If you are new to digital and SEO marketing, you are probably wondering what all the talk of Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is all about. More importantly, do you understand what CRO is and how it impacts on your SEO? To fully understand SEO, you need to delve a little deeper into technical SEO strategies.
What is Conversion Rate? How Do I Calculate Conversion Rate?
Before you can understand what a “conversion rate” is, you need to understand what a “conversion” is. In SEO, the term “conversion” refers to a browser/consumer that carries out an action on your website. There are a number of things a consumer can do that makes them a conversion. They can:
- Make a purchase (this is the ultimate conversion, often called “macro-conversion”),
- Request a price or catalogue,
- Subscribe to your newsletter or blog,
- Create a customer account,
- Add products to the shopping cart or wish list,
- Comment on products or leave reviews.
Now that you know what a conversion is, what is conversion rate? Many customers and newbies to digital marketing ask “how do I calculate conversion rate?” and that’s not too difficult to answer. It’s simple mathematics. A conversion rate is calculated by dividing the website traffic by the number of actions carried out on your website by a user.
For example, if your website receives 5000 sessions (visits) and makes 500 conversions (sales, subscriptions etc.), then the conversion rate is worked out like this: 5, 000 ÷ 500 = 10% conversion rate. As part of your marketing strategy, you should determine what your goal conversion rate is, so that you can work on improving your outcomes.
What does conversion rate indicate? Generally speaking, if your conversion rate is high, it means that your customers want the products and services that you offer and they are able to get them easily.
If you are wondering ‘what is a good conversion rate?’ or ‘what is a low conversion rate?’, that one is easy to answer. Most E-commerce websites that are successful have a conversion rate of anything between 11% and 40%. Obviously a 40% conversion rate is far superior to an 11% conversion rate. Regardless of what your conversion rate is, there’s always room for improvement.
Conversion Rate Optimisation Techniques | How to Optimise Your Conversion Rate
What is conversion rate marketing in easy-to-understand terms? Conversion rate marketing is necessary to ensure that visitors to your website become conversions each and every time. It is also designed to encourage visitors to carry out more conversions on the site during a session, such as creating a customer account, signing up for your newsletter, as well as completing a successful product purchase.
There are two good methods of optimising your conversion rate as follows:
Method 1: Analytics
Using Google Analytics and adding tracking for conversions is a good starting point. This method tells marketers and webmasters where they need to focus their attention and how customers are behaving on their site. If you are losing a customer when they enter on a certain page, you will know that something is not working quite right there.
Analytics is hard data that cannot be doubted. By knowing these figures, you can reach your goal conversion rates with greater ease. Some things Analytics based conversion rate optimisation can tell a webmaster or marketer are:
- What devices are most often used to visit your website
- Which pages are the main entry points for your browsers
- Which are the most popular areas of your website
- Where visitors are clicking through from (did they come via a social media platform, your blog, or search engine results?)
- Visitor demographics
- Where users leave your website or what they are doing (what action were they taking) when they decided to leave
Method 2: People
Now that you have a better understanding of how people behave on your website, you can use that data/information to understand the human aspect of it. The questions you want to answer is why customers are behaving the way they are and who your ideal customer is. You want to get to know more about what your ideal customer wants – keeping them happy is your main aim now – or at least it should be.
Here is what you want to know from your customers so that you can work towards your goal conversion rate:
- What made them engage with your website in the first place?
- What sets you apart from your competitors, in their opinion?
- How do they speak about your products, services, and industry? What words and phrases do they use?
- What do they feel would make your website better?
You can gather this information directly from your customers, via your website and social media platforms by using on-site surveys, satisfaction surveys, polls, and testimonial/feedback requests. Asking customers for suggestions is a great way to add a bit of extra value to your website.
Top Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimisation for SEO
It is difficult to speak about conversion rate optimisation in terms of SEO because it does not officially impact on where your website ranks in a search engine results. It is however one of the technical elements that can impact on SEO in the long run.
Remember that Google is all about creating an exceptional user experience and a website that is effectively conversion rate optimised is a website that is offering exceptional value to the browser/consumer. Below are a few benefits to expect when you pay attention to your CRO.
1. Better understanding of your customers.
When you do conversion rate marketing, you get to learn all about your ideal customer. This is the customer that has the most interest in your product and you will have complete peace of mind that you are not wasting time and attention on customers who are not likely to convert.
2. Grow your business with your audience.
Businesses that do not know what their conversion rate is will not see a growth spurt in their business coming at full speed. Unfortunately, when a business runs out of stock when it suddenly expands, it loses the respect and trust of its customer base. By keeping an eye on your conversion rate, you can ensure that you never leave your customers hanging.
3. Good return on your investment.
E-Commerce businesses are all about ROI (Return on Investment). If you are spending money that is not bringing more money in or if you are wasting money along the way, because your marketing campaign is based on guesses; you are not going to be achieving a good ROI. A good ROI is when every cent spent makes a difference to your overall profitability. When you have a close eye on your conversion rates and you put in effort with CRO, your ROI will naturally improve.
4. Create a valuable user experience.
As already mentioned, this is something that Google pays attention to. Customers who find everything they need on your website quickly and find your content of value too will be back time and again. If customers spend a decent amount of time on your website and carry out successful conversions, Google can assume that your website is providing real value to browsers. And that means that the user experience is good. A good user experience converts to better search engine results.
Of course, a good user experience also goes a long way towards developing a relationship of trust with your customers. With online fraud being so prevalent on a global scale, it is difficult for consumers to trust just any source with their payment details. If your website is glitchy, does not have all the information that they need and does not offer value, chances are that they will not trust you with their credit card or banking details. By optimising your conversion rate, you can build a relationship of trust with your customers…and ultimately make more sales.
Conclusion
Conversion rate optimisation impacts SEO by providing a great user experience. Without paying attention to it, your website is at risk of falling down the ranks on search engine result pages. If you want a well-rounded and highly successful SEO campaign in place, incorporate conversion rate marketing as part of your strategy and efforts.