What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO)  is a term used to describe the continual improvement of your website, and aims to drive more visitors into buying customers or to whatever your business goals are. Ok, so what’s “Sales Optimisation”?

The term ‘sales optimisation’ is often used in the same way as ‘conversion rate optimisation’ (‘CRO’), or ‘sales conversion rate optimisation’.  Essentially they’re all the same thing.  What they’re not is Search Engine Optimisation or SEO – but more about that later…

Although we talk about ‘Sales’ optimisation, in essence we’re including all forms of user experience improvements that allow your visitors to achieve their goals as well as yours.

For example your site may not have an ecommerce capability, where visitors can buy goods or services.  If that’s the case you’d probably rather drive visitors to call you or generate a ‘contact me’ email.  Alternatively you may want your visitors to sign up to an email newsletter, or if your site allows users to manage their account online with you, you may want to drive more self-service activity.

Whatever your website is designed to do sales optimisation can help you achieve those goals more easily.

So what’s the difference between sales optimisation and SEO?

The difference is that SEO focuses solely on improving the rank your website (or more accurately specific pages within your site) has in search engines like Google, whereas sales optimisation focuses on improving the user journey through your site for things like product selection, comparison, shopping basket, registration and login processes.  Reducing visitor abandonment means more visitors get to the pages where they purchase, sign-up or contact you, therefore driving more income for your business.

SEO companies will recommend changes to your site that will specifically target improving these rankings and will likely include:-

  • content – the words you use to describe and promote your products or services, media like video and images
  • spider-ability – the ease with which search engines can read your site’s content
  • page speed – how long it takes your pages to load
  • mobile friendliness (the newest element that can affect your Google ranking) – whether your site is easy for mobiles to view
  • links – the amount and quality of links pointing to your site

The last element is usually only achievable through creating and promoting great content that people want to link to.  Using companies that offer the creation of sites that generate volumes of links to your site are to be avoided as most search engines including Google do not look favourably on these types of link building and will leave you worse off in the end.

For some great top tips on optimising your website visit “Top 5 Website Optimisation Tips“.

If you’d like to find out more about how sales optimisation can improve your website call us on 01438940548 or contact us via Twitter, Facebook or Google+.  If you’d prefer to email us you can contact us here: info@salesoptimisation.co.uk

 

[db_post_ad][db_comments_form]