Are you looking to improve the conversion rate of your website? If yes, then you are at the right place.
Getting your target audience on your website doesn’t hold much value unless they convert and take the desired action that you expect. It can not only increase the sales of your website offerings but also improve your authority in your industry.
In this comprehensive guide about conversion rate optimization, you will get to know about the following:-
- Meaning of conversion rate optimization
- Essence of conversion and their types
- A way to know whether your conversion rate is good or not
- A method to calculate your website’s conversion rate
- Significance of conversion rate optimization
- Your website’s components that must be optimized for conversion
- Ways to boost the conversion rate of your website
So, let’s dive in now to know everything about conversion rate optimization.
What does conversion rate optimization mean?
Conversion rate optimization(CRO) is a step-by-step path to improve the probability of your website visitors taking the desired action. It can be your users’ buying your products or services, submitting a form, subscribing to your newsletter, or any other beneficial engagement.
In this methodology, the user behaviour of your website’s visitors is analyzed. This involves the following:-
- Tracking how your website audience navigates your site.
- Solving the issues they face.
- Understanding the actions they take on your website.
Before understanding CRO, you should first know about its basics!
What is a conversion?
Conversion simply means when your website visitor finishes a task that you expect them to do on your website.
For example, if we refer to the products listed on an e-commerce website, conversion can mean the purchase of your products by your website’s visitors.
There are two types of conversions:-
Micro Conversions: These types of conversions are smaller actions that your website visitors take on your website. They are important, but they don’t have many advantages for your website.
For example:-
- Sign up for your website’s email list to get the pdf of an ebook in return.
- A potential customer adds your website’s listed products to their cart.
- Your website’s visitor clicks on a call to action.
- The section of your target audience watches a video providing information about your website’s offerings.
Macro Conversions: These types of conversions are very important for your website. The actions users take under the macro conversions are for the main purpose of your website.
For example:-
- A customer buys the products or services available on your website.
- A potential lead requests a quote or wants a demo for your website’s offerings.
- Your website visitor downloads an exceptional asset from your website.
- Your prospective client contacts the sales department of your organization through your website.
How can you know whether your conversion rate is good or not?
To ascertain whether your conversion rate is good or not isn’t easy. Your website’s conversion rate depends upon a lot of factors like the following:-
- Industry
- User demographics
- Goals
- Niche
- Traffic
If your website’s conversion rate tracking is lower than you’d expected or below your industry average and your competition, then it certainly isn’t good.
So, you must optimize your website for conversion. However, before the optimization part, you need to know the exact conversion rate of your website.
How does one calculate the conversion rate of their website?
You can calculate the conversion rate of your website by following the below method:-
To calculate the conversion rate, you should divide the number of conversions by the total visitors and then multiply the output by 100 to obtain the percentage.
If you know what conversion means for your website, then you can easily calculate the conversion rate of your website.
For example,
Imagine that you have a niche e-commerce website selling toys for small kids. On average, 10,000 visitors head to your website in a month. Out of those, only 421 buy the toys listed on your website on average. Then, the e-commerce conversion rate of your website will be 4.21%.
Now that you know how to calculate the conversion rate, it’s time to understand the significance of CRO.
What is the significance of the conversion rate optimization?
Conversion rate optimization is highly significant for a lot of reasons. Some of those reasons are listed below:-
- By optimizing your conversion rate, you can generate a lot more sales on your website without spending that much money on it. It can lower your customer acquisition cost significantly.
- It enhances your website to engage more visitors, which in turn increases their probability of visiting your website again. This also increases their chances of becoming your paying and regular customers in the future.
- You can get the maximum return on investment(ROI) for the amount of money that you spend on marketing. Moreover, the more revenue you generate for the sales of your products and services, the more profit you will earn as well.
- It can significantly increase the average order value(AOV) for your website’s offerings. This means that when your customers purchase on your website, they buy a lot more products in a single order. Their chances of buying your website’s high-priced products also increase due to it.
- By optimizing for conversion, you can also understand the needs of your website visitors. This can help in knowing the website experience that makes them convert better. These insights can help you to improve upon your customer personas. In the long run, it will attract those visitors who can convert more easily.
- With the help of CRO, you can add a lot of triggers throughout your website, which will increase your website visitors’ chances of conversion. This will make your website visitor-friendly and improve your sales. It will definitely reduce the time spent by your visitors to convert.
Which components of a website need to be optimized for conversion?
The components of a website that need to be optimized for conversion are as follows:-
Home Page: The home page of a website must be optimized for conversion. It’s because the home page not only makes a first impression on your website visitors but helps them navigate your website. Moreover, it also helps you to retain those visitors to your website.
Landing Pages: The main purpose of a landing page is to compel your website visitor to take the action which you want. In fact, they have the most excellent conversion rate benchmark for signup forms. So, landing pages must be optimized for conversion.
Blog: A website’s blog is a very big opportunity to drive immense conversion on your website. Along with providing information, knowledge, and insights about your industry on your blog, it can be used for conversion as well. Your helpful, reader-specific, and in-depth blog posts can convert readers into potential leads. That’s why special emphasis must be given to your blog for CRO.
Pricing Pages: A website’s pricing page is a crucial component of your website that should be optimized for conversion. The reason behind this is that you can either convert your website’s visitors into paying customers or even lose them forever if you don’t optimize it.
How can you boost the conversion rate of your website?
You can improve your website’s conversion rate by following the ways given below:-
Implement A/B testing for your landing page optimization.
Landing pages are a crucial part of a website and more so for conversion rate optimization. That’s why you should do effective A/B testing or split testing to find out the best style of content and design for your visitors.
With the help of A/B testing variations, you can swiftly and smoothly test distinct parts of your website. It will provide you with insights about which elements and versions of your website your potential leads respond the best to.
Include messages to your best-performing web pages.
You should add a chatbot to your website to provide support and help to your website visitors. If you want to enhance your conversion rate, then you must add them to your pricing and product pages.
It will save your website visitors time, and they will get the information they want easily. Another option is to make your chatbots highly actionable for improved CRO.
Optimize your website’s blog posts that have high impressions.
Publishing great blog posts is a sure-shot way of boosting conversions. You can also optimize your website’s existing blog posts that are performing well to improve your conversion rate.
To do this, you first have to find out those blog posts that have a good amount of web traffic but are not that high converting and then optimize them.
Alongside this, you must also look at the present high-converting blog posts on your website and optimize them for the future as well.
Use retargeting to get visitors back on your website.
The bitter reality is that a lot of individuals who visit your website won’t take the desired action that you want them to take. So, you can retarget them on different platforms and re-engage them again on your website.
You can do so by tracking those visitors who visited your site and then showing them ads on other websites that they visit next. This will get your visitors back on your website and improve your CRO.
Have clear and textual CTAs in your blog posts.
Nowadays, most readers get past banner-like CTAs placed at the end of a blog post because they ignore the countless banners they see each day. That’s the reason you should add clear and text-based CTAs in your blog post.
Furthermore, you should place your CTAs strategically throughout your blog post because it’s not necessary for your readers to stay till the end. So, include text-based CTAs in your blog posts to boost your conversion rate.
Wrapping Up
You can improve your website’s conversion rate if you understand each component of CRO thoroughly. Along with this, if you follow the time-tested and future-ready approaches for CRO, then you are almost guaranteed to reap its rewards.
So, first, understand how CRO can be implemented for your website and then do the same. By doing so, your website’s conversion rate will improve for sure.