Top 7 Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices - BFO

Conversion rate optimization is the key to a successful business website. It is the process of conducting regular updates to your website’s landing pages, ensuring they are “converting” as many site visitors as possible. Site conversions can come in the form of email subscriptions, online or offline sales, or form submissions to name a few. High conversion rates ensure your sales cycle remains steady by producing a flow of leads who interact with your site, with the hopes of converting them into customers.

Poor conversion rate optimization can be a critical problem for both small and large business enterprises alike. In today’s business world where digital marketing can’t be ignored, conversion rates are a key metric to determine the success of your online marketing strategies. Here are some effective conversion rate optimization techniques that  we at Be Found Online have tried and tested and recommend to our clients..

1.  Understand your market and customer

This is a crucial step in your conversion rate optimization journey. It involves getting to know your audience, competitors, and dynamics of your industry. Conversion is all about the mechanics of our customer’s desires. To fully optimize your site’s conversions, you need to understand your customer’s needs and gain a better understanding of how users interact with your website.

You can do this by measuring how your site visitors behave within the existing sales cycle and identifying where they are dropping out of the customer journey. This knowledge can point you to crucial areas where barriers need to be removed to help customers more easily reach the end goal, conversion.

Website analytics is not the only tool that can inform our optimizations. Communicating directly with your customers allows us to gain insight into their desires and dislikes. You can do this using live chat features on your website or through simple customer satisfaction surveys. 

2.  Utilize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools

Effective search engine optimization enhances your site’s visibility on search engines by ensuring it appears on the first  Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The proper SEO tools help you see what keywords are relevant on the web, and allow you to hone in on content topics that will drive traffic.

Keyword research helps you create meaningful and relevant content that is appealing to your customers. Searcher intent is critical when applying SEO tactics to boost conversion rate optimization. Create various pieces of content catered to individual stages of the sales cycle and create appropriate internal linking, linking to another page within the same domain, and calls to action that nurture potential customers. Don’t ignore the technical side of SEO either, and select a search engine optimization agency (like Be Found Online!) to work with. Simple technical tactics like metadata optimization, redirect strategies, and submitting a clean 200 status code sitemap to Google Search Console can have a big impact on SERP rankings.

3.  Optimize for mobile

Most people today visit websites using smartphones. Your site needs to be mobile friendly to keep up with the modern smartphone-based online market. Follow mobile site best practices by using the minimum recommended font size, and ensuring buttons are large enough for fingers to tap.

Boosting your site’s loading speed is now more than a user experience optimization, it’s a ranking factor. Google’s latest Page Experience Update prioritized Core Web Vitals, which are a set of standardized metrics that help measure how a user experiences a web page, as a major ranking factor. What this means is that site speed is now essential to ranking higher in the SERPs.  

To help improve these factors, you can use image compression (we recommend ShortPixel), export images at their desired display dimensions, defer loading of off-screen assets, and utilize browser caching. Also, employing the use of Content Delivery Network (CDN) helps websites load faster by delivering content via a highly-distributed network of servers. To gain a better understanding of your site speed, have your SEO agency run a report on Core Web Vitals performance, or use tools like GT Metrix, PageSpeedTest.org, and Google’s Page Speed Insights for further reporting.

4.  Employ video content

Quality and personalized videos are a great asset to have in your conversion rate optimization toolkit. Not only are they proven to be more engaging than static content, but the growth of video marketing over the past few years has indicated 6 out of 10 people would prefer to view short videos rather than watch television. It is also estimated that by 2022 videos will account for more than 80% of global web traffic.  

There are tons of video marketing tools available in the market today to help you create catchy video content that will function as marketing tools and conversation starters. However, it is essential you use the right type of video and make it personalized, mobile-optimized, and targeted for it to act as a conversion rate optimization tool. Also, including transcripts of your videos as text on the page can help capture users from an SEO perspective.

5.  Conduct A/B testing

A/B testing allows you to test various elements of your landing pages against visitor feedback to learn what is working and what is not. Since conversion rate optimization is all about capturing user’s attention, and converting them to customers, we need to rely on data from A/B testing to inform optimization decisions.

In this guide to A/B Testing, it is clear the data gleaned from testing your site’s event performance can potentially help solve visitor pain points, get better ROI from existing traffic, reduce bounce rates, and continuously improve your website based on evolving business goals. A/B testing should not be ignored when it comes to conversion rate optimization techniques, and you can employ various types of testing all across your website to put your best foot forward for higher conversions.  

6.  Retarget

Let’s face it, retargeting works. Studies have indicated that eCommerce businesses report an average growth of conversion rates by 128% when using retargeting, and in general retargeted users are 70% more likely to convert compared to those that are not retargeted.

Retargeting is often used when attempting to reduce cart abandonment and in more ecommerce applications. However, many brands use retargeting in their brand awareness efforts by reinforcing past interactions with your site and increasing their likelihood of becoming a customer. Increasing your touch points with your website visitors is proven to increase conversion rates.

7.  Include a call-to-action (CTA)

A call-to-action phrase can make or break your website copy. It’s a subtle – or not so subtle – request that prompts your site visitors to take a desired action. Your CTA is arguably the most crucial element of your landing pages. Most marketing teams and businesses are likely to ignore their call-to-action as they adopt other conversion rate optimization best practices. However, an expertly designed and well-placed CTA can turn your site visitors into customers.

Don’t forget that a CTA strategy should be comprehensive, and not just focused on one single button. Sure, you may have a main call to action, but ensure there are multiple ways for users to interact with content after they have digested it. This could include internal linking, multiple CTA button placements on a page, and use of different colors and button copy. Don’t forget to use A/B testing to test performance of your changes and constantly adapt based on data feedback from your site’s users.

Conversion rate optimization needs time and commitment, but a good  SEO agency  can do the heavy lifting for you to help you achieve more conversions. We at Be Found Online can help you move your business to the next level of growth through efficient conversion rate optimization. Please contact us today to begin the conversation.