How to Increase Conversion Rates

Optimising your conversion rate should be one of your biggest goals as a marketing manager, SEO manager, or anyone with responsibility for the operations of a website or digital platform.

Driving traffic to your website is one thing, but it’s very much a leading the horse-to-water situation if you fail to optimise your on-page content ahead of time to ensure that visitors and leads become customers.

In this guide, we’ll explain why conversation rate is such an important metric for SEOs and digital marketers, explain how to measure it and optimise it, explore the SEO conversion funnel… in short take a deep dive into conversion rate optimisation (CRO).

What is a conversion rate?

Conversion rate is the percentage of users that complete a certain desired action once they visit your website. Conversion rate optimisation is a key element of SEO and related digital marketing disciplines, including UX, sales and copy, that aims to improve the percentage of users taking actions you’re tracking.

You may track the following conversions:

• Purchases
• Signing up for a free trial
• Booking a demo or consultation
• Subscribing to a newsletter
• Making an account

Why is CRO important then? Well, it allows you to compare data over a period to see how your business is performing. Have a poor conversion rate? This tells you it’s time to focus on CRO. You can then set benchmarks for poor and good performances to measure your activities.

Conversion rate optimisation

So, conversion rate optimisation is the process of attempting to improve your conversion rate, whether that is on one specific webpage and for a particular desired goal, or across the board.

Businesses should be motivated to improve their CRO for a few important reasons:

• It can decrease customer acquisition costs – PPC, website advertising, social media marketing, email
• It leverages all website traffic – current and future
• It helps you get to know your customers better – informing you what they want and gives you a chance to put your detective hat on to determine what their pain points are
• Improves your user experience – this increases customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, ease of purchase, customer value and much more

Conversion rate optimisation on websites

Conversion rate optimisation is important on a website in various areas.

Homepage – homepages are typically the highest traffic page for a website. Making a first impression is important, right? The homepage is also a chance to keep visitors on your website and direct them to the most valuable sections.

This can be done through effective linking, emphasising linking through buttons and eye-catching colours, menu hierarchy organisation, sign-up buttons and even using a chatbot to attract user’s attention.

Pricing page – this is where you list the price of your services. It is typically the page with the highest bounce rate on a website. This is where you want to convert customers to purchase your product or service.

Here you can emphasise contact details for inquiries, add useful content and FAQs and include a sign-up form or pop-up form to encourage goal conversions.

Landing pages – are designed for people to take action. They’re often the first contact a visitor has with your website after clicking on an ad or other touchpoint in the buying journey.

Here you want to ensure your contact forms are optimised for data capture, and that questions gather the right data for follow-up sales. If you are trying to encourage the download of useful content, you can boost conversions by previewing some of your content on the landing page to entice downloads.

How to improve conversion rates

Improving the conversion rate on websites can be achieved in numerous ways. To understand whether your rates have improved for desired goals, you will need to start effectively tracking conversion rates.

This can be done through tools such as Google Analytics.

Methods to improve the conversion rate on your website:

• Ensure booking forms are visible on websites – add them above the fold
• Make sure forms work properly and capture the data you need
• Ensure forms are engaging and conversational to capture user’s attention – and avoid lots of fields
• Create effective call to actions using active words and keeping text short
• Split test content to see which content layout is the most effective
• Review your website design – are the colours appropriate, is text legible, where is the eye drawn?
• Use heat maps to identify where on the page your users are clicking
• Ensure your website is fast, responsive and that content displays properly across devices

SEO conversions

There are various tools that can be used for tracking SEO conversions and SEO strategy planning.

We’ve mentioned Google Analytics, currently on version 4, a free web analytics service created by Google that tracks and reports website traffic and interaction.

For SEO conversions, return on investment is an important metric to track. This shows how much revenue is being generated from SEO efforts.

You can use this data to see where the most conversions are coming from and where improvements are needed. Google Analytics can provide a breakdown of the most visited pages, including which pages bring in the most revenue.

This gives SEOs the opportunity to continue to optimise high-performing pages and make necessary changes to pages with potential that are underperforming.

SEO conversion funnel

The SEO conversion funnel is the customer journey from awareness to conversion.

It has three main parts:

1. Awareness – the customer becomes aware of your brand through organic SERPS, organic or paid social media marketing, email marketing etc.
2. Consideration – they gather information about your brand through a Google search, read customer reviews and explore the content on your website
3. Action – the consumer decides to choose your product or service or doesn’t

Example:

Your company sells garden hoses. They launch a new advert.

• Awareness – your target market sees your ad online due to smart targeting
• Consideration – they check your Trustpilot rating, read customer reviews and read a blog on your website to confirm your expertise
• Action – they decide to buy a garden hose from your website and checkout

You can optimise the funnel at each stage.

At the awareness stage focus on how customers interact with your promotional material. If you’re running an ad campaign look at click-through rates, bounce rates and cost per click. If you’re using retargeting or advertising on specific websites track which sends you the most customers and focus your efforts (and budget) there.

At the consideration stage, you can make your business more compelling by ensuring your website features recent reviews and that any platforms you have an account on are recently updated. You might encourage your current customers to leave you a review with an incentive, before launching an ad campaign in the future.

At the decision stage, the customer has reviewed the information presented at the other stages of the funnel: it’s now make or break. Focus on your website’s user experience, including sign-up forms, check-out carts and landing pages to push them over the line with frictionless experiences. You can also ensure your website content is useful and the design is well presented to encourage conversions.

Outsource your CRO to an SEO agency

At Polaris, our team are SEO experts in operating CRO strategies. We’ll track, report and implement strategies to improve CRO for your campaigns.

Get in touch with us to benefit from our expertise and give time back to your team to focus on their specialisms.