Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Maximize Your SEO and PPC

SEO and PPC are flipsides of the same coin — the coin you spend in order to get people to arrive on your website. But the process doesn’t end there: if the visitor leaves without spending money, signing up, or doing whatever your website is designed to get them to do, that coin was spent in vain. That process is called “converting” the visitor, and the percentage of visitors that convert is called your “conversion rate.”

As you can imagine, “Conversion Rate Optimization” (CRO) is the process of making sure that as many of your visitors as possible turn into customers, or sign-ups, or whatever you want them to turn into.

How Do You Optimize a Conversion Rate?
The answer is as simple as it is confounding: you try different things, and you stick with what works. That’s misleading, however, because it sounds like trial-and-error. CRO isn’t trial-and-error — it’s trial-and-error backed up by rigorous scientific collection of and statistical analysis of data.

CRO is, in many ways, the ‘flip side’ of web design — it’s the testing and revision of your design in order to improve your design’s ability to accomplish your goals. Using simple A/B tests or complex multivariate tests, you can establish which variations of your website are converting more effectively, and make those variations the ‘normal’ — and then create some new variations and test them as well.

CRO Process

1. Research potential obstacles to sales on the landing page in question.
2. Make a change that seems to overcome/eliminate that obstacle.
3. A/B test against the original.
4. Keep the page that performed better.
5. Start Over

An Iterative Process
It’s meaningful that the cycle you see above is a full cycle — because CRO doesn’t stop until you decide you’re happy with your conversion rate. We can test details as small as the text color on your call to action button, or as large as ‘does this completely redesigned page work more or less effectively than the original?’ We recognize that there is a point of diminishing returns, and we’re not going to continue pushing you to optimize when we hit that point — but for most small businesses, that point is quite a ways down the road…and every step between here and there represents a meaningful boost to your bottom line.

Compound Interest for Your Website
The real power of conversion rate optimization is that it’s money spent improving the return on the money you’ve already spent — much like being able to spend money improving the interest rate on an investment you’ve already made. Can you imagine what you could do if you had that kind of power in the financial sphere? CRO simply makes a mountain of financial sense for anyone who is already investing in traffic, be it through SEO, PPC, social media, or literally any other source.