Conversion Rate Optimization – Kick Off the New Year with a High Converting Website

What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the due process of increasing a greater percentage of your website visitors to take the desired action.

The conversion metric will differ dependent on the site owner and the established end goals but could be considered to be having the site visitor make a call, complete a form, becoming a new customer or a patient.

The CRO process involves understanding the sales cycle and how visitors navigate through your website. What actions they take, and just as important, what prevents them from completing your predetermined goals. Let’s explore more…

How to Measure Conversion Rate Optimization

It’s important to measure your conversions. The easiest way to measure your website conversions is by setting up sales funnels in your Google Analytics account.

First, decide what a conversion means to you. It could be:

• Subscribing to your newsletter
• Completing a contact form
• Calling your phone number
• Buying a product 

If you have a 10 percent conversion rate, that means 10 percent of your site visitors converted. I.E took a desired action.

Good SEO increases the number of organic visitors to your site. Meanwhile, CRO converts the site visitors you are already getting at a higher rate.

When SEO and CRO are combined, your website becomes a very powerful tool that continually delivers a high return on investment.

Why is Conversion Rate Optimization Important?

Conversion rate optimization is important because it allows website owners to lower their customer acquisition costs by increasing the value of each site visitor from the traffic they already get and to grow their business exponentially.

By understanding what on-page factors influence your visitors’ decisions, you’re better prepared to design a meaningful and overall more impactful website experience.

How to Increase Conversion Rate Optimization

We analyze websites at length as we want to fully optimize the traffic they receive.

We don’t optimize websites per se, we optimize thought processes, controlling user chronology with the website geography.

Let’s look at a couple of examples of a website before and after CRO was implemented:

 

 

Conversion modifications never stop and neither does our research, but this will be a solid start. Once we have collected analytical data we will tweak accordingly to increase conversions further. We will also install heat maps to see how visitors navigate the website to see what other insight we can gain to improve the visitor experience.

Website Speed

Let’s start by first looking at website speed. Websites that are slow to load are conversion killers before we even get out of the gate.

This should be improved, especially on mobile devices so the site loads in 3 seconds or less. As Google can easily track this metric, if the site loads slow, Google will also punish your site rankings.

Let’s make it super easy for site visitors to connect. Mobile-friendly sites also benefit from having a floating and personalised ‘Call to Action‘ button that follows the user as they scroll and has shown to increase conversions by over 202%.

Your Website Layout – (CRO) Conversion Rate Optimization

Users typically read in an F shape pattern, so we want to ensure we have all the vital components in the correct places.

The hierarchy we have found to be most effective, especially for the home page is:

• Heading
• Supporting subheading
• Customer benefit-driven bullet points
• A clear call to action
• FAQ’s
• Real Testimonials

The premium areas to concentrate on for maximum conversion rate optimization across your entire website are:

The Homepage

This is the first impression. First impressions count. This is your opportunity to reel in the prospective client and impress on them enough to carry on through the other parts of the site.

In addition to the hierarchy above you can offer a signup to regular email drops or a chatbot box to direct the customer straight to a human or a FAQ page that describes the products or services in more detail or in layman’s terms. The user must have a good browsing experience from the get-go or they may sway to another site in the hope they can understand the subject better.

Pricing Page

This is an important page. It can make or break the possible future sale. This page uses CRO to help convert the visitor into a customer using detailed facts on pricing and products. This can be used to describe the cost and product in more detail and what the customer will get in exchange for their hard-earned money. The pricing page must include the above alongside a contact method like a phone number to call a human for more pricing information.

A Blog Roll

This is a fantastic method of conversion. You can detail content about the industry or services offered on the rest of the site. A blog can use CRO to convert surfers into sales leads if professionally written and insightful.

One amazing way to convert is to use a CTA (call-to-action.) You can leave a CTA anywhere on the page. This means the user can just click the button and go straight to the payment page if they feel they have read enough. A CTA can also be used to invite the reader to submit an email address or for a free product if relevant. All wording on any page is CTA, so give them a button to press to complete the action.

A Landing Page

This is the action page. A landing page can show reviews or video testimonials. Optimize this page with evidence of previous successes to encourage a CTA. For example, if your company provides dental services optimize the page with relevant corporate videos of the industry and links to products relevant to the subject.

You should always ask yourself the following questions when planning out your web pages.

Where am I?

In our example above, the left-justified logo does a simple and effective job to identify the business website.

What can I do here?

Most website searches are people looking for answers to their questions.

We should provide the site visitor with the answer to their questions here without any fluff or filler to solve the prospect’s pain points.

Too much information or too many options create overwhelm and anxiety. In our example above, the site has no information, only a photo of a generic office. Not very informative or inviting is it?

Email, phone, visit social media, read the blog, look through the services pages and so on. When there are far too many options for the potential customer or a big wall of text with little in the way of media to make the information more digestible to read, we simply lose or confuse them.

Why should I do it?

As a site visitor, what are the benefits to me? We need to expand on these points with more customer benefit-driven information to emphasize the key points you want to convey.

Your site should guide the user through the process and tell them why they should do it.

A clear value proposition should encapsulate the primary offer, which is to contact you.

We need something that evokes some emotion with a series of subheadings that support said heading. 

Headlines – We have to get people’s attention and for them to assimilate.

The goal of the headline is just to get them to read the sub-headlines.

The subheading’s job is to get them to engage by introducing the offer, it pushes them along after garnishing interest via the headline. Think of this sales process as an inverted pyramid and we’re guiding the site visitor to the tip which is our ‘Call to Action.’

Otherwise, if they have a look around the site and are not captivated, they quickly become frustrated or lost and press back to search elsewhere. Don’t lose them to your competition!

The longer you have them engaged the more likely they are to take action, as they feel they have invested their time wisely.

Also, add real customer testimonials with ideally a client photo for more social proof in addition to some FAQ’s further down the page so we answer the searcher’s initial questions.

Call to Action Buttons

A Call to Action (C2A) should be clear, concise and personable. The button should be in a contrasting colour to the rest of your website theme so it stands out and naturally catches the eye.

The call to action button is the most valuable piece of real-estate on your website. Ultimately it doesn’t matter how pretty your site is, how many people visits it gets or how high it ranks in search results. If no one is smashing your call to action button to contact you or buy your products you have no business.

So don’t be shy telling your site visitors to ‘Buy Now’ or to contact you.

If you have implemented our CRO as described in this post on your website to guide your visitors down your sales funnel, don’t stumble at the last hurdle. There’s gold in those conversions.

When you implement the above edits and optimise your website for conversions, we’re sure you will grab people’s attention, have a better-converting website and produce a higher return on your digital asset.

 

Why we offer it

Many SEO companies offer only site-building and admin services. Consider a nice well-designed website is useless without CRO and an experienced team to implement it. Blend Local Search Media offers a fully comprehensive site construction and SEO services which includes CRO. This means you don’t have to think to hard into the above, Blend Local Search Media have been optimizing websites since 2008.

There is nothing we don’t know about website optimization and how to guide your potential customers to the BUY NOW button. With an international staff well versed in all aspects of CRO and how to convert, we can help you convert surfers and readers into paying customers. Contact us today for a complimentary analysis of your website.

Conversion Rate Optimization – Kick Off the New Year with a High Converting Website