Conversion Rate Optimization: The Most Important Thing You’re Ignoring Right Now

Every business owner is going to take a look at their advertising tactics at some point and wonder what they can do to get a higher return on investment. This includes online marketing campaigns that can become incredibly complex and often leave owners frustrated at how little progress they are making. If you feel as if your website is no longer providing your company with additional revenue, then it might be time to take a closer look at conversion rate optimization (CRO). If you just thought, “What is Conversion Rate Optimization”

CRO: What Is It?

Conversion rate optimization is important for businesses of all sizes and within all industries, but many business owners are not quite sure what it is and how it affects them. CRO is the process of making your website more efficient. Instead of simply drawing in more visitors with search engine optimization (SEO), a company attempts to convert visitors into paying customers at a higher rate. Both CRO and SEO are exceptionally important, and those that ignore either one will quickly find themselves falling behind the competition.

Understanding Conversions

To further complicate this process, every single business is going to have a slightly different idea of what a conversion should be. Online retailers might want to make an immediate sale while a local lawyer will want visitors to contact their firm. This is just one of the reasons that it is so important to set long-term goals for one’s website. Without clear goals, a business owner and their marketing team will never be able to make the small changes to their advertising campaign that will produce big results. In order to come up with clear goals, business owners might want to ask themselves questions such as:

– What kind of traffic do I want on my website?
– How much time can I devote to my website?
– Is my website the first or last touchpoint for new clients?
– How can I accurately analyze how successful my digital marketing campaign has become?
– Where is my site’s traffic coming from?

Answering these few questions will help you lay the foundation to create a successful online advertising campaign with a much higher return on investment. Long gone are the days in which a company needs to do nothing more than purchase a domain, put up basic information, and then hope for the best.

Data Is Key

One of the most common mistakes made by business owners is creating a website with absolutely no tools to gauge their success. Those that do not have multiple systems in place to collect accurate data are essentially firing into the dark and hoping for the best. Even if your business does continue to grow, you might be missing out on new clients if you are not continuing to improve your website and your conversion rates. A digital marketing team has a number of tools at their disposal to track exactly where traffic is coming from, how long they are on the site, and what percentage of traffic is converting. As time goes on and more information is collected, the marketing team will get a better idea about what changes can be made to the website to produce real results.

Identify Your Sticking Points

No matter how much planning takes place, every website and marketing campaign has room for improvement by reducing sticking points. Sticking points often take place during negotiations, but this term is also used to describe a situation in which the path to a conversion is blocked. Sticking points can take place at any moment, and the more sticking points your conversion process has the lower your conversion rates will be.

While online sales continue to rise every single year, online customers are notoriously fickle. When a company is competing with businesses from around the world, even a small issue can turn a client away forever. Some of the most common sticking points include improper links, dead links, slow load times, too much media, too little information, unattractive layouts, and no clear path to a conversion. Once you are able to collect this data and identify these issues, then you will be able to make changes to your website that will make a real difference.

Where to Start

The process of optimizing a website and converting traffic often seems complicated, but it starts with one very simple concept. Websites should always be designed with the user’s experience in mind. There are countless tactics to bring in more traffic, but little else matters if the website is not designed for the customer.
Companies such as Google want to connect their users with the most useful, pertinent, and up-to-date website. They cannot always achieve this goal, but they use specific metrics to rank the site. This includes data such as where the traffic is coming from and how long they are on the site. Those that focus on the user’s experience will find that CRO and SEO will follow.

Creating a Culture for Your Business

Not every single visitor that lands on your website is going to immediately be converted. Conversion rates change between every company and industry, but most will find that their best conversion rates rarely move past two or three percent. These numbers might seem low, but business owners should keep in mind that an optimized website could drive in thousands of unique visitors per month. Even though the conversion rates are low, the online experience that you are providing to visitors is creating a culture around your company. When it comes to long-term goals, name and brand recognition can become a company’s best asset.

The Tools of CRO

Every single campaign is going to be carried out differently, and there is no single tactic that will work for everyone. Most companies will need to take a multifaceted approach, collect information, and then make changes as needed. Organic SEO, or optimizing a website without the use of paid ads, is a strategy that will take some time to implement. This is why many companies benefit from a blend of organic optimization and paid advertisements such as PPC (pay-per-click). As part of a larger advertising campaign, PPC ads allow a business to bid for the top spots on the search engine results pages and place ads on other websites. Paid Search can be a powerful tool when used correctly, but it can also be a money pit when done incorrectly. Marketing teams must collect data, decide on exactly what they would like their PPC ads to endorse, consider the total costs, and then take a look at the return-on-investment.

Creating the Ideal User Experience

Even companies with an amazing product or service can flounder when they are thrust into the competitive world of digital marketing. Collecting data is the single most important step in this process, and those without the right information will never be able to pull in more traffic and then convert that traffic at a higher rate. In the end, a business owner and their marketing team must create a website with the visitor’s experience as a priority, collect as much information as possible, and then continue to make small changes as they discover exactly what is and isn’t working.

Do you want to improve your conversion rates? We can help! Contact us or reach out on chat today for a free website analysis and strategy session.