What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)?

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

‘SEO’ is crucial to digital marketing and it’s one of the most common acronyms you’ll hear in the industry. But, while essential to driving traffic to your site, it’s not the only thing you need. The other crucial acronym to look out for is ‘CRO’ – Conversion Rate Optimisation. 

In this guide, you’ll discover what CRO is, what the benefits are, and how it works, so you can make the most of your traffic and hot leads to grow your business.

What Is CRO?

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is best described as being able to optimise your website by fine-tuning its content, based on the behaviour of your visitors, to increase your chances of each visitor taking the action you want them to take. So helping convert even more of the people that are already on your site, thanks to your SEO, into completing your desired goal (downloads, subscriptions, leads or sales).

What Are The Key Elements Of CRO?

Just like SEO, an effective CRO strategy is an ongoing process covering multiple stages using detailed data analytics. But, at its heart is a combination of research on your website’s current conversions, as well as the overall user experience and how users interact with your site’s design, navigation and content. 

In an overall CRO strategy, the main elements of CRO that should be taken into consideration include:

Web Page Design & Layout

If your site is well designed, loads quickly, and is easy to navigate, visitors should stay on your site for longer.

Content & Copy

Well written, clear, informative and helpful content should answer your site visitor’s question of “how can they help me?” or “can they do what I want them to do?”.

Calls To Action

An engaging ‘call to action’ with a sense of urgency should compel your visitor to do what you want them to do.

Contact Forms

A simple contact form makes it easy for prospects to contact you, especially if they look good and are easy to complete.

How To Calculate CRO

To calculate your conversion rate, you’ll need to take the number of unique conversions (when someone completes your desired goal) and divide it by the total number of users. Then multiply that figure by 100 to give you a percentage. Here’s an example:

Over 1 month, if your website got 43 downloads (or whatever your desired goal is) from 1,250 visitors, your conversion rate would be 43 divided by 1,250 multiplied by 100. That’s a conversion rate of 3.4%.

Now, that might sound pretty low or it might sound pretty high – it all depends on what your desired goal is. But, the thing to remember is a conversion rate will always differ from business to business and from goal to goal.

What Are The Benefits Of CRO?

Over time, a strong CRO strategy will bring the biggest benefit of all with more conversions, more profit and more business growth. While the individual benefits of CRO are plentiful, here are five that are well worth considering to help understand why a data-focused CRO strategy is a worthwhile investment.

1. Know Your Customers

Understanding what your customer wants, how they use your site and what’s causing the obstacle in making that conversion, is crucial. A solid CRO strategy will help you with this.

2. Get Better Content

By understanding what your customer wants and needs from your site, it means you can change and improve your site’s content based on real data to give them a better user experience.

3. Use Existing Traffic

If your SEO is up to scratch, you’ll already be getting plenty of site traffic. Having a solid CRO strategy in place means you can make sure you convert them into customers.

4. Make More Money

Just like SEO, CRO is a long-term process and results won’t happen overnight. But minor changes can bring in a few extra sales which can all add up to increased revenue over time.

5. Beat Your Competitors

CRO will give you the edge over your competitors – maybe only a little, but maybe by a lot. Having a fully optimised site could be the nudge each visitor needs to make that sale.

The CRO Process

So how does an effective CRO process work? Well, with plenty of methods and analytical tools available, it can be broken down into five key phases:

1. The Research Phase

The first step is to look into how and why users are looking at your site with quantitive and qualitative research and analysis. This will tell you where the problems are and exactly what each problem is.

2. The Hypothesis Phase

Using the data gathered in the previous phase, you can make an informed statement on how strategic CRO can help you. This will include what any changes should be, why, and how they’ll help.

3. The Prioritisation Phase

Using the Potential, Importance, and Ease method means you can start on site pages with high traffic, offering the best income potential, with changes you can make quickly.

4. The Testing Phase

This important stage involves testing different versions of your pages using A/B testing, split testing, and multivariate testing methods to find the best outcome.

5. The Learning Phase

CRO is an ongoing process. Through the various stages, you’ll be able to learn and understand what works and what doesn’t, giving you the chance to refine along the way for better results each time.

CRO vs. SEO

SEO and CRO are two very different practices, but they’re both closely related and incredibly important for your website. But crucially, they both work together to boost rankings and conversions. SEO focuses on increasing traffic to your site while CRO focuses on making each visitor take the positive action you want them to take, whether that’s making a purchase, downloading an ebook, signing up for your newsletter, or any other goal.

And, much like SEO, CRO isn’t a one-off thing – both need to be a regular part of your digital marketing strategy. If you’re consistently on top of your SEO game, you’ll already be getting the traffic and visitors you’re looking for. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have a high conversion rate. So effective CRO is an ongoing process that improves the chances of those leads following through into a full conversion.

Improve Your CRO With Improve Position

CRO is often overshadowed by SEO and often largely forgotten about. But, as this guide explains, there’s a very real benefit to CRO that can’t be overstated. Improve Position is the results-driven SEO agency to help improve your online business success and we regularly put clients in touch with our recommended web designers and developers who can help with perfecting your CRO.

For more information, contact us today to get started and take full advantage of the site traffic you already have to increase those conversions