The Beginners’ Guide to Conversion Rate Optimisation

Businesses, marketers, content writers, designers, and SEO experts are all turning their attention to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). In this guide, we’ll explore what CRO is, why it’s crucial, and how you can improve your website’s CRO.

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation and why is it so important?

CRO is the practice of increasing the percentage of visitors to a website who take a desired action—such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or filling out a form. Instead of solely focusing on driving more traffic, CRO helps you make the most out of your existing traffic.

By optimizing your website’s conversion rate, you can:

• Grow your business faster
• Improve the return on investment (ROI) from your marketing efforts
• Increase overall profits

Even small improvements in your conversion rate can lead to significant gains. For instance, if your conversion rate increases from 2% to 3%, you’re boosting sales by 50% without spending more on traffic acquisition.

Where does Search Engine Optimisation fit in with Conversion Rate Optimisation?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and CRO have become increasingly intertwined. Both aim to engage visitors and convert them into customers. Here are some tactics that benefit both SEO and CRO:

• Meta Descriptions: Craft compelling meta descriptions that accurately reflect the page content.
• Headings: Use clear and engaging headings.
• Social Proof: Include customer reviews and testimonials to build trust.
• Content: Write informative and readable content tailored to your audience.
• Internal Linking: Use a strong internal linking structure to improve navigation.
• Landing Pages: Optimise landing pages for better user experience and conversions.
• Alt Tags: Write alt tags that enhance user experience rather than just for keyword stuffing.
• SEO Titles: Create unique, clickable SEO titles for each page.

Your SEO meta titles are the first opportunity for conversion, especially for organic website traffic, as your meta titles and meta descriptions determine whether someone clicks through to your website or one of the other nine sites listed on the same page.

Try this:

To check your meta titles, type site:yourdomain.com into Google, e.g. site:seo-plus.co.uk, and you should see a list of results that show pages from your site, complete with meta titles and descriptions.

• Are any of the SEO titles the same?
  If so, change them so that each page has a unique title.
• Do your titles look like – company name | keyword | keyword?
  Although this isn’t technically wrong, you may find that a headline-style meta title is more clickable.
• Do the keywords people will be using to search for the page appear in the SEO titles?
  Using your main keyword near the beginning of the title could make a big difference.
• Is your company name at the beginning of all your meta titles?
  Try swapping it to the end and monitor whether it influences your rankings in any way.
• Are all your SEO titles approximately 55 characters in length?
  Longer SEO titles can get cut off in searches.

Measuring Your Current Conversion Rate

To be successful, Conversion Rate Optimisation needs a methodical, almost scientific approach. Where businesses often go wrong is that they guess what elements of their website might be lowering their conversion rate and make changes based on little more than a hunch. Sometimes they get lucky, but often they don’t.

Having done a lot of research into CRO over the years, I believe that you need to adopt a strategic approach that starts with understanding your numbers.

My recommendation would be to start with Google Analytics or whatever analytics system you use to monitor your website traffic. Make sure the date settings are for the last 30 days rather than a single day or week, so that you have a good overview of your traffic across its various peaks and troughs throughout the month.

Here are some key metrics to track:

• Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page.
• Exit Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave from a specific page.
• Average Time on Site: The average duration visitors spend on your website.
• Unique Visitors: The number of distinct individuals visiting your site.
• Pages Per Visit: The average number of pages viewed per visit.
• Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors who complete the desired action.

To calculate your conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the number of unique visitors. For example, if you have 500 visitors and 25 conversions, your conversion rate is 5%.

This gives you your starting point. Now you need to plan how to improve your conversion rate by at least one or two percent, if not more.

Making a Conversion Rate Optimisation plan

If your conversion funnel isn’t working – i.e. the route people need to take through your website to become customers – then it’s essential that you address this before thinking about driving more visitors to your website.

My recommendation is to concentrate on attracting quality, relevant visitors who will buy from you over a large number of visitors who don’t need or see the value in what you offer. When you have relevant website traffic, you have a much higher chance of not only converting visitors into customers but also turning them into ambassadors for your brand who will rave about what you do.

Creating a CRO Plan

1. Analyse Your Data: Understand your current metrics and what they indicate. For example, start with the numbers above and try to understand what they mean before you take any action
2. Form a Hypothesis: Identify potential issues, such as a complicated checkout process. For example, come up with a theory/hypothesis based on these numbers, e.g. people are clicking on the ‘Add to basket’ button but leaving the site without buying because they’re finding the checkout process on your e-commerce site too complicated
3. Test Your Hypothesis: Use A/B testing to compare different versions of a webpage and see which performs better.
4. Implement and Monitor: Use the winning version and continue to monitor its performance.

In his excellent article about converting Google visitors into customers, John Paul Mains from Click Laboratory explains the same process but in fewer steps:

• Step 1:  Understand the unique needs of your visitors from search engines
• Step 2:  Give them the content they came for AND solve their problem
• Step 3:  Test visitor interactions and behaviours
• Step 4:  Constantly evolve and repeat the previous steps

CRO isn’t a one-time approach but should instead be an ongoing process of tweaking and revising your website. What converts well on one website may not work on another, and your successful conversion methods may tail off as web trends ebb and flow. The best thing is to keep experimenting.

Know your customers

Data and stats aren’t enough for really effective CRO. Qualitative feedback from your customers about their experiences of using your website or buying your products/services will provide you with valuable information too.

Early in the planning process, I recommend building up visitor and buyer ‘persona’ profiles to understand who your customers are and what motivates them. Social media is a fantastic place to start with this.

In Google Analytics under the Acquisitions>Overview section, you can see the main sources of traffic to your website. You can then click on each of these sources for a more detailed breakdown of where your traffic has come from. Alternatively, you can click on Acquisitions>Social Media>Overview for a breakdown of your social media traffic.

Where does most of your social media traffic come from?

For many businesses, Facebook is the number one source of social media referrals. This is helpful because Facebook’s business page insights can tell you the gender, age and location of your typical fans, as well as the content from you that they like, comment on and share. You can even click on people who have engaged with your content and see what they share on their profiles in terms of other businesses they like or their hobbies and interests.

Customer surveys

You might also want to try sending a survey out to your existing customers, offering a gift voucher or similar as a prize for taking part. Ask them what they need or want to see on your website, even what brands they love, or how important different things are to them when purchasing your products, e.g. price, choice, customer care, and so on.

You could also ask for feedback about their buying experience.

Try asking a question like: What were the most important factors that convinced you to place an order with (your company name)?

• Do you notice any patterns?
• Do any benefits get mentioned in many responses? E.g. Selection, convenience, price, free shipping, free returns
• Did your customers mention any hurdles or things you offer that helped them overcome those hurdles? Free returns is often cited because it takes away the risks of buying online.
• Are you making things like free returns prominent enough on your website?

HelloFresh is a company that does this well. At various stages in the buying journey, HelloFresh sends out short surveys to understand how their customers are feeling about their overall service, the quality of the HelloFresh boxes, and the website. The emails are relevant to the customer’s most recent contact with HelloFresh, short and warmly worded, stressing that the feedback will help them give the customer the best possible service.

The more you can learn about your customers, the easier it will be to develop a website that meets their needs.

Another option is to use an on-site survey that asks customers if anything prevented them from placing their order. Qualaroo is one company that offers on-site surveys designed to help you understand the customer experience as it happens.

You might also want to consider using an ‘exit overlay’ on your screen. You’ve probably come across these a lot recently but if you aren’t familiar with the term, an exit overlay is a pop-up that appears on the screen when the visitor is about to navigate away from your website. This reminds the visitor of your main offering or prompts them one last time to convert to a customer. Here’s an example of the exit overlay used by Get Rooster:

Is CRO all about design?

The common assumption that CRO is all about design can damage your conversion rate. Turning visitors into customers isn’t just about the design elements of a website. Yes, making a call to action more prominent or changing the colour of your ‘Buy now’ button may lead to more sales but unless you understand why customers are acting the way they do on your website, these changes may not be enough on their own.

Try taking some time out to look at your website as though you have never seen it before or, better yet, ask a friend or colleague to do it for you. Ask the following questions:

• What is the first thing a visitor sees on the page?
• Is it distracting or does it help the visitor move towards converting?
• Do the graphics/images support the main message of the page?
• Is your message clear?
• How easy is it to see and understand the call to action?
• Do visitors understand what they need to do next?
• Can visitors see the value of taking action?
• Will they gain more than they will lose, e.g. is what you’re selling worth more than the cost of the item and postage because of its use or quality?
• If a visitor found a page on Google, would the meta description reflect what they find when they arrive on your website?
• Is there anything on the page that might create uncertainty or lack of trust about buying?
• Is there anything missing from the page, e.g. reviews or a money-back guarantee, that would boost customer confidence?
• Is there any reason for a visitor to take action straightaway?
• Is the website easy to use on a mobile phone?
• Are you showing that security is important to you, especially if you have an e-commerce site?
• Is the payment process clear?
• Can visitors find the navigation, contact page, and the checkout easily?

There’s a fantastic free service called Web User Testing where a complete stranger will navigate your website for the first time for approximately five minutes while recording their observations about the usability and content. This can give you some valuable insights into the first impressions your website creates.

Carrying out your split tests

CRO is an ongoing process. Regularly test and revise your website to keep up with changing trends and user behaviors. Use tools like Visual Website Optimizer or Optimizely to conduct your tests.

For a helpful guide to creating, running and analysing A/B split tests head on over to our split testing guide here

If you have any questions about CRO or you’d like to share your CRO journey so far, I’d love to hear from you in the Comments below.

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