As an online business owner, the internet is your playground full of opportunities to increase your sales.
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Maybe you’re using some highly effective digital marketing strategies already, like dabbling into online ads, email marketing, setting up sales funnels, and so on.
With all of your efforts, what are you doing to get as many customers as you can to buy from you?
At the essence of your efforts lies website optimization, a powerful tool because it can boost search traffic-and eventually sales- if you do it the right way. [source]
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a website optimization technique that helps your website rank higher in search engine results.
When users search for a given keyword (e.g., how to plan for a wedding), your website is likely to show up in the first page of Google if your pages are well-optimized for that keyword.
As your website begins to show up at the top of the organic search results, you’ll draw people closer to your brand and acquire more customers.
On the flip side, while all these techniques may result in a boost in your organic visitation (the people who naturally find you), how do you ensure these visitors make a purchase on your website?
How do you get them to take action? Here’s where CRO comes in.
What is CRO?
In the marketing world, CRO stands for “Conversion Rate Optimization” and it’s a conversion channel that defines a series of finite steps that you should follow in order to get the most benefit from your online products/services.
The conversion rate is the measure of how many visitors take action on your website with the goal to keep them there as long as you can.
The CRO process sets out to attract visitors to your site and works hand in hand with SEO to bring you positive results.
When it comes to Conversion Rate Optimization, your goal is to achieve high conversion rates on your website and as a marketer, your job is to attract customers to your website and retain them.
This is the main idea behind any sales or conversion funnel. A conversion funnel or a sales funnel will help you make the necessary steps to promote your products or brand so that you don’t get off track.
However, to build a highly-productive CRO strategy, you’ll need to have some essential skills in web design, copywriting, and analyzing the results of your various campaigns. You can always request a quote for CRO Optimization and SEO Services from our SEO Company, Cardinal Digital Marketing.
1. Web design
No matter what stage you’re in of your online business, if you don’t have a highly-skilled web designer, then you may want to consider hiring a professional.
Or better yet, learn to do it yourself. Take up online courses at Lynda or Udemy and come away with a new skill that will be helpful to your business and save money.
A good web design not only makes your website cool and nice to use, but it also encourages continued interaction with your website. Designing and developing website, is consider to be one of the most important steps in a SEO Services checklist.
And the easier web visitors can follow your CTA’s, the better the chances of boosting conversion rates.
2. Copywriting
Copywriting is another powerful aspect of conversion rate optimization that can help you to get better results. In other words, you should start “copywriting for conversions”, says expert online marketer Ryan Battles.
If you understand how to clearly communicate your ideas, thoughts, and messages, then prospects will want to get on board with you, too.
However, not everyone knows how to craft persuasive words without coming off as a salesperson.
But there are resources out there that can help…invest the money and time to learn to copywrite and improve your writing skillsand you’ll be on your way to increasing your search engine traffic.
3. Analytics
Recall the concept of a conversion or sales funnel…remember how it’s all about capturing enough data about your customers in the funnel stages? This data can be analyzed to produce results or give you some insight into what you need to adjust in your sales strategy to reach more customers.
That’s why developing analytical skills is important if you want to get the most out of a CRO strategy.
One thing you should note is that CRO should be implemented from the premise of sales and marketing. If you already have a running sales and marketing strategy without a CRO, you only need to incorporate it.
And the earlier you do that, the better.
Once the CRO is in place, visitors start flowing into it resulting in a direct increase in your sales and overall revenue.
A CRO Scenario
CRO is used with a variety of online marketing testing techniques to determine possible ROI. Suppose you have a website with 100 visitors whose conversion rate is 3%. Let’s assume CRO will increase the conversion rate to 4%.
When you want to test the implication of CRO on this website, you’ll have to analyze these two scenarios using A/B testing.
The difference gives the possible ROI increment. Now, you can clearly see whether you’re plunging into the deep end or rising above your competitors.
It’s important to test a CRO campaign, otherwise you’re just spinning your wheels.
A CRO strategy looks at sales funnel data and customer personas to see if they are matching up in the choices customers are making. Then you can figure out what works best and adjust it. Fortunately,CROs are highly flexible. Therefore, careful planning should be made before incorporating it to quickly into the overall SEO strategy.
With these two tools at your disposal, you’re bound to reach new heights in your online business.
How to Increase Your Search Traffic and Website Optimization
A CRO is mainly concerned with prompting action from anyone who visits your website.
So how do you make them visit your website in droves?
Increase Your Search Traffic
Traffic is defined as the net flow of visitors to a website. Good online entrepreneurs and website owners go the extra mile to implement this. It’s not an easy path but it’s worth it in the end if you don’t give up and take the right steps.
Avoid shortcuts and use these acceptable ways to increase your search traffic:
1). Search engines: Search engines like Google can send you heaps of traffic to your website or landing page as long as your page is optimized. So as you create articles for the web, pay close attention to these three key areas:
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- Keywords
Ensure that your page is optimized for the main keyword you’re trying to rank for.
Your title and descriptions should be modeled in such a way that, when your content pops up on the search page, a user can easily relate to it. Don’t be concerned with keyword density when optimizing your articles, just try to answer people’s questions in a clear, easy-to-understand way.
If you have any doubt you about optimization process, contact our Atlanta SEO Company, we provide all in one SEO Services.
2). Useful content: While you may be out promoting your product, don’t forget to cover in detail the information that your target audience is looking for.
Even though it’s important to optimize your content for the right keyword, don’t force it. Use keywords in a natural way and don’t pay attention to the so-called keyword density rule.
3). Facebook Ads: By targeting potential buyers on Facebook with a suitable ad, you increase your chances of conversion, awareness, and drive targeted traffic to your website.
Most people spend a lot of time on social media, especially Facebook. But instead of waiting for them to find you, you actually go out and find them.
The beauty of this is that it’s only potential customers, the people who are likely to buy from your business, who are targeted. And what’s nice is that Facebook has all this sorted out and organized so that you don’t have to figure it out from scratch.
4). Google Ads: Google is undoubtedly the most popular search engine and thankfully it offers online marketers its own advertising platform — Google Ads.
When you place ads on Google, you’ll be able to generate traffic from search engines and display networks on other websites.
This technique helps you to reach more people and drive traffic to your website.
Statistics show that there are 4 billion searches on Google every single day. Therefore, you can imagine the amount of traffic you can generate from placing ads on Google.
5. Influencer marketing: Ever see those people on social media with millions of followers?These people are called influencers. Their opinions on products are highly esteemed by their followers and have likely built their credibility on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, blog, or through public speaking.
According to Sprout Social, “70% of teenage YouTube subscribers trust YouTube creators more than traditional celebrities”.
Therefore, connecting with a social influencer or online influencer to market your brand, product or service will definitely result in more sales for your business.
It’s a great way to leverage someone else’s audience without struggling to build one yourself — especially when you’re just getting started online.
6. Guest blogging: Guest blogging is the simple process of pitching influential bloggers and website owners in your industry with your content idea and leveraging your connections with them. [source]
For example, if you specialize in selling baby products, you can write an article for a pediatrician who in turn features it on her blog. This is a great way to get backlinks as well as traffic into your website.
In all of this, remember to utilize a keyword tool to find the best keywords for your content pages. Since Google is the ultimate search engine we’re mostly interested in getting ranked on, you should be using the Google Keywords Planner.
When you find the right keywords, build your content around them in order to take advantage of recurring traffic from search engines.
Web Optimization
“Web optimization is the process of increasing your website performance by taking into aspect critical factors such as speed” ~ SaaSBrand.
Here is simple language to help effectively optimize your website:
1). Image Optimization: Ever notice hoe some websites load words long before images? Well, suppose these images were the products you are selling, what is your audience likely to notice first? This is why you should spend some time focusing on optimizing the images throughout your entire website.
Slow image load times may cause your potential customer to bounce out of your site. Your web developers should probably know better than to use large images, but it’s always something good to monitor. Make sure that you optimize your images so that they load fast.
2). Reduce Http requests: As a website owner, you probably know a little about this. Http requests are the request made to the server to request for specific information.
When a user tries to access certain functionalities on your website, an http request is sent to the server. However, these requests slow down the load time of your websites and consequently, your web pages could take too long to load. Therefore, you should reduce the amount of HTTP requests you’re making to the server to speed up load time.
Reducing HTTP requests will optimize your website.
3). Caching: This is the process of storing your data closer to the server, which reduces the time taken to retrieve it. This illustration from Oracle explains it better:
Unfortunately, storing too much data on your cache might prove to be a problem. Therefore, you need to figure out a way of leveraging your browser to clear the data after a few days (like put a time limit of 7 days on it).
4). Content Delivery Network (CDN): This is a network of servers that contain copies of your files. Therefore, when users implement searches, files are fetched from the servers closest to them.
Take for instance you have a centralized server in the US and a user in the UK wants access to some files on your server. The total time it takes to do that is huge, but having a server as part of your CDN in the UK solves this problem.
Apart from having a good conversion channel, you need to incorporate the above-mentioned functionalities into your website to please and retain your web visitors.
Conclusion
The above recommendations will give some insight on how to build a strong online presence for your business and increase conversion rates.
A good online business means happy customers who will continue to buy from you and even refer friends, fans, and family members your way.
