Driving more traffic to your website or blog is all well and good — so long as that traffic stops, stays a while, and opts in to whatever it is you have to offer. Unfortunately, a lot of the traffic roaming around the Internet is going to pass you by if you haven’t taken steps to optimize your conversion rate.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is how a website or landing page successfully facilitates a website visitor’s experience so that he or she converts into a customer, reader, client, etc., and pulling it off needs to be an essential part of your online marketing and business strategy. Even if you’ve never considered CRO before, here are five ways to increase your conversion rate optimization.
1. Use the Right Keywords
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At the heart of all good SEO and CRO is the right use of the right keywords. While there are plenty of other important considerations to conversion, your first priority needs to be getting the right kind of traffic to your site, which means you need to utilize the keywords and keyword phrases your target audience is typing into the search engines that bring them to you — or to your competitor. Here are some tips for developing the best keywords and phrases to use throughout your site:
- Think like your ideal customer. What words and phrases would you search with?
- Get specific. It’s true that more general keywords get used more routinely in searches, but the more specific a searcher is, the closer she is to being ready to make a purchase, and the higher you’re likely to rank in search results.
- Use a keyword research tool. Generate relevant keywords with sites like The Free Keyword Tool from Wordstream and Google’s Keyword Planner.
2. Improve Your Landing Pages
Optimizing your conversion rate requires that every landing page a potential customer finds — whether through search engines or PPC ads — is fully optimized. Your potential customers should feel like the page they’ve reached is the one they were expecting to find. Therefore, you need to ensure that your PPC ads and meta descriptions all accurately correspond to the page a potential customer is going to reach when she clicks on an ad or search result.
Additionally, the design of your landing page is also important. Within roughly 8-10 seconds, a visitor to your landing page needs to understand what it is you have to offer, and why she should choose you over your competitors. Headlines, calls to action, graphics, colors, and layout must all be executed in a manner that allows for quick and clear comprehension.
3. Add Proof a.k.a. Testimonials
New and potential customers want to feel confident that they can trust you to take care of their credit card information and deliver on the products or services you’re promising. Trust, then, is a key component to increasing your conversion rate. To that end, you need to include some proof that you’re reliable on landing pages and throughout your site. Customer testimonials — especially videos or quotes accompanied by a picture, case studies, and statistics all increase a potential customer’s confidence that he is making a good choice by doing business with you.
4. Boost Your Visible Credibility
In addition to testimonials and case studies, make use of other credibility boosts to improve your CRO. “Trust” seals from sites like the Better Business Bureau and other reputable national and international business cooperatives let visitors know you’re serious about your reputation, which makes conversion more likely. Offering a guarantee also increases customer confidence in your product or service, and because the risk they’re taking is lower, a guarantee is more likely to convince them to opt in.
5. Write Excellent PPC Ads
PPC ads are pay-per-click ads that form the borders of most social media sites, search engines, and the like. Designed to appear based on the user’s unique keyword query or browsing history, PPC ads have the potential to draw in exactly the right kind of customer — if they’re well executed. Each of your PPC ads needs to correspond with a high degree of relevance to the keyword searches your ideal audience uses. The use of long-tail keywords — explained here— are especially helpful when crafting effective PPC ads.
Be sure to only accomplish a single goal in your PPC ads, however. Far too often, companies try and sell everything they have to offer in a small, clickable space. Instead, develop multiple PPC ads that are all different from one another and built around a single theme or potential query. That way, if you’re a flooring store, you can target people looking for plush, synthetic carpeting in one ad and people looking for hardwood flooring in another.
Improve your business by increasing your CRO with these five tips. From writing better PPC ads to earning trust, better conversion is just a few steps away.