How to increase sales and leads with Conversion Rate Optimisation

Increasing website traffic is great, but if visitors aren’t converting into leads or customers, your efforts may be going to waste. That’s where Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) comes in.

By refining user journeys, removing friction points, and making strategic changes based on data, businesses can turn more clicks into conversions.

Whether you’re looking to boost ecommerce sales, increase enquiries, or generate more sign-ups, this guide will walk you through the essential CRO strategies that can drive measurable results.

But before we jump into that, we’ll help you understand…

What is a conversion rate?

A conversion rate refers to the percentage of website visitors who complete a specific action, such as filling out a contact form or making a purchase, after clicking on your site.

They’re calculated by taking the total number of users who 'convert' (for example, by signing up to a newsletter), dividing it by the total audience size, and converting that figure into a percentage.

For example:

Conversion rate = 150 (conversions), divided by 260 customers, multiplied by 100 = 57.69%

It’s this number that helps you shine a light on the areas of your marketing that are bringing in the most business, and those that aren’t. With this knowledge, you can understand how and where you could invest more resources.

Conversion rate is most relevant to your paid advertising, because you are investing money into the ads, and you want them to bring back value.

If an ad has a low conversion rate, it’s likely that you are losing money, and need to improve the conversion rate quickly. This guide on the average conversion rates by industry and network should help.

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)?

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the process a business, or digital consultancy, goes through to improve factors that influence your conversion rate. In most cases, it’s optimising your website, your landing pages, and your social media content.

Why is CRO essential for businesses?

Missed opportunities

CRO is a key part of marketing that is often overlooked. It plays a crucial role in boosting your conversion rate, which directly contributes to your business’s success.

Without CRO, you risk losing potential customers, making each website visit a missed opportunity.

Just as you would invest time and money into making a physical shop welcoming to attract customers, your website deserves the same attention to encourage visitors to take action.

It gives you a competitive advantage

Customers will often look around for what they are searching for, and will have a few different competitors in mind before they convert. You want your website to be the most inviting, look the most reliable and give the best impression of what you are advertising.

If your website scores 10/10 for those areas, customers are more likely to pick you out of the bunch of competitors.

The quality of your website can sometimes be the deciding factor in securing a sale, even when your product or service is priced higher than a competitor's.

Think of it this way: a well-optimised website is like a beautifully packaged tin of baked beans.

The tin with a complete list of ingredients, an enticing product description, and mouthwatering product photography will undoubtedly capture the customer's attention far more effectively than a plain tin that simply states "baked beans", and nothing else.

Your website is like your product’s packaging. Make sure it stands out, builds trust, and draws customers in.

Increased cost efficiency

CRO helps you get the most out of your marketing budget. For example, if you spend £1,000 on a poorly targeted Meta Ads campaign with unengaging creatives and a basic website, you might not make any sales.

This means that you’ve effectively wasted that £1,000. Optimising your website and ad strategy ensures you see better returns on your investment.

Why is CRO essential for businesses?

It’s important to note that your conversion rate will depend mostly on a combination of two factors, namely the quality and relevance of your ad clicks, and your website.

The quality and relevance of your ad clicks

The first step to boosting your conversion rate is making sure your ads reach the right audience. If your ads are shown to people who aren’t interested in your offering, the chances of them converting are very low.

To check if you’re targeting the right audience, you can:

• Review the search terms in your Google or Microsoft Ads search term report, as well as organic search results in Google Search Console.

• Analyse targeting settings in Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Display Ads on Microsoft or Google.

• Assess data insights from advertising platforms to refine your audience.

For example, if you run a commercial asbestos removal business but notice your ads are attracting searches for ‘home asbestos removal’, your conversion rate will likely be 0% for those visitors.

Since your website only promotes commercial services, those clicks are wasted.

The quality and relevance of your website

Below are some of our top tips on how to improve the conversion rate of your website.

Make your website trustworthy

It’s important that the website visitor trusts your website from the offset - especially if it’s unlikely they’ve heard of you before. Consider adding reviews, testimonials and case studies to your website where relevant.

The more relevant, the better. Reviews about a pair of trousers wouldn’t work well on a page for a lamp shade, so try and get reviews that are going to work best for the page the user is on.

It’s good to note that customer testimonials from platforms like Google Business Profile and TrustPilot are generally considered more trustworthy than written reviews, because it’s less likely that these have been made up or written by the business owner.

Make your website descriptive

When advertising your product or service, keep the descriptions clear, helpful and easy to read.

Bullet points are a great way to give quick information that a user may be looking for.

Videos and product imagery are important to help the user visualise what they would be getting.

Remember your audience, too, and what they will be looking for. Are you advertising a product that your audience is likely to need urgently? Make it clear on the page that you offer 30-minute click & collect or first class delivery.

Keep descriptions useful and detailed so users have all the information they need to convert immediately.

Make your website function well

No one likes a website that is clunky and hard to navigate, so it’s important to have a website that users can use with ease.

All websites should have:

• Fast-loading pages

• A secure and simple check out system (if eCommerce)

• An easy-to-find contact page

• A simple navigation menu

• A search bar

• A mobile-friendly design

Simply, your website should make it as easy as possible for someone to convert. The more barriers there are (such as a slow website or bad checkout system), the lower the conversion rate.

For example, if your desired conversion is for users to fill out a form to get a quote, you should keep the form as short as possible. Long forms put users off - keep it short and sweet. Any additional information you can get later. It’s more valuable to get a name and an email address to follow up later for more information rather than no leads!

Consider a landing page from TJ waste as a good example of a trustworthy, descriptive and well functioning website!

 

What mistakes should you avoid when optimising your conversion rate?

Not optimising for mobile first

As of September 2024, 63.38% of all website traffic comes from mobile devices. This is why it’s important to optimise for mobile users first.

Make sure that your website is responsive for mobile, otherwise your users will almost immediately bounce and leave you with a 0% conversion rate.

Try checking your Google Analytics 4 data for what devices your users are using, and you can optimise based on your priority device.

Sending traffic to a page before it’s finished

One common mistake is sending traffic to a website that isn’t ready for customers yet. Perhaps you’re with the point of view that ‘the page will never be perfect, so we may as well send traffic to it now - we can optimise in the background’.

Don’t send traffic (especially paid traffic) to a page that is not ready to receive customers yet. Make sure that your pages are well optimised before you turn on the tap of paid marketing.

Whilst it’s not effective to be a perfectionist in this situation where you keep making small tweaks to a page to the point where you never set a campaign live, you should at least have a page that follows basic CRO.

Make sure there’s images, a description, a review and an easy conversion point. You can improve other bits later when you’ve got more data on your audience.

Not having a clear conversion point

Call-to-action buttons are great and, when used correctly, can improve conversion rates.

However, it can be easy to add too many call-to-action buttons on a page, which can confuse the user.

Try to stick to just one conversion action. Don’t have a page that displays a ‘Add to cart’ button, a ‘Call us now’ button, a ‘Email our team’ button and a contact us form! A user will simply be too confused on what they should do and bounce.

Make it clear what you want your user to do, and limit the amount of conversion points you have.

Not tailoring the page for your specific audience

Not all CRO best practices suit every audience, so make sure you think about what your audience wants, and pick and choose CRO practices.

A common CRO tactic is to add a sense of urgency to a product or service with a countdown timer. These can work great in some industries, but in some- it’s just not appropriate. For example, adding a countdown timer on a law firm website to ‘Book a call now or miss out’.

This could come across as overly aggressive and undermine trust. Legal services are typically decisions based on careful consideration, not urgency.

Therefore, consider what your audience wants and tailor your website towards that. Always keep in mind your customer, and put yourselves in their shoes.

To summarise

If you need help with your conversion rate optimisation, or if you simply want to have an informal chat about how to develop a streamlined search engine optimisation strategy, then get in touch with us today.

You can drop us an email using the contact form below, or email us directly here.

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