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In today’s frantic digital world, competing online is a tough task. It isn’t good enough to throw up a mediocre site and expect to get results. You need to commit the time, effort and resources to make your website as good as it can be — anything less than that will leave you struggling to gather any momentum.

But where should you start? Well, there’s basic technical SEO, ensuring that your website can be found online — but what use is having your website found if it isn’t going to achieve anything with that visibility? Consequently, I suggest putting a lot of work into optimizing for conversions. Let’s take a more detailed look at why:

Conversion rates matter more than visitor numbers

It’s extremely easy to get swept up in the importance, the vitality, of online traffic. We always want more, after all, and being able to look at ever-increasing visitor numbers makes us feel that our promotional efforts are bearing fruit. But there’s more to internet success than traffic — in fact, placing too much emphasis on visitor numbers can cause major problems.

Why? Because the more you rely on traffic, the more you suffer when it inevitably fluctuates. It’s fine to be a terrible archer if you have an endless quiver, but when you get short on arrows, you’re going to have huge problems hitting your target. That’s why you should be concentrating on conversions instead.

When you get your conversion process working as well as it can, it will ensure that you make the most of every last visitor, helping you get through times when traffic slows down. And when traffic goes up (of the right kind), you’ll benefit even more from your higher conversion rate.

CRO is a solid long-term investment

There are various methods for bringing in traffic, and not all of them have lasting effects. Only organic SEO will continue to pay off after you stop working on it, and that’s very unpredictable today: Google’s algorithm changes on a regular basis, and it’s tough to know what the future of organic search involves. Methods like PPC, meanwhile, work only while you’re paying for them.

CRO (conversion rate optimization), though, is something that has long-term impact. When you improve a part of your website, that improvement will have a positive effect on every user experience that follows it, even if it’s a year later.

Of course, UX standards keep changing, so it isn’t as simple as committing heavily to CRO to begin with before fully defunding it once you’re satisfied. You’ll need to return to it on a semi-regular basis as time goes by, and keep up with developing standards to ensure that your website doesn’t fall behind those of your competitors — but in general, you’ll see steady progress as you go.

The process will help you understand your users

Even if the CRO process didn’t result in superior conversion rates, it would still be valuable because of the insight it would provide into the wants and needs of your users.

CRO relies heavily on A/B testing, which is alternating two versions of a page or element to see which one performs better, and you can’t help but form a better understanding of how your users think as you run more and more tests. By the end, you won’t only have a website better equipped to drive conversions — you’ll have a fleshed-out view of your users that will help you with everything from influencer marketing to customer support.

You’ll need to start by investigating how your site currently performs — seeing which pages, buttons and products convert, and which don’t, then trying to figure out why. Is your message inconsistent? Are your CTAs unclearly marked? Are you missing vital trust indicators?

By looking at better-performing rival sites, you can start to form a solid idea of what you’re doing well and what you’re doing poorly. You can also reach out to your users — or at least your social media followers — to get some feedback about your site (and if you need some support with social media marketing, it isn’t hard to find).

For these reasons, and more, every website needs to be optimised for conversions — whatever those conversions might be. Whether you’re trying to make sales, sign people up to your newsletter, register interest, or gather new followers for your brand, establish CRO as a core part of your broader maintenance strategy. It’s worth it.

Get in touch to discuss your specific conversion strategy