Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge , hints and tips I've built up over the years . Today , I'm going to talk about conversion rate optimization . So you might be thinking this podcast is meant to be all about SEO . Why are we now talking about conversion rate optimization , or CRO , or CRO for short ?

Well , although conversion rate optimization is not strictly SEO , it is probably the most closely aligned , closely related discipline to SEO , and the reason for that is because , obviously , as an SEO , what you want to do is first of all , get people onto your site and then you want to keep them on your site and then doing what you want to do , because if they

don't quickly think that your site is the right site for them , then they're going to click back to Google search results and go somewhere else , and that is like a negative signal . Google . It's one of the signals that Google can actually tell if someone's clicked on a result and then navigated back and then clicked on a different result .

It's kind of saying to Google that actually this site isn't answering my question for this query that I've just put in .

So the reason conversion rate optimization works well for you in this respect is it's really the discipline of making sure that people get to see what they want on the site , achieve what they want on the site and also achieve what you want them to achieve on the site , and that keeps them on the site , keeps them going in the right direction , so they don't

bounce back to the search engine result pages . So this is where the byproduct is . It's positive for your SEO as well as actually being incredibly positive for your site , and we'll talk a bit more about why it's so positive later in the podcast . Okay , what is conversion rate optimization ?

Well , what it is is the process of increasing the percentage of conversions from a website or an app or anything way , interacting with people , and conversion rate optimization typically involves generating ideas for elements of your site that you can improve on and then sort of testing those ideas through a B testing or multivariate testing . So that's what it is .

So why would we actually want to do it ? Well , the reason is actually helps you lower the cost of getting a customer for your website , your business , without actually having to increase the number of people coming to your website .

So , for example , say you've got 1000 visitors per month coming to a web page and you convert them at a rate of 10% at the moment . So that means for every 1000 people to that page , you get 100 new customers .

Now if you can increase your conversion rate by changing elements on your site from 10% to 15% , then that means you're now going to get 150 customers a month from every thousand visitors , which is a 50% increase in customers and , obviously , a 50% increase in revenue , which means it's more money to grow your business . It's more profit for you .

It's , you know , incredibly valuable . Why would you not do it ? So that's why why you do it . And obviously , if you build it on top with SEO on top and you do still increase the number of people going to the page with an increase in conversion rate , you're just going to make More money , more revenue . So incredibly positive for your business .

Now , conversions Don't just need to be direct sales like obviously . If you're an e-commerce website and you're selling actual products , then you are going to Optimize for selling individual products like that . But there are other things that you can Optimize conversions for . So , for example , on an affiliate site , you could optimize for clicks through to merchants .

You could optimize for Lead lead magnet downloads , like people downloading an e-book . You can optimize for leads generated if you're doing B2B or deals closed . You can Optimize for product upsells like , say , if you have travel site , you can obviously optimize them for people who've booked a product put holiday .

You can then maybe optimize for selling them , upselling them , insurance and things like that . So it can be all sorts of things that you can actually optimize for . But you just need to establish what the right thing to optimize for is on your website .

So , once you've identified what it is that you want to actually increase the conversion on so let's say we're looking at an e-commerce site , we want to increase product sales we now then need to think of the areas on the website or on web pages that we can play with , to an experiment with , to try and improve the conversion rate on products .

So that could be Taking , say , your current existing product page and then designing a new one which maybe Concentrates more on better images , or it might change on the call to action or the information it shows on the page .

So by then creating a variant of the page , that is , a new version , you can then test how well that new version works by sending a percentage of your Visitors to the new design of page and a percent and another percentage to the old design of page . So you might decide to put split , that 50 .

50 will send half of people to the current design and half the people to the new design . Then , over a period of time , you can then track how each page performs against each other .

So say , for example , the new page design is positive for conversion and increases sales by , say , 50% , then you'll clearly see that that page drives a lot more sales than the other one . And you can go right , that's a winner . And then we'll start sending all our traffic to this new page , will ditch the old page and send it all to the new page .

Conversely , if the new page wasn't a winner and lots less people were buying on it , then you obviously say well , that's a rubbish , you know that didn't work , we'll throw that away and we'll start again . Now that's just step one .

The way to keep improving is then , once you've found a new winning version , it's to think right , how can we design this again to make it even better ? And then you make another version and then test that and by this iterative Process of testing and refinement and testing and refinement , you will increase your conversion rate .

Over time You'll find out what the winners and the losers are and over time you will drastically increase your revenue per customer . We regularly run conversion optimization tests on keywords . People use calm , for example , time of recording .

We're just testing what affect our on our pricing , what the effect on pricing pages when we show people the monthly prices by default or whether we show them annual prices by default , how that affects signups , how that affects our people interact with the page .

So you know and it's it's the perfect way of Working out what the best thing to do is with any particular part of your site is to literally just test it , because until you test it with real people and against different versions , you never actually know if your idea is going to be good or not . You know we regularly have discussions in-house .

At key was people use on what the best way forward is and what the best thing to do Is , and sometimes we just have to say we can't agree amongst ourselves .

What we have to do is just test it and see , because it's only by having real user data that you can actually know whether something's going to work on it , whether it's a positive or negative effect .

Now , if you want to try conversion optimization and I strongly suggest that you do there are a whole bunch of tools out there that will help you run split tests , show different versions and will channel your traffic between different versions of different pages and things like that .

A lot will depend on what software you're using for your website whether you built it yourself , whether it's WordPress , all those kind of things . So I'm not going to go into detail on what tools to suggest . I'll just say start googling out there .

Start googling how to do AB testing with WordPress , how to do AB testing with whatever , or how to do conversion optimization with whatever system that you're using . I will recommend a book and that's called Making Websites Win .

I'll put a link to it in the show notes , but it's by Dr Karl Blanks and Ben Jessen , who are actually a couple of guys that I know , because several years ago , when I had Broadbanded Code at UK , we actually took them on as consultants to improve our conversion rate on Broadbanded Code at UK and through their work we more than tripled the income on our site

every period of time just by using this methodology of running tests , seeing how they perform and iterating and improving upon the work we've done before . And they have a . They had an agency called the Conversion Rate Experts , which I know they sold recently , but the agency is still going for the really talented people .

But they wrote a book called Making Websites Win and it's available on Amazon and it basically goes through what their process is for conversion rate optimization . They actually invented the term conversion rate optimization back in 2007, . So they really are the .

It's a good starting point and a good read and there's loads of tips and things that they've their playbook , that they've learned on from how they improve sites and how they improve the conversion rate on different sites , and but it also covers the whole methodology , so I'd really recommend that .

So this was really just an overview of what conversion rate optimization is . I will talk about it more in the future . I will talk about things that have worked for us and tools that we've used , but I just wanted in this episode just to introduce the idea of conversion rate optimization , the kind of basics of why you want to do it .

Because it's end of the day , you can't beat , you know . Beat the whole concept of increasing revenue without having to increase traffic . It's fantastic , and if you increase traffic on top , even better .

So that's why conversion rate optimization and SEO are quite well aligned and it's something that every SEO should at least appreciate a little bit on how to , you know , do basic conversion optimization and the value of doing so . So , yeah , hope you enjoyed . Thanks for being a listener . I really appreciate it . Please subscribe and share . It really helps .

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Then find a link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode . If you'd like to get in touch , have any questions , I'd love to hear from you . I'm at channel five on Twitter . You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom . Bye for now . See you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard .