How Do I Effectively Optimize My Website to Increase Conversions?
Conversion rate optimization provides numerous significant opportunities for your business to increase revenue. It’s basically a common-sense approach.
The look and feel of your pages get to be improved so that they are more usable and attractive to your target audience.
With an effective conversion rate optimization strategy, you will be able to convert a higher percentage of your website’s visitors into customers, wherever they are coming from or whatever the reason they were drawn to your site.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of making changes to your website or web pages to increase the number of site visitors that convert into paying customers.
How Does Conversion Rate Optimization Work?
Various tests and adjustments are used to analyze the way users interact with your website. Ideas are likewise developed on how to increase engagement and conversion rate.
With an ever-changing digital market, the improvements on your website are not at all permanent as well.
The user’s shopping journey is becoming more unpredictable and varied by the day.
Hence, conversion rate optimization is an ongoing process that focuses on making necessary changes to the aspects of search marketing that will increase the value of each visitor to your site.
How Do You Optimize Conversion in Marketing?
CRO is a digital service that should be tailored to your business’s needs, your current site performance, and your commercial objectives.
Each CRO campaign will vary from business to business and will typically consist of these important elements:
- Hypothesis report
- Ongoing A/B multivariate testing
- Ongoing analysis with conclusions and recommended changes
- Landing page analyzer
- Usability testing
- Heat maps and click maps
- Expert reviews
Why CRO?
Some say that conversion rate optimization is plain common sense combined with a scientific approach.
It provides numerous significant opportunities for a business to increase revenue but this is not the only reason for businesses to turn to CRO techniques.
Other reasons include:
- Getting long-lasting positive effects that result in a permanent increase in sales and leads. It’s a one-time investment with long-term benefits.
- The efficiency of improved web pages is easily tracked with the use of Google Analytics. This is an important step in measuring the success of CRO efforts.
- Depending on the initial state of a website and the scope of the CRO project, a business can completely recover from its investment in conversion rate optimization within three to five months.
- The economic benefits include improved overall sales and higher transaction values with improved usability of a site. This trend will continue in the long term such that you will enjoy higher repeat sales.
- Only minor UI/UX changes are needed to redevelop the whole site from scratch to make a significant improvement on your return of investment.
How Do You Increase the Conversion Rate of Your Business?
To increase your conversion, you should focus on the smallest details which include:
- Your logo,
- The top navigation bar,
- The widgets in your sidebar, and
- Every other element that seems to be unnoticed.
You should know if these elements are affecting your user experience.
If they don’t harm the user experience on your site, you can get rid of them. Focus on what action you would want the visitors on your site to take.
Focus on how people perceive your site relative to navigation and finding what they want.
What direction do you want them to take when they are on your site?
If you provide a good user experience, your visitors will leave satisfied and appreciative, and may even convert into loyal customers.
So, how do you convert your site visitors into loyal paying customers through conversion rate optimization?
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Use a CRO Planner
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Start strong by using a CRO planner that will help you analyze and develop a strategy for increasing your conversion rate through CRO.
CRO planners will help you understand the entire process from A to Z so you don’t get side-tracked along the way.
This tool is available online and you can find instructions on:
- How to conduct a site audit
- Identify areas to improve your conversion funnel
- Understand users on your site
- How you will go through the process of A/B testing and experimentation
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Shorten your forms
Long forms that need to be filled out by your visitors can create friction in the conversion process.
Visitors typically get hesitant to fill out such forms so eliminate this hesitation by creating short forms that take less time to fill out.
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Always include social proof
A significant percentage of consumers rely on customer reviews when deciding to make a purchase.
In fact, 92% of consumers hesitate to make a purchase if there are no customer reviews and 97% of them claim that customer reviews impact their buying decision.
This simply means that your reputation and online presence have a significant effect on your conversion rate.
Here’s what you can do to include social proof on your site:
- Link your site to your Yelp or any other directory page where customers left reviews.
- Add testimonials and reviews on your site.
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Understand how users interact with your site
Use website analysis tools so you can see screen recordings of users on your site.
See where they leave, what they click on, what offers they skip, and other actions.
These analysis tools include heat maps that show what elements on your site stand out and draws the attention of your users.
It’s a very useful tool in helping you determine what specific areas in your site need to be improved.
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Add live chat
Users need answers right away and when you don’t provide them, they will most likely be unsatisfied and leave your site.
This feature increases your credibility as it alleviates the concerns of your potential customers.
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Don’t Ignore These Important Steps in the CRO Process:
- Test your offers and make sure they align with your audience, are creative and compelling, and make sense
- Clearly communicate your value proposition on the landing page
- Include high-quality images and videos of your product and/or service on your landing page to make your site feel more trustworthy
- Use strong CTAs (call to action) throughout your website and landing pages that are clear and easily accessible.
- Conduct A/B testing to see what type of elements on your site communicate well to your audience.
Don’t Waste All the Good Traffic With CRO
Conducting thorough research on your site and collecting as much data can help you create conversion optimization campaigns for your on-page and off-page SEO.
Focus on user experience as you plan and test your CRO project in your efforts to reach your conversion rate optimization goals. Contact us today to learn more about conversion rate optimization services.
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Big Easy SEO is a web design, SEO, and digital marketing agency that strives to help small to medium sized businesses boost their brand in the online market and search engines.
Our goal is to provide metrics, results and services tailor made to your business through a variety of strategies including search engine optimization (SEO), web design, and ads.