CONVERSION RATE OPTIMISATION (CRO) VS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO)

One of my clients recently called me to ask why the telephone enquiries from their website had suddenly dropped from 5 or 6 a week to zero!

I checked the Analytics which showed the amount of traffic to the website had taken a slight dip over the previous week but nothing really significant. I ask if anything had been changed on their site and found that they had setup a completely new website!

I provide SEO services to this client but not web design services. While their new website looked bright and shiny with animated banners it was not converting as well as the old site.

With this in mind, not only do you need to drive traffic to your site but if you are to make any money you must convert those visitors into inquiries and sales. Once you have a reasonable amount of traffic coming to your site it could be more cost effective to try and improve conversion rates instead of just driving more and more traffic.

Lets look at some figures.

Let say your website currently has 2,000 visitors per month, this produces 20 enquiries of which you convert 10 into customers.

Your visitor to enquiry conversion rate is 1% (20 per month)
Your visitor to sales conversion rate is 0.5% (10 sales)

To double your profits and you profits you would need to double your traffic, from 2,000 to 4,000 visitors per month.

Or, by simply increasing your visitor to enquiry conversion rate by 1% from 1% TO 2% double your profits from the same amount of traffic.

So what can you do to make your visitors pickup the phone or send you an email?

There are many on page elements you can change to improve your conversion rates, the only way to truly find out what works the best is by testing.

Try different headlines, different images, and different calls to action. Different colours and different locations on the page or your phone number and call to action buttons.

Here are my tips for improving website conversion rates.

  1. Make sure you visitors can easily navigate around your website to find what they are looking for.

  2. Add you telephone number and contact details on every page so that they are easily visible. (You dont want to loose customers because they couldnt find you phone number).

  3. Give full descriptions of your products with high quality images

  4. List the benefits of each product.

  5. If you sell you product online make the checkout system as quick and easy as possible.

  6. Check that any forms and your check out is working correctly.

  7. Make sure your copy is easily readable and gets your visitors interest.

  8. Test every thing above.

When you split test each element make sure that you make significant changes and monitor the results for a long enough period to make a good judgement. Start with your high traffic pages that have a high bounce rate as this is where you can achieve the best results.

There are plenty of conversion rate optimisation specialists out there who will charge to increase your conversion rates but with a little bit of testing an analysis you could improve your bottom line with out increasing your traffic.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/19ClqYb, this factual content has not been modified from the source. This content is syndicated news that should be used for your research, and we hope that it can help your productivity. This content is strictly for educational purposes and is not made for any kind of commercial purposes of this blog.
By: Anna Smith