Top 5 Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies
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One of the most significant measures of the success of any SEO campaign is conversion rates. Conversion is the reason why many marketers bother with SEO in the first place.
For instance, the sole reason why an e-commerce website would strive to implement SEO is to get people to visit the website and buy products. If they are getting visitors but not sales, their SEO efforts are not helping them at all.
SEO and conversion rate have a symbiotic relationship. Conversions will be difficult to come by if your website has no traffic, and traffic is useless if nobody is becoming a customer.
A lot of digital marketers make the mistake of thinking implementing SEO on their website is all they need to do to get conversions. You have to incorporate conversion strategies into your SEO strategy to ensure you are attracting high-quality and easy-to-convert traffic. That’s where the term conversion rate optimization comes from.
Conversion rate optimization refers to the techniques you can use to turn visitors to your website into customers.
In this article, we are going to explore the top 5 ways through which you can enhance your conversion rates. We will assume you are already getting traffic, but you are struggling to get conversions. Read along and find some useful conversion rate optimization tips.
1. Know Your Target Audience and Trim Your Scope
If you’ve already managed to drive some traffic to your website through SEO, it means you already know how to target an audience. The question is, are you targeting the right audience? How wide is your scope?
Understanding your target audience is very crucial when it comes to optimizing conversions. You have to know who are your potential customers, and what are their pain points. You also need to trim your targeting scope to an audience with high buying intent.
Failing to trim your scope causes high bounce off rates, which will affect your ranking position. If you target a broad audience, chances are that most of them are not interested in your products or content. They’ll bounce right off your landing page when they see what you are offering.
High traffic is not bad. What’s bad is high bounce off rates, which might be caused by targeting the wrong or a very broad audience.
How do you target an audience with high buying intent? It bows down to your keyword research and use. Keywords are usually derived from search queries. They can reveal the most common search queries within a certain niche.
Keywords can tell you whether the searcher is looking for information or a product. They can also tell you whether the searcher intends to buy anything or not.
The following terms in a keyword show high buying intent:
- Where to buy…
- Cost of…
- Price of…
- How much…
Direct product searches also indicate high buying intent. For instance, if someone searches “13-inch MacBook Pro”, they most likely intend to buy a 13-inch MacBook Pro.
2. User Experience (UX) is a Deal Breaker for Most Visitors.
How does it feel when your visit a page whose loading speeds are too slow? Imagine struggling on a site where navigation is a nightmare and finding what you need takes forever. It’s frustrating. Right!
You’ll probably just head on the next website instead of struggling with a site with an awful user experience.
In 2020, Google started using UX signals to determine rankings. That goes to show just how important user experience is. Even in a physical store, if visitors are struggling to find what they need, they probably walk out and never return.
Your website must offer nothing short of a delightful user experience if you are hoping to get conversions. Below are some of the aspects of a website that affect user experience;
- Site architecture
- Loading speeds
- Responsive designs
- Security
- Visual appeal, etc.
Anything you can do to make your visitors feel comfortable on your website is a big plus. For instance, web designers are beginning to realize that certain color schemes cause eye strain to most people. They are now making sure they use user-friendly color schemes in their designs.
Each website is unique. Try to find unique ways of enhancing the user experience of your website.
3. Leverage Content Marketing
Your website’s content is arguably your greatest resource when it comes to getting conversions. First, your content should be properly optimized to ensure it is attracting high-quality traffic. That is where the target keywords we’ve discussed above become important.
While you are focusing on optimizing your content for search engines, don’t forget you are writing for a human audience. Most marketers focus too much on optimizing content for search engines, that it ends up sounding robotic.
If you want your content to convert, make sure it caters to the readers’ needs in one way or the other. Great content should do one or more of the following;
- Answer questions or provide solutions
- Entertain
- Educate, etc.
In simple terms, ensure your content is valuable. Keep your content clear and concise. It should be easy to consume.
Include some CTAs (Call to Action) in your content. Your CTAs should come after you’ve offered valuable content, explored your audience’s pain points, and proposed solutions. Your CTAs should focus on showing your readers what solutions they are getting. They should also not feel forceful.
4. Avoid Asking for Information You Don’t Need
Conversions are not just buying products. Your type conversion depends on what your website or business is about. A conversion can be a sign-up, download, content share, etc. Most conversions require the user to surrender some personal information.
For instance, if the user wants to buy a product, they have to sign-up and submit personal and financial information. Generally, users are reluctant to submit such information unless they have to. As such, you avoid asking for too much information. Ask for the bare minimum of information needed to complete the conversion.
You should not completely disregard the collection of user information, regardless of how simple conversions are on your website might be. You just need to find a balance between the information you need and asking for too much information.
User data helps you track your conversions. It can also help you analyze your customer base and understand how you can serve them better.
For instance, user information will tell you what kind of demographic is getting converted. You might find out that more men than women are buying your products from user data. If you are selling a unisex product, you’d want to know why that is the case.
If possible, offer some freebies to users that submit their information. Websites that offer subscription products can offer free trials to users who sign-up.
5. Keep Testing and Optimizing
User tastes, preferences, perceptions, and feelings keep changing. That means what is driving conversion today might not be so effective tomorrow. Conversion trends keep changing, and you have to keep up with the trends.
Keep track of your conversion rates. If your traffic is rising, your conversions should rise proportionately. If your conversion rate starts falling, you need to find out what the problem could be.
As mentioned earlier, each business and website is unique in one way or the other. Except for the commonly accepted techniques and standards of driving conversions, you don’t always have to do what everyone else is doing. You can always find unique ways of appealing to your audience and converting them into customers.
Use tools such as Google Analytics to track the behavior of visitors on your site. You can use other conversion rate optimization tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs.
These tools can tell you where your visitors are dropping off along the conversion funnel. You can track the path most visitors take from the landing page to conversion. This can help you find out why visitors are losing interest at a certain point.
You can never perfectly optimize your conversion funnel. Conversation rate optimization is an ongoing process of testing and tweaking.
Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies – Final Thoughts
Conversion rate optimization strategies have to be part of all your digital marketing campaigns. It would be unfortunate to work so hard in a marketing campaign, and sometimes even spend money, only to get no results.
You have to know how you are going to get conversions from the word go. As mentioned above, the strategies we’ve discussed above are just some of the most common methods of increasing conversions. There is a lot more you can do to improve your conversion rates, and it all starts with understanding your audience and their pain points.
If you are struggling to get conversions on your website, you could seek the services of our conversion rate optimization consultants. Digital Marksmen offer conversion rate optimization services, and our experts can help kick your conversion rates a notch higher.