Also known as Conversion Rate Optimisation
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) is a buzzword that’s chucked about the digital marketing world like confetti at a Las Vegas wedding. It’s an important part of SEO, but what the flip does CRO actually mean?
CRO is a methodology facilitated by a series of tools and theories to make people do more of what you want them to on your website. CRO is used to increase conversions on websites.
Put another way, CRO is the fancy pants digital marketing name given to anything that improves the results of your website. What we’re really talking about is optimisation; the industry has just given it an acronym because people in tech love an acronym as much as an anteater likes ants (possibly more).
You might want people to buy more tat from your online store, or you might desire more people to join your email newsletter list. Whatever ever it is you want your punters to do, CRO is the method of optimising the user experience (UX) of your website so they do more of it.
How many people visit your website every month? How many of those people buy stuff, sign up for stuff or contact you? If the answer is ‘chuff all’ then you need the magic of conversion rate optimisation. With CRO you can increase the percentage of visitors to your lovely website who actually do as they are told.
Every one of your website visitors who don’t ‘convert’ is a missed opportunity. A good website is the polar opposite of a baseball film made by Kevin Costner – build it and they won’t come.
The very best CRO strategies focus on learning who their target audience is. Then they launch on a never-ending journey of proving to their audience that they can get want they want easily, cheaply, painlessly, or whatever else reveals itself to increase the number of conversions.
The methods put into play in CRO and many, and the terminology is sometimes bewildering, but the results are the same. More goodness.
Why is CRO important in SEO?
Because ensuring our website visitors are in a conversion funnel, hurtling toward our conversion goals, a focus on CRO goes hand in glove with SEO.
From an SEO perspective researching and optimising for the correct keywords helps deliver the right type of visitor to your website, greatly increasing the chances of visitors from a search engine (organic website traffic) carrying out a desired action when hitting a perfectly crafted (but ever-evolving) landing page.
We’ve said it many times in this SEO Glossary and elsewhere on the Yeseo website, but in SEO success breeds success. Google knows how people use your website (especially if you use Google Analytics tools), so if they see the Internet equivalent of many smiling happy faces, then they will know that you are the best in show.
CRO is the process of proving to the great unwashed swathes of humanity AND to Google that you are the essential source for whatever it is you are shoving into the world via a web page.
Takeaway
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) get more of your visitors through to the shopping cart, signed up to your newsletter or downloading your brochures. Test, measure, optimise, test, measure, optimise. Forever.
