What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Jake Sheridan
Oct 4, 2021

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Most marketing teams today are focused on increasing traffic to websites and social media pages in the hopes that this traffic will convert into quality leads for salespeople to close. The cycle continues, and the business expands.

Although this is an oversimplified version of the conventional marketing playbook, it is applicable to the majority of organizations and marketing teams.

But there’s something missing — a strategy that few marketing teams focus on, despite the fact that it drives firms that do toward long-term, sustainable success and growth: Increasing the value of existing traffic and leads (versus entirely new traffic).

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes into play here.

This article will teach you what CRO is, why your business should focus on boosting your conversion rate, how to improve your conversion rate, and everything you need to know about CRO versus SEO.

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Conversion rate optimization is a marketing optimization technique that uses a framework to enhance the percentage of visitors that fulfill the objective of a website. Conversion optimization examines user behavior and focuses on what drives a certain market group to interact in a particular way with various marketing components.

Conversion Rate Optimization is concerned with convincing more of your website visitors to perform the desired action on a webpage, website, or within a campaign.

A conversion optimization strategy helps you to improve the number of highly qualified leads, increase revenue, decrease acquisition expenses, get more value from your present leads and potential customers, and simply grow better.

A number of conversions might occur across your website (e.g. homepage, pricing page, blog, landing pages, etc.). As a business, you want your website to be built in such a manner that website visitors are converted into paying customers. With so much potential in various sections of your website, you must optimize each spot to increase conversions.

There is a gold mine of CRO data in Google Analytics.

At a high level, the CRO strategy process entails:

  • Conducting a site-specific heuristic evaluation
  • Conducting quantitative research, conducting qualitative research, and analyzing user experience and behavior
  • Performing a competitive analysis
  • Prioritizing site issues and developing a conversion metrics roadmap for your website (what pages need to be fixed)
  • Developing a hypothesis for testing
  • Developing new designs in response to the testing hypothesis
  • Carrying out A/B tests (or multivariate testing)
  • Examining the results

Why Is Conversion Rate Optimization Important?

CRO provides several advantages for businesses. It all boils down to improving the efficiency of your company’s sales process. If you use CRO marketing effectively, you can tailor your website content to clients who are most likely to buy your services. Some of the advantages of CRO are:

  • It helps your website rank better in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPS). CRO is all about satisfying your customers’ requirements, and Google gives higher prominence to websites that provide what customers seek.

According to a study by Hubspot, websites with not less than 40 landing pages generate 12X the number of leads. And this data emphasizes the issue even further. Companies that are the most flexible in terms of creating several landing pages get 1200 percent more leads than those that just have one.

  • You have the ability to optimize your company’s marketing ROI. CRO focuses on maximizing the utilization of your company’s resources so that it costs less and produces better results than other methods of increasing sales.
  • CRO enables you to comprehend your customers’ habits, trends, and demands. To effectively sell to the proper customers for your company, you must first create a picture of who those clients are.
  • You may get a competitive advantage over your competitors in your sector. If your rival is attempting to boost sales by increasing traffic or expenditure without employing CRO, you will have the benefit of seeming more capable of meeting the demands of your clients.
  • It makes it simpler for clients to purchase from you. A CRO strategy seeks to eliminate everything that may make it difficult for a client to conduct business with you. You don’t want anything to stand in the way of a sale, ultimately leading to a higher conversion rate.

Conversion Rate Optimization FAQ

What is Conversion Rate Optimization in SEO?

SEO is the practice of attracting quality website traffic using methods such as keyword research, backlinks, and meta descriptions. SEO is a well-known term. In fact, it was the most popular marketing strategy in 2019. By attracting customers who are already interested in your goods, you can utilize SEO to bring a lot of traffic to your website. But how can you convert that traffic into sales?

That is where conversion rate optimization (CRO) enters the picture.

What exactly is CRO?

It is the practice of directing the greatest number of people to your company’s website to complete a certain task. You may use CRO to ensure that your website’s usability is enhanced in such a manner that it is appealing and simple for clients to conduct business with you.

While SEO focuses on increasing traffic to your website, CRO focuses on moving qualified clients through a sales funnel. CRO attempts to maximize the number of website visits you already have. While many businesses employ both at the same time, CRO may significantly boost a company’s bottom line.

How do you optimize conversion rate?

  1. Insert testimonials and reviews as needed
    Nobody likes to be the first to try a new product or service. So, by offering testimonials and/or evaluations from previous clients, you can set their minds at ease. Here’s an example of a customer quote:

“Loganix has a tremendous reputation in the world of SEO, and when SEO nerds praise a company, it really means something.” Chris Dreyer – Rankings.io

  1. Include a pop-up on your website
    Sumo’s research found that the average conversion rate for all pop-ups is 3.09 percent. However, if you do it correctly, you may reach the top 10% of pop-ups, which have a 9.28 percent conversion rate on average.

This single adjustment will skyrocket your conversion rate.

  1. Include an effective call-to-action
    A call to action (CTA) is an essential component of every piece of information. A CTA moves you one step closer to a conversion. Consider the following while developing an effective CTA:
  • Make certain that it is actionable. Actionable terms should always be included in CTAs. “Learn more” and “Download now” are both excellent examples.
  • The advantage to the reader should be obvious. A CTA should make it obvious how the conversion will benefit them in order to promote a convert. Will they be eligible for a free trial? Perhaps an e-book? Make sure your reader understands what they will benefit from converting.
  • The CTA should be easily accessible. Whether your CTA is towards the center or at the conclusion of your article, make it stand out and easy for the reader to locate.
    CTAs are an excellent method to boost the CRO of your content; but, they must appear natural and helpful to your audience.
  1. Run A/B tests on your headlines
    A landing page’s headline may make or break it. In fact, if you adopt the wrong approach, some readers will stop reading. They’ll just press the “back” button and vanish.

According to Copyblogger, 8 out of 10 people will read the headline text, but just 2 out of 10 will read the body of the content. Consider that. Eight out of every ten visitors to your landing page or product page may not read past the headline.

When A/B testing (also called split testing) your title, try out different versions such as:

  • Length\sTone
  • Statistics are used.
  • The use of numerals
  1. Make the first interaction simple
    Most importantly, ensure that converting is genuinely simple for your customer. Instead of requesting the completion of a form along with a phone number, request for just an email address.

From there, you can design whatever path makes the most sense for that specific customer to take, whether it’s sending them testimonials or presenting them with the right messaging and extra content like relevant whitepapers, case studies, or blog articles.

The easier you make the first step, the more likely your visitor will act and follow through to the conclusion because of the enhanced customer experience.

Don’t forget to increase the prominence of the “Buy now” or “Add to cart” components on product pages.

  1. Page Speed should be prioritized
    Customers demand a lot from websites especially eCommerce sites in today’s digital environment. Because it is so simple to buy things online, even the smallest irritation may drive a potential customer into the arms of your competition. Slow-loading or difficult-to-navigate company websites might have a negative influence on your conversion goals.

It is critical that your website loads quickly and is simple for customers to navigate. Also, if you don’t have a mobile version of your site, it would be a good idea to hire a developer or a software outsourcing company to create one for you. The goal of the website conversion rate optimization process is to make it as simple as possible for clients to do business with you and reduce bounce rates.

You should concentrate on decreasing the rate of shopping cart abandonment. In this scenario, the checkout page must be extensively checked to ensure that no technical issues are present.

When it comes to discovering some of these issues, a Site Audit is a fantastic place to start. At Loganix, we have detailed analytics tools that will provide you an overall Site Audit as well as areas for improvement, such as how many pages have a sluggish loading time.

  1. Consider including a chatbot
    With more than 80% of customer contacts handled without human agents by 2022, you should think about investing in a chatbot platform. Chatbots are meant to receive conversational input via text or voice and respond in natural language.

Chatbots are used for a variety of purposes, the most common of which is customer service. This implies that if you have a customer that needs a few more answers before purchasing your product, a chatbot might be a wonderful way to guide them further down the conversion funnel.

What is CRO vs SEO?

As business owners seek to increase their digital presence, they continue to use online marketing tactics aimed at improving their search engine results page (SERP) ranks. However, these do not always produce the desired outcomes. Some business owners and digital marketers make the mistake of focusing on rankings rather than conversions.

The misalignment of search engine optimization (SEO) with conversion rate optimization (CRO) results in inefficient methods with little commercial benefit. CRO is one of the most efficient methods of boosting online income. You risk losing significant chances for your site if it is left out of the equation or is not tied to SEO services methods. These possibilities might vary from greater sales to enhanced client retention.

Learning how SEO and CRO are intertwined is critical for your long-term company strategy.

The breakdown in the case of SEO and CRO
The success of your internet business is determined by how successfully your tactics interact with one another. When your SEO strategy is primarily focused on increasing your discoverability and rating on SERPs, you are more likely to fail to convert quality leads into loyal clients. Alternatively, relying only on CRO frequently leads to a failure to increase your existing client base, resulting in a limited pool of new customers.

The belief that SEO and CRO are mutually exclusive
CRO’s ultimate objective is to convert existing website visits into buyers. This is achieved through a variety of methods, including tailored landing pages and appealing CTAs.

However, restricting your CRO approach to these implies that you will only be able to convert leads from a subset of visitors. You will fail to create valuable leads if you do not have methods in place to reach out to new potential customers. A devoted client base will not be enough to propel your company forward.

The ultimate objective of SEO is to drive more visitors to your website. This is done using a variety of white label SEO strategies, including a well-designed website, authoritative content, and locally relevant keywords. However, if there is no direction on your web pages, a number of visitors will most likely depart without contributing to your company’s bottom line other than raising click-through rates. This results in a situation in which you have a lot of visitors yet your conversion rates are low.

Some SEO strategies have little to no effect on CRO, and vice versa. Thinking they are mutually incompatible, on the other hand, produces an imbalance in your digital marketing approach. When done correctly, the two have a tremendous influence on each other.

Don’t forget: check out the other definitions (over 200) in our growing SEO glossary.

Begin Working on Your Conversion Rate Optimization Today

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of Conversion Rate Optimization.

As marketing professionals and businesses place a greater emphasis on measuring, affecting, and enhancing the collective value of marketing channels in addition to the directly ascribed worth of them in isolation, marketing becomes more useful and influential.

CRO has a greater ROI than SEO and will continue to grow even after the project is completed. New sales generated by CRO are more lucrative than new sales generated by SEO since marketing expenditures are not increased or potentially reduced. And, by raising the total conversion rate to make all future SEO investments more successful, it’s clear which service produces the highest ROI.

But, once again, SEO is critical to any online success, therefore the ideal answer is to invest in CRO services first, followed by a fresh SEO strategy.

Hand off the toughest tasks in SEO, PPC, and content without compromising quality

Explore Services

Written by Jake Sheridan on October 4, 2021

Founder of Sheets for Marketers, I nerd out on automating parts of my work using Google Sheets. At Loganix I build products, and content marketing. There’s nothing like a well deserved drink after a busy day spreadsheeting.