When the dream of building your business and having a website comes true but then you realize that none of the hundreds or thousands of visitors are actually becoming clients, what do you do?
Let’s dig into this phenomenon and explore the solution: Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Whether it is online sales or a website that shows your professional services to prospects and referrals, your website should be helping you grow. And improving the CRO is the key.
CRO is improving the percentage of website visitors who take your desired action. The desired action is easy to see if you have an ecommerce site but if you don’t sell directly from your site, what can you do? There are dozens of different calls to action (CTAs) that you can implement such as:
- Sign Up – “Join our newsletter for updates!”
- Learn More – “Discover how we can help you today.”
- Contact Us – “Get in touch with our team now.”
- Download – “Grab your free guide here.”
- Register – “Reserve your spot for the event!”
- Subscribe – “Stay informed—subscribe to our blog.”
- Request a Quote – “Find out how affordable we are.”
- Book a Consultation – “Schedule your free session today.”
- Explore – “Dive into our resources now.”
- Share – “Spread the word with your friends!”
- Donate – “Support our cause with a contribution.”
- Start Now – “Begin your journey with us.”
- Watch – “See our story in this short video.”
- Apply – “Submit your application today.”
- Follow Us – “Connect with us on social media.”
And each one of these CTAs can be tracked.
Having a compelling CTA helps but often the barrier to improving CRO is that you have unintentionally put barriers between what you want the visitor to do and the user experience. So the first step in improving CRO is to revisit your website. Look at the colors, the language, the links and the images. There are numerous examples of a website owner improving conversions simply by changing the color of a button or turning a text link CTA into a button to make it stand out more. So you can now begin testing these things on your website.
So how do you get started with this? Ideally you have an analytics package installed on your website. With that you can have data to see what is happening, how people are navigating your site and perhaps even have heat maps that show where a visitor’s mouse or eyes are traveling across your page. All of this data provides valuable insight you can use to begin testing. Depending on the volume of traffic you have, you might want to run a test for days, weeks or even months.
Don’t make wholesale changes because even if it works, you won’t know which change was the most responsible for the uptick in conversions. Make small, incremental changes. If a change does not have the desired impact, change it back and try something else. And continually monitor the data so you can see if you are indeed getting more conversions or at least to see visitors coming closer to take your desired action.
And measure the results! If you have a conversion rate of 0.001 (meaning out of every thousand visitors to your site you get one conversion, moving that to 0.002 is not just a 0.001 increase, it is a 100% increase.
Why think about CRO at all?
Many businesses think they want SEO or paid search when what they most want is CRO – to have a website that helps them grow. Before you invest in SEO or PPC, you should make sure you know your CRO. If the CRO is zero, then driving more traffic to your website will only frustrate both you and your visitors.
And, as noted above, small changes can lead to big increases. By paying attention to how visitors are using your website, you can improve the user experience, resulting in happier clients! You don’t have to be a big brand to do this. Here are a few tools that can help you get started at little to no cost:
- Google Analytics
- HotJar
- Visual Website Optimizer
- Optimonk
Conversion Rate Optimization is all about turning visitors into clients in the most efficient manner possible. Should all of this sound too time consuming
