Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Shirley Lowe, writer at Landlord’s Tips.
Many business owners who decide to digitize their business may struggle with conversion these days. While they have put considerable effort into their SEO and have even tried to do some PPC advertising, they still have yet to polish their website in terms of conversion optimization.
To make sure that you comply with the basic rules of CRO, you need to understand the fundamentals. Driving tons of quality traffic to your website is great, but what good is it if you cannot convert those visitors to real customers?
When you take a look at your website through the eyes of your prospective client, you can notice details that you didn’t think are important. Small things like an inconveniently located ‘purchase’ button or not enough call-to-action buttons can screw up your whole marketing strategy and result in no sales at all.
First of all, you should understand that the success of your business is not determined by the SEO statistics or number of clicks only. Business should deliver sales, so what about yours?
Let’s say you’ve entered a certain business niche and you’re trying to sell products online. You’ve got yourself a well-optimized website and you rank high enough to drive tons of traffic to your website, but looks like you don’t have enough sales to sustain a healthy business plan. What’s that about?
Take a look at your competitors and see what they can offer in terms of the website usability and service quality. No matter what niche you operate in, doing good research is a key to ensuring that your product is good enough for the end-users.
Determine the key points that your competitors are good at, find out the benefits that they offer to users and browse around their website to see how they utilize their UI/UX to guide users to the shopping cart.
Most of the times, it all depends on what type of industry you enter. In some cases, you’ll have tremendously developed competitors, and sometimes you’ll face small companies. Let’s take the Real Estate industry, 3-5 companies were there ‘from the beginning of time’ and some would be scared by this level of competition. However, a great lesson lays there, because a few small startups appeared and offered something new. Wouldn’t you consider it revolutionizing if you found out that now you can find apartments for rent and secure them using blockchain and smart contract?
So it’s all about innovation and the benefits that you can bring.
Once you’ve finished gathering the data and have evaluated the market, it’s time to write down some basic guidelines for how you’ll operate.
Define your long-term and short-term goals and write down what you aim for. Otherwise, it will be too hard to determine how successful your business is if you don’t really have the necessary metrics.
Identify the weaknesses of your business and work on eliminating them. To find out the weak and strong sides of your products, you’ll have to become a user yourself and review your product under a huge magnifying glass. We’re kidding, just try on the shoes of your users and evaluate your product as a regular website visitor. Did you enjoy the user experience? Was it easy enough to make a purchase? Were the product benefits clear?
To find out where you may lose your customers and what stages of the interaction process they’re leaving your website, you should get some data. The best tool for that will be Google Analytics and utilizing this one correctly will boost your CRO tremendously.
Google Analytics gathers plenty of data on where your users spend time on your website the most, what page makes him leave or what stage of the ‘check-out’ process scares him away.
Having this data in your pocket will help you review the conversion funnel and ensure it’s consistency. Once you’ve determined where you’re losing your customers, you’ll be able to deal with these problems directly, and you’ll know for sure what part of your website needs for improvement.
Many people tend to think that having a huge ‘call us now’ sign is enough. However, call-to-action mechanics are more complex than you may think. First of all, call-to-action is one of the most important elements when we talk about conversion rate optimization.
There are lots of ways to determine where you should put the CTA buttons and other elements, but the best one will be trying to interact with your website yourself.
Do you have your company’s phone number and address right where the user will need it? Do you have the feedback forms popping up right when your customer is ready to place an order?
One of the best examples of good CTA practices is when you visit a website of, let’s say, attorney and he has a button helping you to request a callback. The trick here is that usually they say that you’ll get a callback in 30 seconds and it attracts users highlighting that you’re way ahead of your competitors. They’re slow and sloppy; you’re fast and efficient.
How fast your client can load pages on your website is crucial these days. We live in the era of tremendously fast internet and good mobile experience. When someone visits your websites, he won’t wait more than 6 seconds to get the product he needs.
When it comes to speed, having a better page load speed will not only help you attract new customers but will also make you more reputable in the eyes of Google search engine.
In case you’re wondering what are the ‘don’ts’ of CRO, we should let you know that you must always set your goals straight and set realistic time frames. When you set unrealistic goals, it’s no wonder your whole strategy will be screwed up, and the results will shock you.
This will affect your patience and make your CRO even worse. Optimization needs patience and consistency. You can get those only if you define your goals smartly.
You’ve already reviewed the products of your competitors. Now determine your strong sides and shout about them everywhere. When your prospective customer visits your website, he should know how good you are and why you’re so good. This gives you additional points when your clients will make his final decision to stay on your website, and buy the product you’re selling.
Conversion rate optimization may seem hard, but you should approach it smartly, and you’ll be alright. Most of the websites on the web these days struggle with getting high conversion rates, but the truth is the only thing they need to do in the first place is applying these basics.
Shirley Lowe is a professional marketer and blogger, currently living in Burbank, CA. She is passionate about creating fresh strategies for brand promotions with a positive mindset. Shirley blogs for Landlord’s Tips, and her posts have been featured on RankWatch and REAL Trends.