The first step in any SEO campaign is to increase rankings for keywords searched regularly related to your services. Once those keywords are ranking and your traffic has started to increase, you may find you are not receiving the number of leads you expected. This is where your marketing partner employs a tactic known as conversion rate optimization or CRO. We are going to walk through a few of the ways you can optimize your website’s structure and content to convert your traffic more readily.
User Experience
The first thing to consider when looking to optimize for conversion rate is the experience your users encounter when they enter your website. Here are a few questions to ask:
- What is the primary action you want your users to take?
- Do you have a secondary action you want your users to take?
- Are these primary and secondary actions prominent on the site?
- Are there any other prominent elements that may take away from the primary and secondary actions?
Your website should be designed to lead your users down a path. Using ourselves as an example, we want our home page to give valuable insights and stats on successful SEO campaigns. Much of the information found here is more generic, top-level style information. It is the sub-pages, such as our Search Engine Optimization page that has the finer details related to SEO. Once they enter this page, we know they are digging for more information. This is where interlinking importance arises. You want to make sure your users are easily able to navigate to related pages and supporting information. The movement should be intuitive and backed with intention. If you have supporting elements like case studies, testimonials, and reviews, this would be a great area to interlink them. Alternatively, you would not want to link to a blog talking solely about a PPC campaign on this page since it is centered around SEO.
Informative and Relevant Content
We talk about content a lot here at Firestarter. At its core, SEO is centered around the words found on a website’s pages, so it makes sense it would keep coming up. Curating and building on a comprehensive and informative content plan helps you stay on top of industry trends and keeps your users in the loop as well. This is why interlinking is so important, as noted above. You do not want blogs sitting on the site which are unable to be accessed unless you have a specific reason for this. With this in mind, the content on your site becomes a tool to support your main services pages. We have case studies and articles centered around results and topics we discuss in our content. As long as we have these pieces of content interlinked properly, our users are able to easily navigate to those supporting pieces of content.
Try New Ideas
It is never a bad idea to do some comparative, or A/B testing on these types of tactics. You may be able to tweak your calls to action a little bit by moving them around on the page, or changing them up altogether. You may be under the impression that folks want to pick up the phone and call you, but customers would rather fill out a form and go through the process that way. Maybe this change falls flat on its face, but reversion should be a simple process. You can’t know what you don’t know until you know what you know. As noted above, taking the time to put yourself in the shoes of your visitors can be an eye-opening experience for any business owner.
When whittled down, conversion rate optimization involves understanding the actions you want your website visitors to take and then making it as easy and intuitive as possible to get them to take that action. If you’d like to chat about ways you could optimize your website for better conversions give us a call today!
