When we talk about improving your website performance, getting more customers, and increasing sales on your website, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is an important concept we need to learn and a vital part of the work that needs to be done. It is a key factor to the improvement of your website and search engine rankings. Optimizing conversion rates plays an crucial role in how much of your traffic will turn into your customers and sales, and how fast your business will grow.
Getting high volume of traffic is always what web masters want to achieve on their own websites. But do you realize, the volume of converted traffic on a site plays a even more important role than the volume of traffic does, especially when you are running an eCommerce website, because it ties to the revenue and profitability of your business.
In this article, I will show you some helpful tips, practices, and advanced techniques that you can incorporate when getting started to improve the conversion rate on your own site.
You are also welcomed to download my eBook ‘Conversion Rate Optimization – The Way to Improve Your Online Sales’ to get a deeper insight as well as a lot more details on how to improve your conversion rates at a strategic level.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
In simple words, it is the name given to a collection of processes and techniques deployed in order to increase the number of converted customers on your website. Converted customers are customers who take an action on your website i.e. download an item, buy a product or subscribe to your services. Contrary to the idea of doing everything to increase the number of visitors on your website, CRO focuses on working with strategies that help you convert website traffic/visitors into your customers, sales and leads. It is not hard to understand, what good is high volume of traffic if it does not convert into revenue for a business online?
Why Is Conversion Rate Optimization So Important For A Website Improvement And Development?
Conversion rate optimization is essential for business, because this is what contributes to its sales and income. Let’s say, if you invested on Search Engine Optimization to increase traffic on your site, CRO is the subsequent process you must get involved for the better results.
The purpose of CRO is to convert traffic/visitors on your site into customers or leads, and eventually grow the sales. When you open a brick-and-mortar store, you don’t just want people to come in, look at things and leave. You want them to come in and purchase stuff. Similar to those traditional business, CRO focuses on the “buy stuff” part of your online store.
11 Proven Strategies to Improve Your Website Conversion Rate Optimization
In this article, I will introduce 11 proven strategies which will help you effectively improve your conversion rate and get better results with your sales online. Once start working with these strategies, you will soon see the noticeable progress in your conversion rates optimization.
1. Improve Your Call-To-Action Buttons
Sometimes everything is right with your website but the call to action button is not appealing and enticing enough for your potential prospects to click on. The aspects of a button that have to be worked on in order to improve conversions are as follows:
- Button Color
- Button Size
- Special Effects
- Button Text
- Button Location
- Space Around the button
You have to try out different combinations and find out the one that yield the best results.
Apply the 3 rules listed below to make your call-to-action buttons stand out.
- Give them a contrasting color to the overall website color theme.
- Keep the button above the fold.
- Give blank space around the page for a button to stick out and look clickable.
2. Improve Website Aesthetics
Here are some important rules to follow when enhancing your website aesthetics.
- Make good use of the white space.
- Go with simple, clean website designs to avoid distracting your website visitors.
- Use high quality images, graphics, large typeface and soothing background colors.
- Keep information available at one glance.
3. Make Your Website Mobile
Make your website mobile compatible by either having a dedicated mobile website developed or going for a responsive website design. It shouldn’t have been a surprise for you to learn that mobile internet users has surpassed computer users since 2016, and this trend is keep going and increases the urgency for business to make their website mobile friendly.
If your website can not engage well your mobile visitors, you are driving away a significant portion of potential sale, and your search engine ranking is impacted too. Professional web design should incorporate the best mobile SEO practices to benefit from mobile traffic for web masters.
4. Website Speed Analysis and Improvements
Page load time influences your website conversion. The faster your website loads, the higher conversion rate it will get. Statistics shows one second delay of your site’s loading could result in 7% deduction in conversion. Web users usually make up their mind to leave or stay on a website within 3 seconds. If your website takes longer than that to load, you will soon find them on your competitor’s website.
There are various free tools you can use to test the loading speed of your website, like Google Pagespeed Insights, Pingdom, Performance Budget Calculator, etc. You can optimize your website speed at different levels with many different ways. The room for site speed improvement is unlimited. You may need to review your whole website and optimize the site to get its load speed to an acceptable level.
5. Analyzing Visitor Behavior and Optimize Your Website Accordingly
Get insights into your customers behavior and optimize for better results. There are many aspects to look into when analyzing visitor behavior. It includes but not limited to:
- Time spent on a web page
- Popular sources of traffic
- Web page abandoned the fastest
- Ordering process metrics
- Checkout abandon rate
- Shares, Likes, and reviews on popular content
- Heat maps that show which part of the website visitors most looked at
There are some great tools paid or free that you can use to track and analyze your website visitor behavior, like Google Analytics, CrazyEgg, Yahoo Web Analytics, etc.
6. Listening to Your Customers
Are you focusing too much on your own products or services and forgetting to care about what your customer really want? Being a good listener is a great way to get feedback, build relationship and trust with your customers and get ahead of your competitors.
There are many ways to listen to your customers. You can conduct surveys using online questionnaires to know what visitors like or dislike about your website, provide proactive live chat or feedback forms on your website, or use social network platforms to get feedback.
7. Optimize Your Landing Pages
Don’t focus merely on refining your home page. Give special attention to your landing pages. Research shows increasing number of landing pages from 10 to 15 can bring a company more than 50% growth in leads or sales.
The following are 5 helpful practices to optimize landing page.
- Create compelling and convincing flow of information that inspires visitors to take action on your landing page.
- Keep landing page relevant to the anchor texts and posts from where the visitors are coming.
- Make your landing page concise and to-the-point.
- Improve page load speed. As we discussed above, your page speed is a deal breaker. Speeding up your landing page is always a major step in CRO.
- Using high quality images to create visual appeal, grab attention, and bring out emotions to make customers take action on your page.
8. Improve Your Checkout Process
If you see many customers abandoning your website at the checkout process, see which particular page of the checkout they are abandoning on. Maybe it’s the part where they want to make the payment and they are taken to a third party website to do this that’s making them uncomfortable.
The following 4 ways will help you effectively improve your checkout process.
- Install SSL certificates on your websites so customers feel safe while giving information.
- Try avoiding third party payment processors that take visitors to their websites.
- Use easy forms and reduce the number of fields to be filled.
- Up-sell and cross on “Thank You” page.
9. Research and Analyze Competitors for Better Optimization Results
Knowing about competition is a critical learning process that can help you identify the strategy and techniques applied by your competitors, and find out what you are doing wrong and where to improve.
You can visit your competitors websites, track their traffic and ranking, analyze their performance and strategy, try out their products, and more. It is always important to understand your competitors for the sake of your improvement and the success of your business in every respect.
10. Implement Videos
Video is currently the most popular form of content on the internet today. Videos are engaging but the best ones that get attention are up to 90 seconds long. You can even make videos interactive so visitors can take immediate action. Keep curiosity alive during the video and incentivize the viewing for visitors so they are motivated to watch the full video.
11. Incorporate Customer Reviews on Product Pages
The easiest way to sell your products and earn trust is to incorporate real customer reviews on your product pages. According to the statistics from BrighLocal during a survey in 2014, 88% customers have as much trust in online reviews as recommendations they receive from people around them.
Conversion rate optimization is an ongoing work where progress is made every day. If you feel you have already invested a lot of money in other areas but your business has not seen the growth you were expecting, it is time for you to focus on conversion rate optimization.
If you want to get deeper insights on conversion rate optimization and learn more strategies to get your conversion rate improved, please subscribe my eBook – CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION - THE WAY TO INCREASE YOUR ONLINE SALE.
