CRO is an element of digital marketing that stands for Conversion Rate Optimization, which is the process of optimizing your website to increase the likelihood that visitors to the site will take the action you want them to, such as making a purchase, or contacting you about becoming a client. The higher your website’s conversion rate, the better. Even if your website is thriving in all other areas, if you have a poor conversion rate, something needs to change.
If you have a low conversion rate, you probably also are not making as many sales or taking on as many new clients as you would like.CRO can be confusing. There are a lot of different actions you could be wanting customers to take, there are many different ways to modify and improve user experience (UX), you may not be sure how CRO and SEO work together, and you probably don’t know all of the ways that CRO is important for your business.
Consider this your declassified guide to all things CRO.
How important is Conversion Rate Optimization?
There are many benefits to focusing on CRO when working with small business marketing strategies. The conversion rate optimization enhances user experience by focusing on two things, reducing friction in your funnel and increasing the value of your offer.
These steps, in turn, yield results such as increased value of website traffic, rise in number of customers, rise in profits, increased customer centered development, winning customers from your competitors, and a larger volume of customer retention. Does it sound important yet?
How can conversion rates be optimized?
As we mentioned before, the conversion rate optimization enhances user experience by focusing on two things, reducing friction in your funnel and increasing the value of your offer. This is achieved by using a variety of different parts to achieve optimal conversion rates. These moving parts include:
A Call to Action
A call to action tells your page visitors what to do every step of the way. Before they reach your site, when they’re on your landing page, when they place an item in their cart, as they’re making a purchase. This helps them to perform the desired action, which takes you one step closer to your conversion goal.
An Optimized Conversion Funnel
Content marketers often use conversion funnel to determine the steps page visitors take on the website. A conversion funnel is the series of steps visitors must take to complete your site’s primary goal.
Optimized Usability
Processes to make your site as easy to navigate, use, and understand as possible. This is what we mean by removing friction from your site. Make it easy to use, and see your conversion rates increase.
What are some ways you can use those tools and variables to improve user experience?
There are so many ways to improve user experience and increase your CRO. A common practice to test conversion improvements is AB Testing, where two (or more) versions of your site are shown to visitors. Conversion rates are then measured on each version to see which one is most effective. You may also choose to implement User Recordings, a tool that records users as they move through your site. User recordings provide a lot of feedback on where people get stuck and where they really want to go, making it a great way to see where you can make changes to improve your site’s conversion rate. You can also use analytics, usually built in to most site development tools, to measure data surrounding visitors to your site. Google Analytics is also a phenomenal tool to use in order to gain data from your site.
You can access tons of information, including keyword research, search engine data, search queries, meta tags, and ranking factors, using Google Analytics for free.
Developing a strategy to improve CRO
Make sure you know your starting metrics as you begin developing a strategy to improve CRO for your website! This will help you determine whether your methods actually work.
While there are many strategies you may use to improve your CRO, it’s best to start out with something basic and see what happens, and where changes need to be made. Consider an initial strategy similar to this:
- Condense all of your site’s images to the smallest size possible
- Add an attention grabbing CTA (Call To Action) on every page
- Imbed internal links on every page to encourage click-throughs. Link building will help when it comes to increasing the percentage of sales of your products or services.
- Improve your site’s navigation, especially top-level navigation, such as the title tag, and add breadcrumbs
- Use big subheaders on pages with lots of content to keep people reading
These are a handful of solid starting strategies. Test each of them using both A/B testing and multivariate testing to gauge results, make any changes or adjustments, and repeat the process. You should start to see an increase in CRO, at which point you can move into more advanced, complex website edits to increase conversions and boost your CRO even further.
Now you know about CRO and why it is so important to online marketing for small business owners
While many may know about CRO, few are able to harness that knowledge and utilize the right tools, plans, and resources to implement it. While CRO may not be the “be all, end all” approach to digital marketing, it can have a huge impact on the success of your business. CRO shouldn’t be left on the back burner, it must be implemented along with other marketing strategies in order for you to achieve the best results possible.
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