Top CRO Tips: Boosting Your Site to Boost Conversion Rate

Getting people onto your website can be tough enough. But when they’re there, how do you convince them to get in touch? The end goal of your site is to get visitors to convert. The more that do, the better your digital ROI.

So what do you do when you want to boost your site’s conversion rate?

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of increasing the number of people who take certain actions on your site – such as filling out a form, giving you a phone call or using your live chat. You might also track other goals – like clicking on a link or watching a video – but it’s those involving contact that ultimately contribute to the bottom line.

And that’s why CRO is so important.

What is CRO?

In a nutshell, CRO is looking at things to change on your site to convince more people to get in touch. This could be anything – from the colour of your call to action button to the positioning of your forms and even navigation and structure changes. If you think it could potentially affect the chances of your site visitors converting into leads, you can test it as part of your CRO efforts.

CRO is underpinned by psychology. It’s about convincing people to take the actions you want them to take. It can encompass elements from various disciplines, including design, development and even content.

Your efforts to improve conversion rates can involve changing colours, moving important forms and buttons to more prominent positions or changing the wording of pages to subtly convince people to take that next step.

It’s also closely linked to user experience. You want visitors to have a straightforward journey through your site and ultimately end up converting. So it’s important to take a holistic view when looking at CRO, as well as targeting individual elements of the overall picture.

Improving conversion rates

First4Lawyers CRO manager Jason Connelly has one main suggestion for anyone looking to improve conversion rates: “Take a step back. Forget what you think you know and look at your website from the customer’s point of view.”

He advises that data is your starting point. Look at what it tells you. You can start on the basics of CRO with free analytics accounts, like Google Analytics. Which pages aren’t converting as well as they could? Evaluate these pages and identify what the pain points might be.

You can then get a little more advanced and incorporate heatmap software – such as Hotjar or Lucky Orange – to analyse how far people are scrolling down your pages and what they’re clicking on. Identifying the drop-off points will let you address them, helping to keep people on your site.

CRO manager Jason says you can use the information you’ve gathered to build up a picture of your site’s performance, which you can use as a basis to structure a testing plan to then tackle the problems you’ve identified.

What to test

A/B testing – also known as split testing – is one of the most important ways of finding out what actions to implement across your site. You can set up tests to show half your visitors your control page while the rest see the variant. The changes can be major or minor – it just depends what you want to test.

Google Optimize lets you compare different versions of a page for free. You can also pay for more comprehensive services that allow for more testing and more results – but if you’re early in your CRO journey, Google’s offering should be more than enough.

If your variant is getting a better conversion rate, you can implement that change throughout the site. But if your control version is seeing more conversions, you might want to carry out further investigations into what might work better.

You may even want to test elements that attract visitors to your site, rather than targeting them once they land there. You can test page titles and meta descriptions, for example, to see which gets you a higher click-through rate. As we said, you can take a holistic approach with CRO. It’s not purely about choosing the right contrasting colour for your important buttons.

CRO top tips

• Avoid surprises

Make sure your visitors know what will happen when they click a button or link. That means you need to ensure you’re using the right text to describe the button’s purpose.

• Be selective

As we advise in our Digital Marketing Jargon Buster, don’t run too many tests simultaneously or you could struggle to identify where the improvements are coming from.

• Give it time

Let your tests run for at least a fortnight – and start and finish on the same day. That way, you’ll have sufficient traffic to give your results context.