Conversion Optimization (CRO) is an integral part of any company’s online marketing strategy. In this article, we will teach you how to calculate the CRO on your website.
While there are many ways to drive people to your website or social channels, what happens when those users interact with your content makes all the difference in generating leads and revenue for your business. Conversion rate optimization strategies can help you get more conversions and grow your business.
Today you will learn what conversion rate means, why it’s important for your business, and the best practices for achieving the highest possible conversion rate.
What is the conversion rate?
The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take the desired action on a webpage, whether it's completing a registration form, downloading an e-book, or making a purchase. In other words, it's the number of times a user completes a goal divided by the traffic on your site.
Conversion rate optimization is a data-driven process to increase the percentage of visitors who take a specific action and convert. This is calculated by dividing the number of people who convert by the number of people who are prompted to take an action.
Conversion rate optimization occurs after visits reach your site. This differs from optimizing conversion through SEO (for which you’d need an SEO consultant) or paid ads, which focus on who clicks through your site from organic search results, how many clicks are obtained, and which keywords are driving traffic.
How to calculate the conversion rate or CRO?
Now, this part is pretty straightforward (assuming you have the data available).
If a user can convert on each visit (e.g. by purchasing a product), divide the number of conversions by the number of sessions (the number of unique times a user arrived at your site).
If you sell a subscription, divide the number of conversions by the number of users.
Let’s simplify: to calculate your conversion rate, just divide your total number of conversions by the total number of visitors.
To obtain a percentage, you can multiply the resulting figure by 100.
For example, imagine convincing 500 people to sign up for a series of webinars. Over the month-long campaign, a total of 10,000 people visited the landing page for the webinar series. So, if 500 people signed up out of a possible 10,000, our conversion rate would be:
(500 ÷ 10000) x 100 = 5% Conversion rate = 5%.
What is conversion rate optimization (CRO)?
Conversion rate optimization is the process of enhancing your website or landing page experience based on visitor behavior to help improve the likelihood of the visitor taking desired actions (conversions) on the page.
In today’s world, online traffic is highly inconsistent. If visitors don’t enter the conversion funnel on the first attempt, the likelihood of them returning and taking the desired action is quite low, which is nothing but a missed opportunity for the business.
The best way to improve possibilities and get more conversions is by carrying out effective campaigns for conversion rate optimization.
A good conversion rate optimization campaign not only saves a lot of time, money, and effort, but also explores new growth strategies previously unknown.
In other words, optimizing the conversion rate helps you better understand the usability of your website, while also providing insights into customer behavior and suggestions on how to improve their user experience to achieve your goals.
At a strategic level, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a continuous process of learning and optimization. Unfortunately, the “continuous” aspect is often overlooked when discussing CRO and its elements. This is where an SEO consultant or SEO expert can be of great help, but we’ll discuss it later.
Components of a successful CRO.
A successful CRO campaign requires a deep analysis of the target audience, multiple tests to measure performance, and continuous optimization to ensure maximum results.
Throughout this process, it’s likely that some basic elements will be addressed that can be optimized for higher conversion rates:
Web page design.
The appearance of your website and landing pages play a crucial role in CRO. An aesthetically pleasing design with easy navigation will likely boost usability and facilitate user conversion.
When designing your landing pages, work with a web designer who comprehends CRO and how users generally navigate a website.
The must be mobile-friendly (responsive), have readable fonts and interactive menus, and make it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for.
Speed of the site.
The website’s load speed is an essential aspect of any search engine optimized website and is also a component of CRO. The longer a website takes to load, the more likely users are to abandon it and head to another site.
Ideally, your website should load in less than 3 seconds both on desktop and mobile devices. Reduce the size of image files and eliminate website elements that take time to load in order to ensure fast loading time. This alone can increase conversions on your site.
Text
Web text or copy refers to the words that users read on your website and landing pages. Qualified writers are able to create text that meets the specific needs of your target audience. It’s not enough to just write “off the cuff” and hope for the best.
This is where audience research comes into play. If you know your audience’s problems and the solutions they seek, you can communicate the value of your offer: its features, benefits, and more.
Ultimately, it’s about convincing users that your service or product is the best solution for their needs. Also, if your copy is crafted by an SEO consultant, it’s guaranteed that your website’s text will generate traffic on its own, as they’re the ones with the right tools and expertise to achieve it.
Calls to action 💬
A call to action or CTA is often a concise request for users to take some action on your site. Common phrases include “Contact us,” “Buy now,” and “Work with us,” but you can be far more creative.
For instance, if you know your audience is interested in a specific offer, your call to action can be more obvious. For example, “Buy X here” or “Download Y now.”
A good practice is to make it clear what users will get once they click on a link or submit their information.
Navegation
The structure of your website should be built with the main objective of making it easy for users to navigate. This structure usually consists of the distribution of pages on the site and how they interact with each other.
Most websites adopt a hierarchical structure, with the most important pages in the main menu and subpages in the dropdown. Ideally, pages shouldn’t be buried more than 3 clicks away from the homepage.
Consider how a typical user would navigate your site. Even better, you could check a content breakdown report of your site to see how users travel from one page to another.
This could be something like this:
- The homepage.
- A page for services.
- Individual Services Page.
- Contact page.
- Completion of the objective (filling out the form, downloading material).
Or, for an e-commerce site:
- The homepage.
- A page for services.
- Product category section or page.
- Individual product page.
- Add to cart.
- Basket payment.
- Thank you and/or Confirmation Page.
Overall, creating an easy-to-navigate website is key to increasing conversions, building trust with customers, and enhancing their loyalty over time.
Forms
Contact forms are the most popular tool used by website owners to gather information from users, particularly on service and agency sites.
E-commerce sites, on the other hand, may feature individual product pages and the typical shopping cart function.
Contact forms should be user-friendly and functional. By this we mean that users should be able to submit their information easily, and these forms should be collected within your website for quick follow-up.
CRO vs SEO
Although the two strategies CRO and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) often intersect, they are located at different stages of the marketing funnel.
SEO focuses on optimizing content for search engines, on how Google's robots read, interpret, and rank your site. This occurs at the top of the marketing funnel, trying to get visitors to "pass through the digital gates".
Next, the CRO takes over in the middle of the funnel and examines how people interact with your site. It’s something like: “now that they’re here, how can we convince the most visitors possible to take the desired action, whether it’s downloading, registering, or purchasing a product?”
There is a natural synergy between the two, since optimizing keywords and website architecture simultaneously enhances the user experience for visitors. In fact, 53% of mobile users leave a website if the site speed (a key SEO ranking signal) takes more than 3 seconds to load.
5 ways CRO benefits SEO.
Conversion rate optimization provides unique benefits when it comes to SEO. Both the SEO expert and the companies they work with experience these benefits.
Although not necessarily related to attracting organic traffic to the website or ranking on a search engine results page, Conversion Rate Optimization has distinct benefits for SEO. These include:
Improved knowledge of customers
Conversion rate optimization can help you better understand your key audience and find the language or messages that best suit their needs. 💬
Conversion rate optimization focuses on finding the right customers for your business. Because clearly, obtaining more people is not good for your business if they are not the right type of people.
Improved Return on Investment (ROI)
A higher conversion rate means getting more out of the resources you have. By studying how to make the most of your lead generation efforts, you’ll get more conversions without having to attract more potential customers. 🔄
Better scalability
While the size of your audience may not scale as your business grows, your conversion rate allows you to expand without running out of resources or potential customers. Audiences aren’t infinite, so by converting more browsers into buyers, you’ll be able to grow your business without running out of potential customers. 📈
Better user experience
When users feel comfortable with your website, they tend to stay. Conversion rate studies what works on your site; if you take what works and amplify it, you’ll achieve a better user experience and a strong digital identity, even turning some of those users into brand ambassadors. 👩
More confidence
For a user to share their credit card or email info, they must really trust the site. Your website is your main sales agent. Like an in-house sales team, your site must be professional, courteous, and be ready to answer all your customer’s questions.
The importance of conversion rate optimization.
The beauty of conversion rate optimization is that it focuses on doing a better job of turning existing visitors into paying customers, rather than trying to acquire new visitors.
Since converting existing visitors is more cost-effective than directing more traffic to your site, optimizing your conversion rate allows you to make the most of your current investments by redirecting your budget to the channels that achieve the best results.
This means that you should spend time optimizing all the channels (email, paid search, social media) that direct traffic to your website to make sure it is reaching the right people with the correct messages. When they arrive at your site, the probability of them bouncing due to misleading offers or unfulfilled expectations should be very low.
The different channels require different optimization techniques. You can try everything, from newsletter subject lines to Facebook ad text, or AdWords call-to-action.
Since new ideas regarding customer behavior and optimization tactics emerge every day, conversion rate optimization is never truly finished: it’s an ongoing and permanent process that must be adopted and carried out frequently.
Conversion rate optimization not only empowers businesses to understand how customers think, use, and perceive your brand and offerings but also exposes them to an incredible range of data to shape your future business strategies. Conversion rate is not just another tool to improve your brand’s online performance, but “the” tool that will set you apart.
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