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9 Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) Best Practices for Better Lead Generation

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If your website conversion rate isn’t entirely where you’d like it to be, the good news is that you can fix it with a couple of small tweaks!

Conversion rate optimisation (or CRO) is the science of adjusting certain elements of your website to increase the number of users that convert. By “convert”, we mean customers that carry out a specific action on your website, whether that’s buying a product, signing up for your newsletter, or filling in a lead enquiry form.

We’re experts in conversion rate optimisation best practices at Bubblegum Search. With this in mind, we’ve put together nine examples of conversion rate optimisation to supercharge your website.

Give them a go and improve your conversion rate today!

1. Set a goal

Dartboard with four darts on it

The first tip when it comes to conversion rate optimisation best practice is to set a goal. When you have a target conversion rate, you’ll have something to aspire to.

What’s the ideal conversion rate to target? It depends on your industry and the goals you want to achieve. If you sell £5 pairs of socks, you’re going to experience a higher conversion rate than you would if you sell £500 trainers!

If you’re looking for a base point, WordStream recommends that the median average conversion rate is 2.35%. If you get 5.31%, you’re in the top 25%; if you get over 11.45%, you’re in the top 10% of all organisations!

Look at your current stats to see where you are and where you want to be regarding conversion rates. If you’re not monitoring goals on Google Analytics yet, it’s a good time to start!

2. Tweak your call-to-actions

One of the easiest ways to improve your conversion rate is by looking at your call-to-actions (CTAs). These are the prompts on a page that encourage customers to act, for example, a ‘buy now’ button.

Changing the text, placement, colour, even the shape, can all affect your CTAs. While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy to create the perfect call-to-action, we have some tips that will help.

  • Know your target audience. This will give you insight into the call-to-action that appeals most to them (more on this later)
  • Keep your text strong and short. For example, ‘sign up’ rather than ‘sign up to our exclusive offer’
  • Stick to one call-to-action on a page. When you start using different CTAs, you risk confusing the user

A/B testing is a fantastic way to test your CTAs – we’ll talk about it more at the end of this article.

3. Review the customer journey

A group of coworkers working on a customer journey case study

When looking at how you can improve your conversion rate, it’s essential to consider the customer journey from beginning to end. You can then fix any problems that might be stopping prospective customers from converting.

For example, are there any dead links on your website? Is the checkout process too complicated? Is your page copy too long or boring?

The easiest way to review the customer journey is to put yourself in the shoes of a customer and carry out tasks on your site. Try buying a product or filling in a contact form, on both desktop and mobile. 

Do you encounter any potential issues that might cause customers to click the close button on their browsers?

Alternatively, you can set up tracking software like Hotjar or Crazy Egg to see how customers use your website.

4. Make your site faster

We all have shorter attention spans than ever before. If you’ve made it to this point of our conversion rate optimisation best practice article, we salute you!

This means it’s essential that your website loads and runs quickly. Nearly 70% of customers admit that page speed has a significant impact when it comes to buying online. 

The best place to start is to look at your existing page speed. Google PageSpeed Insights is an excellent place to start, as it gives you a rating out of 100 for both mobile and desktop.

Once you know your page speed, you can make changes to your site to knock it down. Two easy ways to make your site load faster are to optimise your images and audit your redirects. While redirects are great for taking your site users to the right page, too many can make your site load more slowly.

5. Know your target audience

Whiteboard with the word audience on it written with a black marker

Creating website content with the right target audience in mind can go a long way to increasing your conversion rate.

Understanding your target customer means you can provide content in line with their needs and make that all-important connection.

For example, let’s say your target audience is toddler mums and dads. There’s not much point in providing a 100-page white paper as a lead magnet as they’re not going to have the time to read it. Instead, why not offer a short explainer video they can watch on the go?

Your target audience will also determine the tone of voice of your content. A landing page aimed at retirees will sound much different than one aimed at Gen-Z.

6. Check your forms

Our next tip for conversion rate optimisation best practice is to look at the forms on your website. Forms are a great way to collect customer details, but you need to make sure they ask for the right information.

While asking for a lot of information can be good for qualifying leads, it can be counterintuitive for your web users. HubSpot recommends that three is the magic number with form fields.

Form complexity essentially equates to the value of your product or service. If users think you’re worth the effort, they’ll happily fill in a complicated or lengthy form.

7. Look for high-traffic, low-converting pages

Bird’s eye view of crossroads with traffic

A quick win when it comes to conversion rate optimisation strategies is to identify site pages that get a lot of web traffic, but not a lot of conversions. Then, you can leverage these pages to positive effect.

As an example, let’s say you have a popular blog page that gets lots of organic traffic. You can add a lead magnet to push a proportion of the traffic that comes through the page into handing over their contact details.

Keep an eye on your metrics when you do this. That way, if conversion rates don’t increase, you can look at alternative ways to optimise your page.

8. Win your customers back

Let’s say a customer looks at a product or even puts a product in their shopping cart, but that’s as far as they go. One of the easiest ways to boost your conversion rate is to entice them back to finish the purchase.

Re-marketing is when you use display and paid social ads to remind customers that they were looking at a particular product. This can be just the nudge they need to encourage them to come back and buy.

If a customer abandons their cart, you can send them an email encouraging them to go through the checkout. You can even throw in free shipping or a discount code to sweeten the deal. Nearly 30% of these emails lead to a sale, so definitely worth doing!

9. Use A/B testing

Illustration of A/B testing for conversion rate optimisation

Our final piece of advice when it comes to conversion rate optimisation tactics – use A/B testing to see what brings you the best results.

A/B testing (or split testing) is when you test two identical assets with one variable that has been changed. For example, two copies of a landing page with a different call-to-action on each. You can then review the stats and see which page gets the most conversions.

When you test one change at a time, you can see which has an effect on conversion rate, and expand these changes to the rest of your website as a result.

Your partner when it comes to best practices for conversion rate optimisation

We hope this article has helped you understand more about the meaning of CRO when it comes to marketing your website and given you some handy hints to try.

Remember, if you need a little extra support with conversion rate optimisation best practices, we’re here to help.

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We’re London’s number-one CRO agency dedicated to providing and implementing bespoke CRO strategies for small businesses just like yours. 

Book a twenty-minute call with our team of experts today or get a free marketing plan and see how we can get your conversion rate on the upward climb!

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