CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization is a set of practices aimed at increasing the effectiveness of some content to persuade users into completing the website’s goal.
A conversion may translate into a subscription, a purchase, filling out a form or downloading an e-book, for example. All these apparently different actions share the fact that they generate leads or a direct sale.
See more in: What is a lead?
Why is CRO important?
On the one hand, SEO helps us take better and more traffic to a website. But having many visitors is by no means equivalent to completing many sales operations.
Users need to complete some desired action in the site to become clients or to be in the sales funnel in order to follow them up through lead nurturing.
In other words, they are expected to leave their contact details for us to identify at which stage of the purchasing process they are and send them relevant content to walk them along the final acquisition stage.
So we use SEO to attract more traffic, and CRO to make that traffic turn into potential or effective clients.
Recommended for you: What is Buyer’s Journey?
How to do CRO on a website
Unlike the SEO, following more or less the same criteria for all websites, the CRO depends entirely on the needs and the psychology of your target audience or Buyer persona. That means that the CRO strategy won’t be the same for an online plus-size clothing store for women as for a landing page designed to sell the new model of a luxury watch brand.
Below there are two tools that can help you define the best actions to optimize the conversion rate:
1.- Google Analytics or a similar tool
It allows you to measure and analyze the results of all our pages, in terms of traffic, heatmap, time spent on the site and conversions.
A piece of content with little traffic may get quite a high percentage of conversions, while other piece of content with many visitors may get a very low percentage of conversions. No doubt the ideal thing is to do the necessary in order to get two high performance indicators
This article will be helpful: What is Conversion Rate (CR)?
2.- A/B performance tests
Two or more different versions are developed of a page, site or content, conveying the same basic information, but with some small changes that might include:
- Elements layout
- Navigability and usability
- Site color palette
- Type of CTA
- Tone of persuasive language
- Purchasing process or form filling-out
After some time, the performance of both sites is analyzed to check which one had more conversions. Changes introduced in A/B tests are usually small and specific, so once it is decided that a CTA is more effective than another, a new version of the same CTA is created, but with different colors. This is a process of continuous improvement.
To learn more about CRO
CRO is a really extensive universe. There are endless strategies to increase conversions according to the type of industry and the target audience of a site.
Actually, CRO strategies may change pretty much among the different pages at the same website. If you want to learn more about this, check the resources we’ve selected for their quality and relevance:
- Conversion Rate Optimization [2020 CRO] – Moz
- Conversion Optimization Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide – By Neil Patel
- The Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) – Hubspot
- 4 Trends Optimization Experts Should Pay Attention To in 2020 – By Convert Blog
- 10 New Conversion Rate Optimization Rate Strategies For 2020 – By Ignite Visibility
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO 2020): An SEO Guide – By Stan Ventures
- The 13 Most Effective Ways to Increase your Conversion Rate – By Crazy Egg
Do you need help with your CRO?
At Workana you’ll find hundreds of freelancers specialized in web design, buyer’s psychology and content marketing, who will help you optimize the performance of your content.
Find more tips in: Advantages of integrating freelancers into your content team
What is Workana?
We invite you to know Workana, the leading freelance marketplace. We’ve been working since 2012 to keep connecting companies and entrepreneurs with remote workers of the most diverse specialty areas.