What is Conversion Rate Optimisation? (CRO)
Turning your website visitors into prospects or customers isn’t easy.
In the process of converting people who have never even heard of you into parting with their cash, your website plays an increasingly important role whatever business you are in.
Understanding how and why people complete this journey to becoming a client, in order to identify how to make the journey as smooth as possible, is what CRO is all about.
What is CRO in practice?
There are 2 key features of CRO;
- Using data and feedback from visitors to understand how they use your website.
- Testing how changes to your website cause people to behave differently.
By developing plans and experiments and measuring the difference they make, ultimately you will increase the number of people who decide to become a client.
Importantly then, CRO is about making the most of the website traffic you already have, and not about getting more traffic.
Why is CRO important?
CRO is important because no matter how well you think your website is performing, there is always room for improvement.
The harder you work at making your website easier for your customers, the better the results will be.
Saving money and seeing more return on your marketing ROI is also a big benefit of CRO. You’re becoming more efficient and capitalising on the visitors you already have, improving your business without the need to pay for more visitors.
How do I know what my current conversion rate is?
A simple way of seeing what your current conversion rate actually is, is to divide the number of conversions by the number of visitors to your website, for any given time period.
Your website analytic tools can track conversions very accurately. Conversions are the actions you want people to take on your site, and they vary depending on your business. They could be online sales, form completions or downloads for example.
The key thing is to know this number and work to improve it. It doesn’t really matter what it is to start with as each business is different.
Six easy ways to improve your CRO
The best way to begin your CRO strategy is to look at your site through your visitor’s eyes.
Here are some ideas to help you improve the CRO on your website.
- Your calls to action – are they clear and easy to find? Do they all work?
- The graphics you use should be relevant and well placed, not distracting or dominant on the page, and they should not prevent the page loading quickly.
- Experiment with reducing the content on the page to what is absolutely necessary to get your message across.
- Think about the usability of your site – how easy is it to navigate? How well does it work, technically? Is there a mobile version? The easier you make everything for your customers, the higher your conversion will be.
- Is your site secure and trustworthy?
- Is all of your SEO meta data up to date and relevant? If not, people could be clicking on your site from the search engine results page expecting to see something else, or the customers you want might not click at all.
Once you have decided what you want to change and have made the changes on your website, measure the results and keep adapting your website until you are happy with your Conversion Rate Optimisation results.
REMEMBER!
What works for one site could do completely the opposite for another!
Every site and business has different strengths and weaknesses, and you need to just keep testing, measuring and adjusting to find what’s right for you.
If you need more help getting to grips with CRO, we are here to help.
Get in touch with us today. Call us on 01642 924507, or email hello@forrestdigital.com