When working on your company site, you spent a lot of time focusing on SEO and paid vs. organic rankings. You pour your heart and soul into the content, hoping it will bring in visitors and thus more sales. But, to make that happen, you don’t necessarily focus on your conversion rate optimization.
Conversion rate optimization is just as important as search engine optimization. It deals with optimizing landing pages and popular web pages to complete the conversion from simple visitors to full-on customers.
Today, we will look at conversion rates and explain what they are and basic methods to optimize your site for better conversion rates.
What is a Conversion Rate?
A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that complete a desired goal. While the ultimate goal may be to purchase a product or service, any goal you have is counted as a conversion. For example, if you have a newsletter you want people to sign up for or white papers for download, both of these would be considered a conversion.
You want a high conversion rate. However, what is high for one industry might not be increased for yours. Therefore, you need to look at your website’s average conversion rate and target that. For example, according to Google, business and industrial companies have an average of 3.71%, while law and government might see conversion rates as high as 7.45%.
Calculating Conversion Rate
To calculate your website’s conversion rate, you divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors. Then multiply the answer by 100 to get a percentage.
For example, you had 30 sales on your website last month and 500 visitors during that period. Therefore, the conversion rate would be 30 divided by 500 (0.06) multiplied by 100 to give you a 6% conversion rate.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization is essential to your website as it lowers your customer acquisition costs and gives you more value from the customers you already have. However, there is no one size fits all method to optimize your conversion rates.
While the following steps will help identify what you need to work on, there is no guarantee focusing on a single issue will work for your site. You must test different options to determine what combination works for your site.
Quantitative Data Analysis
The quantitative data analysis method focuses on the analytics of your website. First, you will view the hard numbers of how users behave using an analytic platform like Google Analytics. Then, once you have the raw numbers, you can add tracking into the analytical mix to understand your conversions.
When you use quantitative data analysis for your CRO, you understand how people engage with your website. For example, you’ll be able to answer questions such as
- Which features do your visitors engage with
- Where on your site or within page do they spend most of their time?
- Where are visitors entering your site? What page are they landing on?
- Who are your customers?
- Where do they abandon the conversion funnel?
Knowing the answers to these questions will help you focus your efforts on where customers interact. As a result, it will make the most significant impact and be the most valuable to your users.
People-Focused
Using quantitative analysis is a good starting point when trying to optimize your conversion rates. First, however, you must focus on why your visitors engage the way they do when on your site. That is where the people-focused method becomes essential.
People-focused, or qualitative data analysis, is subjective. Optimizing for every visitor is impossible, so you need to maximize your conversion rate tactics for your ideal customer. You can get information through on-site surveys, satisfaction surveys, or user testing.
You want to gain information such as
- What do your customers think of your website, and how is it different from your competitors?
- How would they describe your company? What words would they use for your services and products, and how do you address problems?
- Why did they come to your website, to begin with? What appealed to them to engage?
With all the data combined, you can focus on optimizing your pages to convert visitors into customers. Start with high-value pages as they will offer the best chance of immediate impact on your goals. However, you should also focus on underperforming pages to help them convert more users.
How Conversion Rate Optimization Helps SEO
Conversion Rate Optimization doesn’t directly affect your site’s SEO and organic search page rankings. However, CRO does have some benefits for SEO in general.
As you develop and analyze the data for CRO, you learn about your customers and why they visit your website. This information helps you find the right customers and spend less time drawing in customers you don’t need. You can then focus on your ideal group and make your website a better experience for them.
As the conversion rate grows, you see a better return on your investment. When you make the most of your resources, you make more conversions without spending more money, thus increasing the return on your initial investments.
Finally, focusing on conversion rate optimization often means focusing on creating a website that users want to visit and engage with. A professional site ready to answer any questions they may have builds trust between you and the customer. Enhanced site trust can help boost your SEO.
Do You Need Conversion Rate Optimization
The simple answer is yes; you must ensure your pages are optimized for conversions. However, like with SEO, there is no one-and-done method of earning new customers. Instead, you will need to monitor your monthly conversions and update pages and information as necessary to maintain your conversion goals.
Ready to optimize your conversion rate? Contact us today to learn how we can help you use your existing website to attract more customers.
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