So you have great content and your getting visitors to your website or blog post from SEO or social media but you’re just not getting the actions you want – whether that be sales, enquiries, phone calls or e-mail sign ups. Your problem is one of conversion or as we say in the business – CRO or Conversion Rate Optimisation.
CRO can be a very complicated topic but I just want to look into some key points here, starting with split testing. Anyone familiar with paid advertising, particularly Google Adwords will know all about split testing and how important it is. Now in Adwords the split testing is done on the adverts themselves, or more accurately the copy in the adverts. But you can also split test your landing pages (the pages you send the traffic to from the ads). In the same way there is software that allows you to split test pages on your website to test certain elements, such as colour schemes, call to actions (CTA’s) and button placements.
You can send traffic to different versions of your page and see the response rates to the traffic. Over time (and this will depend on how much traffic your website gets) you can make an informed decision on what colours, CTA’s and design work best for your audience, instead of guessing. While there is a lot to be said for reverse engineering your competition and also using your gut instinct, nothing actually beats testing what causes your visitors to respond best in actual real time. This of course may change over time but generally any patterns you find will hold over time and through an evolutionary process you should see the results from your website, whatever that may be, improve dramatically over time.