce site is different. However, here are some simple steps anyone with a website can take to improve their conversion rate:
Optimize Your ECommerce Process
One of the biggest areas of trouble websites encounter when turning visitors into customers is in the checkout process. If you notice that several customers are leaving items in their cart without completing checkout, you need to optimize your checkout process. It’s imperative to make the purchasing process as simple as possible. Shorten the checkout process, offer multiple forms of payment, and allow customers to buy products as “guests” on your website rather than creating an account. Eliminate any steps that slow down the purchasing process for customers and can let them get distracted.
Identify Your Potential Customer
Before you can convert a customer, you need to know who they are. That will go a long way towards convincing them to buy your product. Identify your target audience so you know how to talk to them, and more importantly, sell to them.
Survey Your Website’s Users
To get more insight into your customers’ wants and needs, survey your website’s users. Ask them to complete questions or polls. Try to keep the questions to the minimum amount necessary and keep the questions short. Definitely avoid boring or repetitive questions. This will help you learn more about your customers and how you can give them what you want. 
Map The Way Users Look At Your Site
You can use a heatmap tool like Lucky Orange to help you map the way your visitors look at your site. This will help you see what they are most and least interested in, and help you determine which content is working for your website.
Focus on the Content that Matters
The most important pages on your website for conversion are the ones that should receive your attention. For example, your homepage and landing pages are what need to be looked at. Run heatmap analysis on those pages, or run A/B testing.
Use A/B Testing
Now comes the fun part! Try some multivariate tests to see which strategies work best to convert more visitors. Utilize A/B testing and make two different versions of your web pages. Test out different headlines, copy, visuals, font size, font color, and anything else! Then see which versions your visitors prefer. Don’t just stop at one A/B test – keep going until you find the perfect combination of fonts, visuals, and colors that please your visitors the most and convinces them to make a purchase. This helps take the guesswork out of your work. (Still not convinced? Did you know President Obama raised $60 million for his campaign by using A/B testing?)
Try a Conversion Operation Tools
Finally, you can try using one of the best conversion operation tools in order to optimize your website for more conversions.
How can SEO Design Chicago Help with CRO?
For help with conversion rate optimization for your business’s website or improving your marketing strategy, contact SEO Design Chicago today. We can determine what your website’s current conversion rate is, then help you develop a strategy customized for your business to improve it. We will create a CRO website just for you! You need an expert CRO marketing firm to help you with conversion optimisation.
FAQ:
- How to calculate a conversion rate?
- What does CRO stand for?
- What are the best CRO techniques?
- Which is the best CRO marketing firm?
- How do I convince web visitors to take a desired action?
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