What is CRO?

CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimisation, and is all about getting your website visitors to then take some desired action.

As discussed one of our blog posts, combining CRO and SEO can have results 10 times greater than SEO or CRO alone.

There are many processes involved, including testing different versions of the same page, known as A/B testing, but the basic process is as follows:

  1. Make the visitor to your website feel instantly at home – just like the first time you walk into a new shop in the shopping mall, within a few seconds you decide whether or not you want to explore further, or if it doesn’t ‘feel right’ then you usually leave before venturing more than a few yards into the shop
  2. Once your website visitor is at home, they start to explore and look around, at this stage you need to provide what they’re looking for and re-assure them they have at least potentially come to the right place.  You have to demonstrate you can provide what they need, and ideally also offer them something further that makes you stand out above competitors who may also offer what they need – some point of differentiation.
  3. Then once your website visitor is comfortable with the ‘feel’ of your website, and knows you should be able to help in some way, then we come to the often overlooked vital step… asking them to take action.  Your so-called ‘call to action’ needs to really stand out, ideally in a contrasting colour (you might have to tell your brand adviser not to be pedantic at this stage if the colour doesn’t quite fit your subtle corporate brand guidelines 🙂 – just inform them that you want some results from your website).  Just like a brightly coloured object on the edge of your desk will keep grabbing your attention, so will a contrasting colour call-to-action on a web-page.
  4. As well as the use of colours, there are other ways to draw attention to a call-to-action button or section on your web-page.  One of the lesser-known techniques is to have an image of a person looking towards the area of the page where the call to action is located; naturally (and subconsciously) the eye moves over to where the person is looking…  Other methods include the use of arrows, white space, or just placing the call-to-action sections right inside the ‘flow’ of the page content, rather than tucked away to one side.