Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is every bit as important to your website, and your bottom line, as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Yet, a great many people don’t even know what it does, much less how to implement it correctly. This guide will not only answer the question, what is conversion rate optimization, we will also tell you exactly how to best accomplish it.

Many businesses today are focusing so hard on increasing traffic to their websites that they lose sight of the reason why they want them in the first place: to turn those people into buyers. But even astronomical numbers won’t do you any good if only a few of those potential customers are convinced to open up their wallets.

Here is what you need to know about converting website visitors to paying customers.

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Basically, a conversion rate is the percentage of your website visitors who do exactly what you want them to do. It isn’t always to buy something immediately. Sometimes it may just be opting into an email list by giving you their email address. Sometimes it may be just filling out a form that gives you information you need.

The conversion rate is a percentage. You get the actual number by dividing the number of conversions you get by the number of visitors to your website, then you multiply the result by 100. Higher is better.

(Image credit: instapage.com)

In order to get that number as high as possible, you need to format, design and provide content on your website in ways that will most effectively get visitors to do whatever it is that you are asking them to do. The process of doing that is conversion rate optimization. You are optimizing your website to generate the most possible conversions.

If you want to generate more revenue from your website, CRO is one of the cheapest and fastest options you have. Trying to increase sales by increasing the number of visitors to your website is not nearly as effective. For instance, look at these alternatives:

• Ads – Buying more ads to attract more website visitors costs more.
• SEO – Trying to increase traffic with targeted SEO not only takes a really long time to see results, but can be very expensive if you don’t do it yourself.
• Marketing – Expanding your marketing department increases payroll expenses.
• New Products – Developing more products to sell can take quite a while, and may not even be possible for some businesses.

So let’s take a look at your options using CRO.

FACT: A typical website conversion rate is about 2.35% on average. But the top 10% of companies are seeing 3-5x higher conversion rates than average.

Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies

For the most effective CRO results possible, you need to have a plan in place before you get started. Here are some of the best conversion rate optimization strategies for you to consider.

Paths to Profit

Before you start testing things that cost money to change, such as design and content on your website, you should try testing different methods of generating profit. For instance, will free shipping tempt more people to buy than offering a discount? Then try different sizes of discounts.

What about both? Maybe it doesn’t seem likely that offering 10% off plus free shipping will actually increase profitability, but you won’t know until you test whether it will generate enough increased volume to make a difference.

Test your SEO in 60 seconds!

Diib is one of the best SEO tools in the world. Diib uses the power of big data to help you quickly and easily increase your traffic and rankings. We’ll even let you know if you already deserve to rank higher for certain keywords.

• Easy-to-use automated SEO tool
• Keyword and backlink monitoring + ideas
• Speed, security, + Core Vitals tracking

• Intelligently suggests ideas to improve SEO
• Over 500,000k global members
• Built-in benchmarking and competitor analysis

For example “www.diib.com”

Test Your Site for Free

Used by over 500k companies and organizations:

• 
• 
• 
• 

Syncs with

Featured Products

There are two main ways to test the products you offer on the company’s website.

• Density – Find out how your sales are affected by the number of products shown on a page. Is it better to just show 2 or to show 12? More than 12 or something in between?
• Favorites – Your analytics should be able to tell you which of your products buyers choose to put in their carts first. Would you generate more sales by putting them on the home page so that even more buyers will choose them? Or is it more profitable to showcase products that generate the highest profit?

Targeted Offers

Use your demographics data to their utmost advantage. There are almost certainly products that women buying lingerie are more likely to consider than men’s shoes, so show them those, instead of the shoes. Or makeup, for example:

Design

At some point, you will have to consider the difference a change in design could mean for your sales. There are multiple areas that could have impact: layout, colors, navigation and more. This is an area where research should play an important part.

It would probably be very expensive, and certainly less effective, to try and reinvent the wheel. Find out what the established wisdom is and proceed accordingly.

Content

The copy on your home, sales and landing pages is of the utmost importance. It can’t be stressed strongly enough just how crucial it is for you to have the most effective content on your website as possible. Again, a great deal of research has already been done on this, so you just need to implement the results.

Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices 

Many companies just jump in and start haphazardly trying to optimize their websites for better conversion rates, and they are usually disappointed in the results. To be most effective, besides saving you time and money, you should be aware of conversion rate optimization best practices.

Calculate Total Investment

Effective CRO requires you to devote adequate resources to the effort. At the very least, you will need to allocate funds to:

• Design – Any people, hardware and software necessary to create multiple design options.
• Content – Landing pages, emails, sales page content and more should be given to the most successful writers you can afford.
• Split testing – Often referred to as A/B testing. You’ll need the personnel to perform 1 to 2 split tests a month, plus the necessary software if you don’t already have it.

Here is a visual graphic that will show you the different methods and their effectiveness:

Determine ROI

The rule of thumb is that websites which are converting less than 20% of their visitors should be able to achieve a 30% increase. Calculate what that would mean for your business and compare it to the cost of your total investment.

Follow the Data

Base all of your decisions on what the data from your website is telling you. No matter what your personal opinions and assumptions are, make changes based on the information you are getting from your analytics.

Small companies and certain industries may have a problem getting statistically significant data, particularly when testing just one page at a time. One solution to this problem is running a change across all similar pages at once and using a benchmark of 50 clicks.

Create Your Buyer Personas

Before you spend a single penny, you need to figure out exactly what your customer demographics are. Because it is very likely that you have more than one, and you probably will need to market to each one differently.

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of the people who are most likely to buy whatever you are selling. For instance, if you are selling some type of orthopedic shoes, your customers could be restaurant servers, hospital workers, elderly people and more. So you should have a buyer persona for each one.

Give them names, make them seem like real people to you. Then use your marketing to talk to each of them about the specific problems of their individual situations and how your products can help solve those problems.

Turbocharge Your Content Effectiveness

One of the most valuable techniques in marketing is to organize your content to accommodate a sales funnel. What that means is that you will provide content to complement each stage of the buyer’s journey.

• Awareness – In the first stage, when the buyers are trying to figure out exactly what their problem is – for instance, why their big toe has started hurting all of a sudden, you could have content on a blog post specifically about all of the possible causes. They could range from an ingrown toenail to being on their feet all day.
• Consideration – Once buyers determine what the problem is, they are looking for solutions just to that specific issue. If it happens to be standing on their feet all day, you want them to come across a video on your website of how best to cope with that using orthopedic shoes.
• Purchase – Once they have decided they need to have orthopedic shoes, they will be looking for the best ones, and you want them to choose yours. So you will have pages on your website with details for each of your models of orthopedic shoes that will hopefully convince them to buy a pair.

Here are the digital touch points in conversion:

Think Big

Always start with big changes before bothering with the small stuff. For instance, try changing the headlines on your content before re-writing all of the text. Or change your navigation menu to make it easier for visitors to find what they need in order to give you their money before worrying about the color and text of the Buy buttons.

This is particularly important for the companies referred to above, who may not have enough traffic to generate significant testing results. There is much more of a chance of generating 50 clicks with more noticeable changes.

Message Matching

Don’t confuse your potential customers with a different message in your ads than the one featured on your landing page. Nothing makes a user bounce quicker than clicking on an ad that promises them one thing, then being taken to a landing page that is for something totally different.

You should create a separate landing page for every different ad you create. Make sure the headlines are exactly the same, as well as any offers, keywords or phrases. Check out this conversion chart that can help you organize your thoughts:

What Are the Steps of Conversion Optimization?

The first thing you need to do is make one list of the CRO strategies you want to test in order of how much additional revenue they can potentially generate, and make another list of them in order of how much they will cost. Then you decide which are the most cost effective and start with those. Once you have decided on which strategy to start with, you need to know what are the steps of conversion optimization to use on all of them.

There are just 4 basic steps to conversion optimization, but each requires an intense focus. One, in particular, has almost endless variations. Still, they can essentially be broken down to:

Acquire Data

You need to know what is already going on with your website in order to know where changes can and should be made. For instance, just a handful of the things you will want to find out are:

• Any demographic information at all that you can get about your website visitors, including geographical locations.
• Where your traffic is coming from.
• Which pages are visited most often.
• Which pages get the most engagement.
• How long people are staying on each page and, if possible, at what point they are bouncing.
• At what point carts are being abandoned.

Analyze Data

Now you take the data that you’ve acquired and try to see what the difference is between the least successful pages and the most successful ones. Look for differences in the design, the layout, the copy and the product offer.

Testing

This is where you start making changes one at a time. Just like starting babies off on solid food, you need to only make one change at a time so you can tell which change is having an impact.

Or you can think of it like going to the eye doctor. Is this change better than the original? If no, then try something else. Is that better than the original? If yes, then try another one and ask, better or worse?

Repeat

There are so very many variables to be tested on your website. First there are the different pages: Home page, landing page, product pages and more. Then there are all of the elements on the pages: buy buttons, calls to action, colors, copy, navigation. Each one is an opportunity for testing. When you optimize one item, go on to another.

FACT: 68% of small businesses don’t have a documented CRO strategy.

We hope that you found this article useful.

If you want to know more interesting about your site health, get personal recommendations and alerts, scan your website by Diib. It only takes 60 seconds.

Enter Your Website

For example “www.diib.com”

Test Your Site for Free

I`ve found Diib to be very helpful on demystifying Google Analytics data which can be overwhelming. The service trawls through your data and finds the areas where you can improve - even if you were an expert this would save time. For me, it means the data collected by Google Analytics becomes actionable so I can improve, rather than simply interesting.

Nick Colebatch
RV Cover Supply

Conversion Rate Optimization Agency 

All of these things can certainly be handled on your own, particularly if your company has its own marketing department. But even in that case, optimizing a website to improve its conversion rate can be a daunting task. There is no shame in handling the project over to specialists.

If you are unsure about trying to attempt conversion rate optimization on your company’s website yourself, you may want to consider outsourcing the project to a conversion rate optimization agency.

Some of the things you might expect from a CRO agency are:

• Site Audit – They will run a professional eye over the current effectiveness of your website.
• Funnel Analysis – They could study the customer flow on your website and analyze how best to lower the rate of churn and abandonment.
• User Behavior Analysis – They could apply professional CRO tools such as heat maps, and interpret the results.
• On-site Surveys – They could gather extremely valuable information from your website visitors with survey widgets that would result in actionable insights.
• A/B Testing – Based on all of the above, they would determine what changes on which elements of your website would have the best chance of producing positive results.
• Automated Email Process – Some agencies could develop automated conversion-optimized email sequences, to streamline your CRO efforts.

It wouldn’t hurt to call a few and feel out what they have to offer and how much it would cost. Obviously, you should take that information and use it to calculate the ROI, then compare it to the same number for doing it in-house. Just make sure that you are costing the same services, so that you can compare apples to apples.

FACT: Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) tools offer a 223% ROI (return on investment) on average.

Diib® Can Help You Boost Your Conversion Rate!

Conversion rate optimization will help you determine how to allocate your resources so they will have the most impact on your revenue. The results should be a reduction in your customer acquisition costs and increased generation of income from the existing traffic to your website. The combination of lower costs and higher revenue usually equals greater profit. Diib User Dashboard will help you know the changes you need to make to positively impact your conversion rate and, ultimately, your revenue. Here are some of the features we know you’ll love:

• Objectives to help you isolate reasons for low conversion rates and fix them quickly.
• Alerts that tell you about your Domain Authority and help you isolate pages that have low conversion rates.
• Competitor research, including conversion rates, for up to 6 of your most intense competitors.
• A monthly call with a Growth Expert to see how you can grow your domain authority.

Call today to get your free 60 second website scan or to talk to a growth expert about your specific website concerns.