Conversion Rate Optimization: The Key to Online Success

Getting people to your website requires time and money. Unfortunately, generating web traffic is just one piece of the puzzle. To earn continuous profits from your site, you also need to focus on converting visitors to customers once they reach your site. This means creating a meaningful website that clearly promotes your goods and services FIRST, then promoting the site online through paid advertising, email and social media marketing, and other means.

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, focuses on the number of people who perform an action when visiting your site. This action may include making a purchase, joining a subscription service, opting in to a mailing list or downloading content. When it comes to CRO, your website may be optimized to perform one or all of these actions.

Calculating CRO is easy and should be a ritual you adapt each month to see how well your website performs. Divide the total number of people who visit your site by the number of orders or requests for materials you receive. This will give you a percentage. From there, you can make changes on your site to increase this percentage. Most successful websites have conversion rates between 1% and 2% – although there are some websites with higher rates.

Increasing Conversion Rates

To increase conversion rates, you need to review your website to find ways to promote goods and services in a better way. If you don’t know where to begin, start with your homepage. Ask yourself the following:

• Does the content clearly convey what’s on the website?
• Is the content interesting and useful?
• Can I clearly read the content?
• Do the images enhance the content?
• Can I easily navigate through the rest of the site using links or site map?
• Did I make the best use of keywords and phrases?
• What changes can I make?

Do this for each web page. Make the necessary changes and then calculate CRO as usual to see if the percentage changes.

Ask for Help

If the changes you make don’t yield the conversion rates you’re looking for, create a short visitor survey. Find out what visitors think and consider suggestions you receive. After all, it’s the visitor that decides whether to linger on your site or leave to search other sites. Take this information and continue to make changes until you see a change in conversion percentage.