This post is the second part of how to increase your website’s revenues taking into account that improving SEO is becoming more complex. In the previous post, I mentioned what is working best for us: focusing on our reader and optimizing conversion, and I focused on the former. So, today, I’ll be talking about the latter.
Here’s a summary of the process we follow to improve the conversion. Let’s dive in!
Focus On Conversion
A conversion occurs on your website when a visitor performs the action you want: buying one of your products, subscribing to your newsletter, and so on. Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO is the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who perform desired actions.
Improving the conversion rate is not just about making the changes to your website that you think will work and waiting for sales to rise. Nor is it about applying any magic formula or what has worked for others.
The Conversion Improvement Process
The conversion optimization process is based on understanding what is happening on your website, collecting quantifiable data to help you identify where the problems are, and then proposing alternatives to try to solve them. Next, I will tell you in a little more detail the steps involved in this process consists.
Define Goals, KPIs, and Metrics
In order to improve your conversion, the first thing you need to know is where you are and where you want to go: define your business goals, website’s conversion goals, your KPIs, and the metrics of those goals.
For example, in the case of our website, Nelio Software, our goal is to increase the subscribers to the premium plans of our plugins. But it is also, for example, getting 15 new subscribers per month to our mailing list.
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To define the goals of your website you must understand the conversion funnel, that is, what your visitors do from the moment they land on your website until they become customers. In this way, you can optimize each different stage in the funnel.
Thus, for example, a visitor can first find out about Nelio A/B Testing when they have googled information about A/B tests. Once they land on our website, they might read some articles in our product documentation to learn more about it. What are the conversion goals, KPIs and target metrics for our website at this stage?
A conversion goal will be a visit to the pricing page. The KPI is the number of visits to that page and the metric for this goal can be 2,000 monthly visits to that page.
Then, if the visitor finds interesting information, they will ask for more detailed information or download the plugin from the WordPress directory to test the free version of the plugin.
In this case, a conversion goal will be a visitor fills out our contact form. The KPI will be the number of contact forms received and we will be able to define our monthly target with a certain value. Another conversion goal will be the downloads of our plugin. And so on.
Finally, the visitor subscribes to one of our premium plans. Our conversion goal will be to have a purchase event occur. And, again, we can define the metrics that interest us.
Understand What’s Going On And Where You’re Losing Visitors
From here, analyze in detail each of the pages of your website taking into account the purpose of that page. Look where it is failing and where it has room for improvement. Analyze, with heatmaps, scroll maps and/or confetti maps how your visitors behave on each page.
Analyze with the data provided by Google Analytics where you are losing visitors, and how far you are from reaching your goals.
For example, we identified that on the Nelio A/B Testing page, most visitors did not scroll down and did not pass the first fold. Furthermore, only 45% clicked on the pricing page. The question immediately arose: can we improve these figures?
And so, if you analyze each of the pages that are part of the conversion funnel, you will get a long list of identified problems. These are the basis for starting A/B tests that will help you improve the conversion of your website.
Create And Run A/B Tests
Prioritize all the problems you have identified so that you tackle those that can have the most impact. Those with the most impact will be the problems identified in the pages with the most visits or that are more relevant in the conversion funnel, or where the identified problem is more evident.
Start with the first problem identified and generate a hypothesis that will be the basis of your A/B test. For example, in the problem we identified earlier, if people only visit the first fold and we would like to increase the number of visits to our pricing page, maybe it is a good idea to change the title and text of the first paragraph to make it more attractive. Our hypothesis was: changing the message so that it doesn’t show urgency but instead arouses more curiosity, we will manage to increase the number of visitors who will want to know more details about the product.
From here, it is as easy as creating an A/B test with two versions:
It is only when you have run your A/B test that you will know whether or not your hypothesis was right or wrong. In this particular case, we achieved an increase in conversion of the alternative of more than 12% compared to the original version.
After seeing this result, we immediately apply the winning version as the definitive one on the Nelio A/B Testing page.
Next, for each of the problems you had identified in your sorted list, you go through the same process: generate a hypothesis and create an A/B test. This way you will see how the conversion in your website is improving. When you are done with all the problems, repeat the analysis you did previously and start again. In our blog, we publish the tests we perform every month on our website and their results. You will see that we explain the details of how we have created each type of test.
Of course, to create and run an A/B test with all the guarantees that you are doing well, our recommendation is that you do it with a tool. Nelio A/B Testing is the best tool to perform A/B tests in WordPress and is fully integrated with the Gutenberg editor. This way, creating and editing alternatives in a test is as easy as editing a page or post in Gutenberg. You find the results in your own WordPress dashboard and, once you find that an alternative is the winner, applying it as the definite one is as simple as a click.
Nelio A/B Testing
I was very impressed by the quality of this plugin, how easy it was to set up, and the outstanding support Nelio provides. I highly recommend Nelio A/B Testing.
Josette Millar
Conclusion
As we already mentioned in the previous post, your website, its design and its contents are the showcase and the interior of your store. Think about the best-known stores: they are constantly changing the sideboard and how and where to show the products to adapt to the market and get more income.
Your website is exactly the same. If you want to increase your sales continuously, you have to know well who your target customer is and what they like. If you manage to establish a continuous conversion optimization process, you will see how little by little your website’s income increases.
Featured image of Austin Distel on Unsplash.
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