CRO in 2022: A Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization

Why do you need a guide to conversion rate optimization? Because the ultimate goal for any website owner is to get as many conversions from their website as possible.

While it’s nice to have tons of organic traffic, it’s useless if none of these site visitors take the next step and convert into qualified leads or customers. The truth is that most websites struggle to get conversions even if they get tons of site visitors.

What’s the solution? Conversion rate optimization, of course.

That’s why we’ve created this beginner’s guide to conversion rate optimization. This guide will teach you everything you need to know to get started with conversion rate optimization.

So, let’s get started.

What is a Conversion Rate?

A conversion on a website can refer to site visitors taking any desired action, not necessarily just making a purchase.

The conversion rate is the percentage of people who visited your site and took the desired action (converted).

It is calculated as:

(No. of conversions/Total site visitors)*100.

Needless to say that the higher the conversion rate the better it is for your business. That’s where conversion rate optimization comes into the picture.

Let’s understand what conversion rate optimization is and why you should care about it.

Why Should You Invest in Conversion Rate Optimization?

Conversion rate optimization is the process of improving the conversion rate of a website. It’s important because the ultimate goal of any business is to get more leads and conversions, not just website traffic.

Conversion rate optimization can help you get more leads and sales, making it crucial to the success of your business. This is especially important for eCommerce websites as they depend on the conversions made through their websites. While CRO can help you get more orders, it’s up to you to manage your orders well and make your customers happy enough to make repeat purchases.

Now that we’ve understood the importance of CRO let’s discuss exactly how to get started with it.

Five Areas Where You Can Implement Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies

Here are five important aspects where you should start your conversion rate optimization process.

1. Calls-To-Action

CTAs are at the core of CRO and that’s why they’re first in this guide to conversion rate optimization for beginners.

CTAs guide your site visitors to take the next step, be it signing up for your newsletters or making a purchase.

So how can you optimize your CTAs?

Here are a few tips:

• Keep them short and impactful
• Use strong action words
• Make sure they’re clearly visible
• Place them strategically to make them the focus of a page
• Use text-based CTAs along with buttons as these look more natural and get more clicks

2. Forms

The next aspect of great conversion rate optimization is forms. These are used to capture useful information about your site visitors that you can use for future marketing communications and other purposes.

How does conversion optimization come into the picture here? Using CRO tactics you can optimize your forms for more conversions. There are three aspects to optimizing forms—style, length, and placement.

Style – Make your forms visually appealing and engaging. Design something different than a boring email capture form and gamify it.

Length – The shorter the form, the higher the chances of people filling it. So, limit the length of your form by creating forms with only the essential fields.

Placement – Placing the forms above the fold is generally considered better for CRO. Still, you should use A/B testing and see what works best for your site.

3. Site Structure

One of the key rules of conversion rate optimization is to make your site easy to navigate. Keep your site structure simple, yet appealing. Make it easy for first-time site visitors to find what they’re looking for. Create category and product pages or any other form or site hierarchy that makes logical sense for your users. Hire a UX designer to improve the overall design of your site and its UX performance.

4. Website Speed

Another important aspect of this guide to conversion rate optimization is site speed. Most people will leave your website if it takes more than a few seconds to load. This makes page speed crucial for conversion rate optimization. Since images and videos are often the main culprits for slowing down the loading speed, that’s where you should begin your conversion rate optimization. Use image compression tools to reduce image size and make them easy to load. Also, use a content distribution network and caching to further optimize your site speed. Use optimized video templates to keep your video sizes in check while also making them engaging.

5. Landing Page Design

Coming to the most important part of this beginner’s guide to conversion rate optimization, let’s discuss how to optimize your landing pages.

After all, most of the conversions happen from landing pages as these are where your new site visitors often land.

While designing a landing page keep all the above elements in mind and structure it in a way to make everything come together beautifully. Use a mix of text and images, keep your CTAs the focus of your page, place your forms strategically, etc. Take Netflix’s landing page, for example, which has a clean and simple design, a one-line form, and a clearly visible CTA.

Source: Netflix

Also, use your primary keyword throughout your landing page content and keep the content impactful and to the point. These CRO tips will optimize your landing page conversion rates.

Ready to Use This Guide for Conversion Rate Optimization?

You now know what conversion rate optimization is and why it’s crucial for your business. Now it’s time to implement the CRO strategies mentioned in this guide to conversion rate optimization for your business.

Use this guide to get started with CRO and drive more conversions from your website. Start with the five most important areas mentioned above and then expand from there.