Why Your Business Needs Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
Whether your company is large or small, brick and mortar or eCommerce, or sells B2B or B2C, Conversion Rate Optimization can make a defining difference in your brand loyalty and sales numbers. With so much focus on driving traffic to your website, often the question of “What is that traffic doing once they get there?” is ignored. Enter Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). CRO is an integral part of your SEO strategy, helping to ensure the maximum amount of people going to your website take the actions you want them to—whether that’s joining your email list, making purchases, scheduling consultations, or any actions that boost sales or lift up your brand.
With a general understanding of what CRO is in business, let’s go over some conversion rate optimization tips.
Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies
Conversion rate is a balancing act between attracting traffic and motivating them to take action. Sometimes higher rates actually indicate a failing strategy. After all, a 100 percent conversion rate sounds amazing… but if it’s out of the two people who came to your site, it’s an indication that your problem starts with driving traffic to your site. On the other hand, if your conversion rate is extremely low, that could be a sign you’re not attracting the right people or not motivating them to take action once they’re there. And conversion rates tend to differ based on industry. Effective CRO strategies start with engaging and well-written calls-to-actions (CTAs) that stand out from the rest of your page (and are easy to find location). Now you’re getting people to click! But if the action doesn’t load quickly and isn’t easy to take, you’ll lose customers right there.
Should you hire an expert? A professional CRO expert has deep understanding of conversion rate optimization best practices. They also understand that effective CRO takes time and attention to detail. Hiring experts who excel at consistent monitoring of analytics and competitors, keyword research, A/B testing, and all the other minute CRO details can boost your sales and your reputation. Therefore, hiring an expert might be exactly what you need.
Still have questions? Check out some frequently asked questions and get in touch! We’d love to discuss your CRO strategy with you, and give you the advice needed to help your business take off!
FAQs
Is CRO important for eCommerce websites?
eCommerce websites rely on online purchases. That makes CRO absolutely imperative to your company. While sales conversions are essential, so is getting your current customers to leave reviews and respond to deals. And don’t forget potential customers. Maybe they didn’t purchase something on their first visit, but if they sign up for a coupon or join your email list, there’s a higher chance they’ll be back—and reviews and comments satisfied customers left on your site and products will increase that likelihood even more.
Is CRO part of SEO?
Technically, SEO is primarily concerned with driving traffic to your site and CRO is more concerned with what users do once they get there. However, it doesn’t make sense not to include CRO in your SEO strategy. Why spend money to perfect driving potential customers to your site if you’re not going to follow through by ensuring they do something once they find you? At Globe Runner, we believe CRO, along with content optimization, is key to your overall SEO strategy.
How do you implement conversion rate optimization?
CRO starts with a complete audit of your site. What are your CTAs? Where are they? What’s the current conversion rate for different CTAs on your site? Once thoroughly audited and analyzed, you pinpoint where you could improve and what may be stopping potential conversions. Is it page speed? Are CTAs hard to read or understand? Is your site drawing in the right amount and type of traffic. Professional CRO firms will optimize your page to ensure CTAs all function properly and are easy to do and find, as well as experiment, with A/B testing of language and styles to see what’s drawing customers in and driving them away. As with all of these types of services, CRO is never “set-it-and-forget-it” and requires ongoing maintenance, testing, and analyzing to keep you on top of your conversion game!
How do you calculate conversion rate?
Your conversion rate is really just a simple math equation: The number of users who take the offered call to action on a specific page divided by the total number of people who landed on that page. If 100 people land on a page and 5 of them take the action, that’s a conversion rate of five percent.
EFFECTIVE WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE IN 15 MINUTES
You know the feeling. You really want to get in shape, but getting started is just. so. hard. However, every day you put it off is another step further away from your end goal. In all reality, a little bit of time each day and a lot of discipline can be truly transformational.
The same can be said of your site’s SEO. You don’t need to be an SEO expert to help your website perform like it’s optimized by one. In fact, you really only need about 15 minutes of daily maintenance to keep your site performing at full tilt.
Don’t believe us? Below are some high-impact SEO changes that can increase your website traffic in about 15 minutes a day.
Start with a Website Audit
When was the last time you evaluated your website’s SEO? If it’s been more than a year (or worse, never) time to crack the whip.
There are free online tools that can give you a general idea of what you’re up against. However, hiring a digital marketing agency to perform a SEO audit for you is bar-none one of the best investments you can make for your business.
If auditing yourself, here are four areas you’ll want to pay close attention to:
- Your meta tags and meta descriptions
- The keywords you rank for
- The content on each page
- Your site speed
Quickly Optimize your Site
Ok, so you know where to put your focus. Let’s get down to brass tacks so you can improve your Google ranking and grow your brand.
First, read over your meta descriptions and titles. These are what the search engines use to determine what the content on your site is about. It’s also what users will read before deciding whether to click on your site or not. Remember that your meta’s should be keyword-driven, no more than 160 characters, and grammatically perfect.
Next, make a list of the keywords you’re currently ranking for. Beside it, make a list of the keywords you’d like to rank for. Make sure any new content you’re generating on your site aligns with each of these words and phrases.
Which brings us to step 3, your site’s content. Typically, the more copy you have on each page, the better the search engines will be able to crawl and recommend your site in searches. We tell our clients to come up with about 300 well-written words per page, even the ones that don’t seem like they need a lot of explaining. Bonus points if the content is organized by sub-headings!
Not a wordsmith? This is a time it really pays to hire a copywriter. The more polished your content the more effective your website will be.
Finally, there’s the matter of your site speed – specifically, the speed of your mobile site. You can test your website for free at Think With Google. However, desktop speeds aren’t altogether unimportant. If you want to check both in one go, try the Google Developer site for Page Speed Insights. After it scores your site, it’ll also furnish concrete ways you can improve your SEO and load time.
Remember that just like exercising, small adjustments in your daily routine can accumulate to big, lucrative changes down the line. Apply this logic to your site’s SEO and you’ll be staring down a first-page ranking faster than you can say “Globe Runner.”
And of course, if you want to simply leave it in our capable hands – just say the word!
SPRING CLEAN YOUR WEBSITE IN 5 STEPS
What do you immediately think of when you hear the word “Spring”? Flowers? Thunderstorms? Cleaning? If you’re like us, it’s the latter.
We find Spring to be the perfect time to get our digital ducks in a row. We’re no Marie Kondo, but we’re all about helping clients put their most polished, organized foot forward, too. That often starts with a site audit and subsequent cleanup.
Make sure your website is in full bloom. These five simple steps will showcase the best your site has to offer this season…and beyond.
1. Start with the home front (page).
The most logical place to start is at the beginning. In this case, it’s your website’s homepage. As the most visited page on your site, its ability to make or break your brand cannot be overstated.
Done right, your homepage is an effective sales tool that can help grow your business by leaps and bounds. And when you only have about 15 seconds to get it right, it pays to pay attention.
The single most prevalent layout we see is a scrolling homepage – and for good reason. It gives visitors the opportunity to learn more about your brand without having to click around. It’s also an ideal design for your mobile site. The receptivity among browsers proves that scrolling layouts are simple, easy, and aesthetically pleasing.
2. Update your copy.
Whether you’re switching to a scrolling site or updating one, you’ll want to give your copy a refresher. It’s an effective way to increase your SEO and improve your search ranking. Plus, a lot can happen in a year. Make sure you’re adding any new press you’ve gotten or awards you’ve been given.
3. Upload video content.
Interactive content can be a nice brain break for site visitors. Many sites accomplish this by incorporating video content like GIFs into their landing pages.
Some estimates suggest doing so can increase your conversion rates by 80% or more! Whether you’re showing off products or people on your team, this kind of visual content is captivating and a nice change of pace from the wall of words they’re confronted with on most other sites.
Just make sure to loop video clips to about 5 seconds. It’ll cut back on your load time while helping them appear longer than they really are.
4. Check your links.
Broken links are just plain unprofessional. But if your web host changes its code often (cough, cough WordPress) then the links and content you currently have could stop working without warning.
The best way to catch, and fix, broken or outdated links is to do an annual check.
5. Revisit your titles and tags.
Algorithm changes. They impact us all, but they don’t have to become a source of worry.
No matter which flavor of the week the search engines are prioritizing, some content is a necessary evergreen that may require a bit of pruning.
At a minimum, you should use this Spring to revisit and refresh your:
- Title tags
- Meta keywords
- H-tags
Though browsers may remain wholly unaware, this labor of love is what ultimately marries their search queries with your brand.
As a Dallas digital marketing agency, we’ll take any opportunity to organize our online presence and suggest you do the same this spring.
Need a hand cleaning up? Let us help your site shine.
CREATE A POSITIVE USER EXPERIENCE
Let’s talk about User experience, or UX. So why is it so important? I think it’s pretty obvious that we want the website to appeal to our viewer, but that’s not to say we want a beautiful website. Yes, we want an attractive website, but I want a website that actually functions, that has a functional user face that’s easy for consumers.
There’s a couple things to think about.
Let’s start with desktop. So, if you’re on a desktop, is it easy to see the call-to-action? Is it easy to fill out the form? Is it easy to navigate to the information that I want? Does the scrolling help or detract from the website?
Depending on the site, there can be a very different answer for that. So user experience is very situational, not all websites are alike and not all users are there for the same purpose.
Think about your various users:
Take a university website for example, a great example, or a city website. You have lots of different buyers coming to the site for different reasons. Universities have students, teachers, and potential students, applicant’s parents. They all want something different out of that site. Providing the information they want and making it easy for them to access that information is critical.
Mobile Use
That’s not all, we’re not done. We’ve only really talked about desktop. How do we make the same experience just as good on mobile or tablet or any other UX that you can think of? How do we make the person interact with the device and the device isn’t a barrier and the website isn’t a barrier for the information or decision that they are trying to make.
Hopefully that decision is to reach out and call you, and not your competitor. That’s why we take user experience so seriously.
Now, I wouldn’t stop there. Don’t just make it look good. Implement some software that will test it right. Do some iTracking software, some click tracking software, maybe do some ab testing to get your user experience up to snuff.
It’s worth the investment.
WEBSITE LOAD SPEED
Load Speed is probably the number one factor that has a big impact on your site, SEO, user experience, and leads on your website.
The world is getting more connected.
Mark Zuckerberg’s speech talked about the unmanned drones that will fly around the world and provide internet to third world countries so people can get online and go to Facebook, surf the web, and be part of the digital community.
If you want to reach those millions of consumers, you’re going to have to have a website that loads quickly because they are not going to wait around for a slow site through potentially a weak internet signal that’s coming in through a drone airplane that’s flying over them.
Even if you don’t want to reach the rest of the world and only want to deal with hyperlocal, people are more and more on their phones, moving around, who might have weak cellular signal, and having a fast loading site is important. So, test your site.
A good tool to use can be Pingdom Tools, or Google, which has a speed test of its own. These tools will help you understand where your site is failing. If your site contains large images or videos that take a long time to load, figure out how to minimize that. If it’s triggering error reports, take care of that.
Look at services like enabling caching, or content delivery with CEN, to figure out how you can achieve a faster and faster load speed. The better that gets, the more engagement you will generate from search engines or people.
As a rule of thumb, 1.8 seconds is what Google officially uses to determine whether or not the speed is sufficient. Run through some of these tests through different servers all over the world and see just how close you can get to 1.8 seconds. If you’re not quiet there, give us a call and we can help you with load speed.
VIDEO: CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION
Conversion Rate Optimization is extremely important. As an agency, we take this very seriously and I would say that sets us apart from most of our competition because we are really looking at driving more leads and more sales.
One of the primary ways we can do that is by increasing the percentage of people that make a purchase decision on any given landing page. The way we do that is through a simple A/B or multivariate testing. This is a simple test that tells us if a call-to-action, image, or headline, works better than the alternative or control set. Once we determine the winner, we implement the change and we start a new test.
This is incredibly powerful because it has the compounding interest of that. If we can make a 5% or 10% improvement on a monthly basis, overtime, that results in a powerful increase in the number of leads in a general area. One thing I would say about conversation rate optimization is that it’s an undervalued technique.
You don’t see a lot of SEOs truly practicing and the problem with most campaigns is not the paid search campaign or the SEO campaigns. It’s commonly the page isn’t converting a high enough percentage of visitors, particularly in competitive spaces that have a high cost-per-click.
The number of visitors that convert into a sales lead is the most critical element that we have control over.
That’s why we spend so much time and energy working on conversion rate optimization. I’d love to talk to you more about it.
Give us a call, but in the meantime, subscribe to our channel.
THE SURPRISINGLY OVERLOOKED TRICK TO IMPROVE YOUR SITE’S PAGE LOAD SPEED
by Brian MellerWe all know that a faster site leads to usability, conversion and SEO gains. And sometimes it doesn’t require specialized SEO knowledge to improve site speed, as we’ll show you in this blog post.One often overlooked way to improve the page load speed of your website is to compress your images.This may not apply to everyone, but most websites have a portfolio section or a blog that contains images. If that’s the case, it’s important to reduce the file size of your images.Most people think you can’t reduce the file size without reducing the quality, but there are two ways to get around that problem.1. Resize the image to the height or width that will be displayed on the siteSometimes we’ll see images that are 5472 x 4648 pixels, but the site’s maximum width is set at 1200px. So if you upload that original file size, it’s not useful because the site will resize the image width to 1200px and the file size will still be 3 MB instead of 600 KB.But let’s say you want the 5472 x 3648 pixel image on your site to give users the option to view it full size. That’s fine, but you should compress the image to reduce the size.How do you do this? Simple.2. Go to Tiny PNG and upload your .png or .jpg file to the siteTiny PNG will compress the image and reduce the size up to 80%.Here are two files of the same image, but in different sizes. Can you spot any difference in quality?
Brian is Globe Runner’s Quality Team Lead. He’s our resident SEO expert who can also enlighten us on the intricacies of sci-fi and Formula 1.
CONTACT FORM 7 – 4.4 UPDATE RELEASE IS CONTROVERSIAL
Some news regarding our favorite contact form plugin. You may start seeing new alert messages crawling across wordpress-backends asking to check contact form validation, and settings. Having a second look into what these messages mean for the website, and mean for you could be very important in the next few weeks.
This marks a departure in cf7’s previous programing policies to now attempting to try to help with you entering all the contact form settings properly. Problem is, the community does not think its entirely perfected yet.
The main focus is on email settings. CF7 form fills often fool the server to make the email look like it’s coming from someone else. Example, instead of clients getting an email from wordpress@yourdomain.com, the email looks like its from jimbob@gmail.com.
CF7 defaults to this method, but also marks through the validator as this is a problem. Weird, huh?They have decided to validate this way to help with client’s spam settings. Making an email look like its from someone other than wordpress@yourdomain.com can flag some spam settings.Problem is, its often really nice to be able to immediately view email, and hit reply knowing the email will go directly to who filled it out. The new method is to copy the email information, and start a new email fresh.Confusing, isn’t it?Work arounds to this are being worked on, and several new blog posts are popping up. This link is beneficial: https://www.wiyre.com/solution-contact-form-7-issues-your-contact-form-has-a-configuration-issue/Nothing is immediately wrong. Just cf7 is trying to start to respond to many of their emails being marked as spammed. Hang tight with this plugin while they make transition, and enable this validator to become more powerful.
404 ERRORS WON’T CAUSE A GOOGLE PENALTY
In an interesting conversation on Twitter, Google’s Gary Illyes has confirmed that 404 errors will not lead to Google penalties for your website. 404 errors occur when a web page has been removed from your website or does not exist. Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable explained that there is a rumor out there that “having a site with some 404ed pages will lead to a Google Penalty.”. Google has now confirmed this.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=629672123359887361&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fgloberunner.com%2F404-errors-wont-cause-a-google-penalty%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px
Google’s @methode said 404s do not lead to Google Penalties https://t.co/WQMmZ4zEA4 pic.twitter.com/MS6sPcUPpW
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) August 7, 2015
I agree that just the existence of 404 errors on your website is not going to lead to a penalty or manual action from Google. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to have 404 errors on your website. For example, if someone is linking to a page on your website with a lot of bad links, then you can move the location of that page to another URL and serve up a 404 error. That will essentially ‘get rid of’ those bad links and not pass them onto the rest of your website. But, that’s all great if those bad links are linking to an internal page on your site: most negative SEO and low quality links I’ve seen tend to be pointed towards a site’s home page.
404s won’t lead to a penalty, but it’s not good for your site overall.
Technically speaking, 404 errors on your website won’t get you a penalty from Google. But, let’s look at it another way: if your internal linking structure is messed up and your site is linking internally to pages that don’t exist, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Your 404 errors are causing problems, and you’re also going to cause crawl issues.
So while 404s are not technically going to get you a penalty, you’re just shooting yourself in the foot by not fixing them.
The goes for duplicate content on your website, as well. Unless you have so much of it you’re spamming the search engines, you’re just not going to typically get a penalty from Google just because you have duplicate content on your website.
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