As Search Engines get smarter website owners are going to have to increasingly turn inward to achieve and maintain top positions. Beyond search is the trend of mobile usage outpacing desktop as we roll into the New Year and beyond – thus resulting in less screen real estate to get your message across for the majority of your website visitors. It is fast becoming apparent that the goal to understand the usefulness of a page beyond simple keyword matching should be a wakeup call to anyone still stuck in 2010 tactics.
...Enter Conversion Rate Optimization!
Conversion Rate Optimization is often overlooked in digital marketing by most businesses. SEO and Social Media seem to own the spotlight in the minds of marketers and businesses. CRO on the other hand is in the background lying wait, practiced by only the most savvy website owners.
Why Business owners avoid it: It’s not as visibly noticeable as a #1 ranking or gaining 500 new fans on a social media channel. Also I believe that for a lot of website owners after having invested a lot of time and money into a particular look and feel for a website they don’t want to admit that there are still flaws in the design or things they could do to improve it. There is always something that can be done to improve a website. Admitting that may feel like admitting defeat a bit.
Why Agencies avoid it: I think the reason why so many web design agencies avoid offering conversion optimization is simply because it’s hard to admit that your web design can be improved to the client.
CRO Fact All websites can be improved. Yes even shiny new ones that cost thousands of dollars…
Stop avoiding Conversion Rate Optimization and start optimizing your web experience! The payoff can be huge. Take this sample scenario
- Website A gets 20,000 visits per month with a conversion rate of 2%. This means roughly 400 of those website visitors become customers on a monthly basis
- Website A wants to double the amount of customers they receive on a monthly basis up to 800. They decide to focus 100% on SEO. They are successful in doubling their traffic after 9 months of intensive SEO. This gives them about 800 leads per month.
- Website B also gets 20,000 visits per month with a conversion rate of 2%. They also get roughly 400 customers per month from this amount of traffic.
- Website B wants to double their customers. Instead of focusing only on SEO they also focus on Conversion Rate Optimization. They make some conversion rate changes early in the year and increase their traffic (not as much as A) but are still successful. They get 30,000 visits and only increase their conversion rate by 2%.
Now let’s see where each of our website owners are at:
- Website A: 40,000 visits per month with 2% conversion rate = approx. 800 customers per month
- Website B: 30,000 visits per month with 4% conversion rate = approx. 1200 customers per month!!
It is likely that website B also started seeing a quicker improvement in conversion rate seeing more leads sooner. This would leave a larger annual gap between the two websites!
This example while hypothetical is absolutely representative of real life clients and scenarios. Even small investments in Conversion Rate Optimization have seen fairly significant revenue gains for many clients usually in very little time. On top of that this, you are objectively improving your website experience and pleasing more customers…a win-win for any digital marketer or website owner!
