Conversion Rate Optimisation - advice before seeking out a specialist
-
Hello!
I have a site I've been working on for a lovely client, a small business start up since Christmas. The site has a very simple layout, is ranking well and maintaining its positions, has solid social media, is receiving enough traffic and ranking for a number of terms. The problem is - conversions! The site just isn't converting.
I have spoken with a few peers who have said advanced CRO will be too much for me to learn in terms of Psychology of Buying, learning about colors, fonts etc. I understand meta descriptions for example are something that I can do, I was wondering if anyone could give me advice on any other basic CRO techniques I could apply to the site before going to a specialist.
Any advice would be MUCH appreciated - the moz community is always so helpful!
Charlotte
-
Looks awesome! Thanks so much! I've just taken a look and can't see the process clearly - users upload their own content is that it then share effectively using the platform?
-
Came across a tool last week that gives you the ability to create Video Testimonials, it's part of a Video Marketing Suite.
I was amazed by the statistics that are available in the backend. You can see which testimonial has the most positive influence on visitors, so you can use the best testimonials on your page (and if you want you can reward the person who recorded that video)
So you get the tool, but also the insights in which type of testimonials work best for you...
You can try it at http://www.bubobox.com but they'll have to do some SEO as well in order to get found I think...
-
Wow - this looks like an awesome tool! Thanks for your help
-
Hello,
Sorry to take so long to reply! I've subscribed to their RSS and downloaded their free CRO tools from the site, I can't see the eNewsletter though, is there a sign up for this or will it all come under the RSS?
Your help and advice is massively appreciated, thank you!
Charlotte
-
Hello,
Sorry to take so long to reply! I've subscribed to their RSS and downloaded their free CRO tools from the site, I can't see the eNewsletter though, is there a sign up for this or will it all come under the RSS?
Your help and advice is massively appreciated, thank you!
Charlotte
-
You could also try this tool > http://bit.ly/HRNQiF, it lets you create A/B tests without doing any major page design changes, comes with its own visual editor.
-
I just signed up! Thanks!
-
Hi Charlotte,
Firstly, I'd suggest signing up to www.usertesting.com and running three tests on your site (costs approx $40 per test).
Secondly. I suggest signing up to the conversion rate experts newsletter, which will provide you a series of free case studies, tips and improvements.
And without seeing the site, my gut says;
- Prioritize key functionality to the front page (order form, email sign up, etc)
- Remove "create account/ sign up" process or include "checkout as guest"
- Increase the number of payment options (paypal, credit card, bank wire)
- Merge offline channels with online by including catalogue/ brochure search on web
- Ensure the site has accurate pricing, images and descriptions (easily overlooked)
By following the above, I managed to help a client increase their conversion rate by 125%.
Best of luck!
-
Wow - thanks so much for looking into this for me, yes its a brand new site so traffic is really low, have done a bit of (I'll admit not enough!) social media and social bookmarking, any other advice would be fab with regards to increasing traffic? I'm trying to get the client more active on Twitter reaching out to authority figures in the industry as that gets me loads of traffic, they have two companies though so its hard trying to juggle the two I think.
Someone else recommended hubspot too - I'll give that a go, and thanks so much for the advice about the slideshow. Its such a big space and I don't think we are using if effectively. The call to action is the contribute to the gaity of the nation and book Operalicious but we discussed it today and perhaps its not prominent enough.
Thanks again - its so appreciated!
-
Hi Charlotte,
Just had a quick glance at your site and unfortunately I couldn’t see any clear call-to-action message!? However, the good news is that I can see some low-hanging opportunities for immediate gain such as including a strong call-to-action headline on that slideshow. And just in case you need some further guide on creating effective call-to-action, check out this ebook from Hubspot (great resource for noob like us) http://www.hubspot.com/how-to-create-effective-calls-to-action/
Also if you decide to run a web experiment, I strongly suggest that you read this article http://conversionxl.com/what-to-test-first-second-third/ that explains what to test first, second and third (yep, the low-hanging opportunities again!)
Oh btw, I had a chance to check the site’s stats on semrush.com which apparently shows very low traffic volume?
All the best,
-Ashish
-
Hi Thomas,
Thank you so much for taking the time to give me all that detail and information! It is quite daunting at the moment but so was SEO initially and I'm always up for a challenge so I'm very keen to give it a go! The SEOmoz software helped me massively when I started so I'm very open to investing in some software also and luckily I've already got the site on my Google Analytics so I can use these more helpfully. The site does have a capture yes and I admit when I've seen the number ones I do prefer them to the traditional ones. What would you say is a good bounce rate or does this depend on industry and I should always be aiming to reduce this down?
Thanks again
Charlotte
-
Awesome resource - I'll go check this out! The help is much appreciated thanks
-
I would strongly suggest either Google analytics which is 100% free or my preference is free for 30 days and I feel gives you a better overall view using kiss metrics or HubSpot if you can https://www.kissmetrics.com/ http://HubSpot.com Analytics is a must with out it you are literally out to sea without a compass. You want to maybe look into HubSpot's CMS they allow for A/B testing as well as you must have a group of people judge the overall navigation ease of use if I am the customer can I see what I want to buy? If I do see where want buy is it is easy as clicking "buy now" if using google captcha please understand how many people like myself get sick of it and say forget this. If you must use a captcha style system to prevent spam please use the addition like what is 5+7=12 that would most likely boost some sales however it seems like if you're getting the traffic it's either not traffic intended for your site. Which if you used analytics you would be able to tell us what the bounce rate is. if this is in word press you can use the HubSpot plug-in after signing up for a 30 day trial for free no credit card is required on night either kiss metrics or HubSpot here is a link allowing you to do free A/B testing with Google analytics http://support.google.com/websiteoptimizer/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=14316
this is a business insider article about what colors impactor website and how
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-07-15/strategy/30011343_1_color-impulse-appeal
I am most certain you have what it takes to do this however show to your friends don't be afraid to use your resources like you have now. Run it through things like the campaign in SEOmoz as well as http://marketing.grader.com/ marketing greater will show you the complete close loop funnel. If the project is too daunting and I'm not saying that it isn't all you may want to request outside help and have them work with you say you benefit from their knowledge and they get something in return as well.
I hope there was help you.
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Usability testing - are there any good online guides for learning more about this? Really appreciate your help thank you!
-
There is a website... http://whichtestwon.com/
They show the results of lots of testing. There you can look at two different versions of a page and find out which performed better.
If you view lots of their tests you will slowly start to get an idea of what types of change can be effective , although there will always be results that surprise you.
-
Perfect! This advice is exactly what I need - I'm stuck in that conundrum at the moment, I can get the rankings fine but its sales people are really paying me for that I'm struggling with! (I'm a newbie freelancer, been in industry only 3 years).
What are your thoughts on getting a conversion specialist? Would you suggest trying the above items first maybe?
Thanks so much - its really appreciated
-
Hi Charlotte,
Create a funnel, find out the drop off's, survey your customers, run some usability tests and this should be enough to get you started
Usability testing is good as it will show you onsite usability issues, bugs and errors. However it won't show you how to improve persuasive architecture hence why you would seek out a specialist for this.
I hope this helps
-
In Google Analytics > Standard Reporting you have on the left the tab Audience and in it you have Visitors Flow....
Click on that
Just saw your website.... To start You might consider making your text more readable (change color or bg or both) as I didn't bother reading anything
-
Hi Charlotte,
There's a lot to consider, but I'd say that colours/font aren't where you'd start. I'd also say that getting some CRO awareness can really benefit your SEO - after all, our customers want sales/leads not rankings!
It can be really hard, especially when you've worked closely with a website/business for some time, but the key is to try and take an external perspective and see the site through the eyes of your customers/visitors. Can you identify the kind of person who would be interested in the site's offerings? What are their needs/problems and how does the site address these.
What you want to establish:
Are you targeting the right keywords? What is the user intent behind the keyword - are people searching for that term really looking for the products/services you are offering. Are they really likely to be your customers?
If the offering being clearly explained - are you clearly expressing the benefits (to them). Do your pages answer the "What's in it for me?" question.
Is the purpose of each page (and it's position in the conversion funnel) understood?
Do you have clear, appealing calls to action. Is it obvious to visitors what to do next? Don't leave people hanging.
What are the objections that people may have before taking action. How can you address these objections (social proof/testimonials etc, guarantees, try before you buy etc)
Hope this helps!
-
I never thought of that! The site is www.operalicious.com the owner got a simple but limited template which they are now regretting as in terms of doing things to it it's very tough!
Can you explain drop off page? Is it how many people only visit the home page?
I didn't even think about getting people to review - thanks so much for the advice
-
Thanks very much - I've heard about using Analytics a lot, would you suggest finding the pages people drop out of and changing them or putting in different pages? What would be your process?
Thanks!
-
I would advise in getting your website reviewed by 10-15 people(regular people/friends that could be a customer) with good questions about your website/product.
That will get you a step closer to how a client looks at your website.
Personally (as you did not offer any link to review)... I think most websites have a huge conversion problem because of their poor design, and the client's trust of the website/busienss/product QUALITY is lost because of that.
Of course Google Analytics have a huge role in fixing the pages that show up as having the highest drop off.
Hope it helps...
Just for my own curiosity what is the drop off rate for the home page of your website.
-
Hi Charlotte,
I would begin with by analysing your analytics and seeing where people are dropping out of the conversion funnel and find out the missing links/barriers to conversion.
Hope that helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Advice on combating blackhat within an organisation
Hello, I have an unsual challenge I would appriciate some feedback from the community. I have been managing the digital marketing for a UK franchise for around three years. My approach has been to try and keep to the priciple of one microsite per franchisee - listing only the serviced locations once as appropriate. Now this franchise has been aquired by a US company and a new marketing manager for the US company is overseeing the site - why I am still involved is unkown and is a matter of time I supsect. This marketing 'guru' is clearly blackhat and is pushing agaisnt my eithical, brand driven approach in favor of creating landing pages for pretty much every location. I can see from the other brands he manages - this has been his approach --- boiler plate content and fake addresses (complete with schema markeup) for every location and and additional websites per actual valid location (so 2x listings per term for same brand) My question is how do I go about combating this - or is it a lost cause? I feel responsible for the success of the franchisees. Thanks in advance. Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | goodersuk1 -
Robots.txt advice
Hey Guys, Have you ever seen coding like this in a robots.txt, I have never seen a noindex rule in a robots.txt file before - have you? user-agent: AhrefsBot User-agent: trovitBot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eLab_London
User-agent: Nutch
User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: / User-agent: *
Disallow: /WebServices/
Disallow: /*?notfound=
Disallow: /?list=
Noindex: /?*list=
Noindex: /local/
Disallow: /local/
Noindex: /handle/
Disallow: /handle/
Noindex: /Handle/
Disallow: /Handle/
Noindex: /localsites/
Disallow: /localsites/
Noindex: /search/
Disallow: /search/
Noindex: /Search/
Disallow: /Search/
Disallow: ? I have never seen a noindex rule in a robots.txt file before - have you?
Any pointers?0 -
Advice on Link Removal Services
Hello everyone, Due to the Penguin update my site unfortunately took a bit of a hit. A little while ago I submitted all of our questionable/bad links to the disavow tool, however I still wante to go back and delete any and all problematic links that are still out there. Ive looked into many services, however I haven't been too impressed. Removeem - The email addresses they provided weren't always valid, and their email tool didn't always deploy correctly - a lot of cross referencing and was not saving me any time. Link Detox - Free trial was a bust. They show you 10 links on the free trial, however for me, 9 of the 10 were all the same. Couldn't get a good feel of their system. Rmoov - Their tool is one where you upload your own links, and they help manage everything, however they DONT allow you to email through their system, so Im not sure how this helps my process if I have to do everthing manaully anyway. A lot of sites I see are also a full service approach that charge you based on how many links they remove, and this can get quite costly. I have also contacted:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lukin
Link Delete - No reponse from multiple email requests
Linkquidator - No response
Infatex - No response My questions to all of you are: Is there any company out there that you recommend that provide a self service tool [online or desktop driven]? Is this even an avenue I should explore, or should I compile my own list [as 3rd party algorithms are not always accurate] and reach out to sites manually? Is disavowing good enough and Im just spinning my wheeles trying to now get them all removed? Thanks!0 -
Need advice for indexing a multilingual website
We are in the process of creating a Spanish subdomain of our website. I want to know what needs to be done in regard to meta tags, sitemap.xml and robots.txt so that Google and Bing will index both website properly and not causing the web page on the English site to lost rank. Our English site is www.mydomain.com with the Spanish site being es.mydomain.com We are planning to put a button or link on both sites so that visitors can switch between both sites. The two sites are similar but not all pages are mirror images.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Qualbe-Marketing-Group0 -
Seeking Help with Domain Acquisition Redirect Strategy
My company is purchasing www.boughtsite.com. This new site has multiple sub-domain sites: customsite1.boughtsite.com, customsite2.boughtsite.com, etc. 1. Is it possible to redirect everything from www.boughtsite.com to www.mycompanysite.com while leaving the other sub-domain sites active? These other sites have different audiences than our main site. 2. Would it be an okay solution to just place a link on boughtsite.com to mycompanysite.com telling visitors "We have been re-branded to My Company" 3. Can I use an i-frame to move customsite1.boughtsite.com to www.mycompanysite.com/customsite1 instead? Thanks for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0 -
Seo advice / plan ? penalized ?
I built an ecommerce site for a client of mine just over 9 months ago now. To begin with the serps were great, everything was listed in the results but for some reason a few weeks in all the results vanished from google and now we're lucky to find anything. I've been as far as page 200 and havent found any results. Its been like this for a solid 8 months so i can only presume that the site has been penalised in some form. Searching for unique phrases from the site doesnt even return results. The website in question is = http://goo.gl/A6Gz2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gfxpixeldesigns
keywords we're aiming for = coloured contact lenses, fashion contact lenses
Target = Google UK Now im not really an seo guy but regardless of this my client has hired me to see whats going on and correct it. I've been scratching my head thinking all sorts of things but none of which im certain about so i'm looking for someone to point me in the right direction before i do anything drastic. So to begin with here are some of my suspicions which i personally think are affecting ranking and possible penalisation. #1 - Too many links on the page
#2 - Possibly over optimised
#3 - Lack of content on the product and category pages
#4 - Lack of backlinks and links in general coming from other sites My main concern is the lack of links from other sites and the odd link coming from low quality sites. I've also just found out that my client has been using an automatic link submitter which i've always thought of as a big no no. Some of the sites these links have been submitted to have nothing to do with the keyword we are targetting and are sort of spammy sites containing all sorts of links. Im wondering if these poor quality links could have caused the site to be penalised, google may be seeing it as a spammy site due to this. Whats your opinions on the above, are my suspicions correct and can this be recovered ? My planned course of action is to be as follows: #1 - Re write the content currently on the site so that it is better written and include more keywords, especially long tails since i think these will help bring the serps up.
#2 - Write detailed category and product descriptions as well as making sure every page has some well written content with links and keywords.
#3 - Keep the above pages to one main subject / keyword so that google doesnt get confused.
#4 - Get some links on popular and relevant sites, the only problem here is the lack of fashion contact lens sites. Does anyone have any advice on how to find these or where i should be getting links placed. Are directories worth while ?
#5 - Get more involved in the social side ie facebook, twitter I will be building on the above over time, aswell as running google ads moderately for our chosen keywords. Is there anything i have missed, anything i shouldnt be doing. Please advise. Thanks.0 -
1st Campaign - Advice please.
We have just run our first campaign for our site and have found over 5,335 errors! It would appear that the majority of which are where the crawl has duplicated the product page with the "write a review - Tell a friend page"...hence a large number of errors. In addition we also have over 5,000 302 warnings for the following URL: URL: http://www.collarandcuff.co.uk/index.php?_a=login&redir=/index.php?_a=viewCat&catId=105 Please bear in mind we are fairly new to this type of data....so go easy on us. In short, will these errors have a significant bearing on our rankings etc and if so how do we rectify? Many thanks. Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | collar640 -
Optimising a website for multiple keywords and multiple towns
Hello, We have a clients site who we are trying to rank for 10 keywords accross 20 towns so a combination of 200. What would be the best way to tackle this. Their url is www.abbottclarkeifa.co.uk. Thanks Shehzad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gareth_Cartman0