CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)
What is CRO?
CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization is concerned with increasing conversion rate on the website. While SEO is usually targeted at driving traffic to your website, CRO efforts are aimed at what happens to the traffic that comes to your website. CRO experts will test your website for possible issues that prevent your traffic from getting to the bottom of the sales funnel. While the issues vary from website to website, take a look at the most common ones:
- Navigation on the website is confusing or too crowded
- Various programming glitches (for example slow load time)
- Poor quality content that is not conversion-oriented
- Bad quality website design and layout
- Mistakes in pricing configurations
A lot of websites will have at least a couple of conversion rate issues which result in loss of on average 40% of potential sales.
Why is CRO important?
SEO is a constant investment, which means that if you stop investing in SEO today your traffic and therefore sales will start dropping very soon. On the other hand conversion rate optimization is a once-off investment. Once your layout, design or programming issues are fixed, they are fixed permanently unless you do some major changes to your website. This means that unlike SEO that needs constant work, CRO investments will keep driving up your ROI and you will benefit from increased conversion rates and sales forever.
During web traffic analysis CRO experts find ways to get more sales out of already existing traffic. This means that you do not have to invest more into marketing to get more sales. When 20% or more of your sales profits are consumed by marketing investments, each additional sale drives up your ROI drastically. Quality conversion optimization will put sale straight to your profits without having to sacrifice a significant share of it into marketing investment. Even more so for those of you running PPC campaigns: CRO experts will reduce your marketing costs by removing non-converting keywords from ad campaigns and will help increase your conversion rate from PPC ads traffic by optimizing your website.
Conversion Rate Optimization will make all your investments in marketing (SEO, social media, PPC) more profitable as you will increase conversion rate of the traffic you get from these channels. When you improve conversion rate of your website as a whole, you increase conversion rate of all your sources of traffic as a consequence.
Should I invest into CRO?
Return on investments you get from CRO is much higher than return on investments from SEO as you continue to reap the benefits of the conversion optimization long after it’s been done. It does not mean that SEO is less valuable than CRO. CRO is simply another way to increase ROI by investing less money. You do not have to increase your marketing costs to get more sales. Furthermore CRO can potentially reduce your marketing investments. And with CRO making all your future marketing investments more profitable by increasing conversion rates, should there be any doubt about investing into conversion rate optimization services?