Most websites these days are heavily focussed on common elements such as improving website rankings, driving traffic and lowering bounce rates. Although these metrics are relevant to a website’s performance, there is one element that is often overlooked by marketers and business owners in the lifecycle of a website: CRO or otherwise known as “Conversion Rate Optimisation”.
What is CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation)?
In a nutshell, CRO is the method of employing digital marketing strategies to help convert visitors into leads and in turn, convert leads into customers.
While there are literally hundreds of different strategies and methods to help improve and implement CRO, they all tend to fall into the following categories :
- A/B Testing: Commonly referred to as “Split Testing“. This refers to running “tests” on your website that compares one version of a landing page against another version. This can mean anything from changing the current wording on an offer to altering the colour of text or buttons.
- CTA’s (Call To Action): Considered to be buttons, links, banners and general marketing tools or any other element that users interact with on a website. They are essentially there to help a website turn traffic into business – In this post, we list six effective ways.
Six CRO Tips to Boost Your Organic Traffic
As mentioned above, generating a lot of traffic to your website is a great thing. But, there is simply more to it than that.
Take a real-life store on the high-street (as this can scenario can almost someone window shopping).
Your store attracts plenty of customers walking past and peering into your shop window, but when it comes to the crunch, if no one is actually going into the store to buy something, then this can repercussions on your businesses’ ability to carry on functioning as staff have to be paid and other running costs.
The same goes for a website, even if you generate a large amount of visits to your site, its meaningless without this making a profit.
Luckily, there are several conversion rate optimisation (CRO) tips and tricks available that can help you draw traffic that converts and benefits your business. No matter what niche you’re in or how well-established your brand is, the following tips can help.
1. Implement Strategic CTAs
As highlighted above, implementing a carefully thought-out call to action is what can really get people to convert on your website.
These are carefully designed to encourage your visitors to perform a specific action such as :
- Signing up for your email list
- Downloading an eBook
- Buying a specific product or service with a special discount
- Subscribing to your newsletter
Consider implementing your CTA around the page from the more traditional position at the top where people can clearly your CTA or to the side of the page.
By implementing colours that grab a users attention, using the right language and even placing your CTA “above the fold” (the area that visitors see when they first land on your website) can really help make a difference to your sites ability to convert.
2. Simplify Your Navigation
Yes, it’s tempting to have lots of navigational links running along the top of your page or a large drop-down menu. 
However, this can actually be quite distracting and unintentionally can even discourage people to want to carry on using the site, as an overcomplicated design can often appear overwhelming to visitors – especially when they have tons of options to pick from.
By simplifying your user navigation, you may actually benefit from this as there are fewer distractions.
Consider scaling your navigational links back. Sometimes less is more!
3. Improve Your Page Load Speed
People won’t want long for a page or website to load. In fact Google has also confirmed that page speeds are considered into their page rankings algorithms.
Clunky text, large images and inefficient coding can all slow down your page speeds. When this happens, you’ll see a higher bounce back ratio.
People will click on your page, get tired of waiting for it to load and click back out.
Streamlining your website can improve your page load speed. And, this can boost your conversion ratio for anyone who lands on your page.
4. Understanding Customer Behaviours
By understanding your customer’s behavioural patterns, websites can use this knowledge to gear its site to convert better.
Through the use of insights tools ranging from heatmaps to customer surveys to analysing website traffic, businesses can begin to better understand any potential friction points and pinpoint where they are falling short in order to ‘tweak’ and improve its user experience for more conversions.
5. Adopt A/B Tests
Creating variations of landing pages is one of the best ways to really experiment with what works for your site.
There are some great tools out there which can really help you create these experiments, ranging from Google Optimize, Optimizely and Unbounce to name a few.
6. Consider Chat Boxes
Chat boxes are almost considered the ultimate sales hack. This is because many customers prefer this type over communication over more traditional methods such as phoning up and being put on hold or emailing which can also result in a delayed response.
Chat boxes can address both of these issues in one swoop, as they allow potential business leads to interact with the website almost instantaneously while remaining anonymous.
In fact, we have one right here on our own website!
Research has shown that chat boxes have the ability to improve website conversions by at least 45% according to one study and so its no wonder so many websites are considering this functionality.
While there are some excellent chatbox options out there, some of the more common ones include HubSpot Chat, to ZenDesk, Olark to name a few.
In a nutshell, chat boxes assist in :
– Closing deals/sales quicker
– Assist and help upsell more to potential business leads
– Unlock a new source of lead generation for your business
– Can be fully automated to take the strain away from a lack of staff/company resources because they can use scripts to reply to common questions asked.
Bottom Line
Conversion rate optimisation is something you should take into consideration if you’re going to compete with other businesses in the same niche and online.
These quick conversion rate optimisation tips can help you improve your online conversions and get a leg up on the competition in order to boost your own conversions and inevitably help make your business more money.
We hope you found these tips useful!
Looking for a conversion rate optimisation agency?
If you’re looking for a helping hand in further improving your website’s conversions, why not get in touch with our friendly team?
We are a leading conversion rate optimisation agency who has the expertise and knowledge to help further optimise your website to prompt and inspire your traffic with focused strategies.
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