CRO or SEO? How can I make my website work harder for me?

CRO or SEO? How can I make my website work harder for me?

by | Mar 5, 2018 | eCommerce, Sales optimisation, shopping basket/checkout process, Usability

CRO vs SEOHow much do you know about CRO and SEO?

It’s frustrating to know that people are visiting your website but they’re not actually becoming customers.

Getting the most out of your website is critical for any business today – especially any business that wants to grow.

We all know about SEO – search engine optimisation – but how many of us have heard of CRO – conversion rate optimisation?

While SEO helps bring the pages of your website closer to the top in search engines like Google and drive more visitors to your website, CRO improves your website so it actually benefits your business by converting more of those visitors into customers. Sales optimisation is another term for CRO, where you give your customers what they need and THAT benefits your business.

How does it work? Unlike SEO, CRO focuses on the visitor experience. It optimises the customer journey to make it easier, allowing them to find what they’re looking for quickly and confidently.

A site design can often be overly complicated or too minimalist. Both of these cause problems for customers who are time-poor or are looking to compare products and quickly as possible.  Conversion Rate Optimisation is all about reducing the noise and putting the visitor in control.

With sales optimisation, product selection, comparison, shopping basket, registration and login processes are easier for your customer. In essence, sales optimisation makes the whole experience of buying from you a pleasure.

Find out more about Sales optimisation here or call us on 01438 940548

Top Checkout Process Improvements

Top Checkout Process Improvements

by | Mar 5, 2018 | eCommerce, Sales optimisation, shopping basket/checkout process, Usability, user centred design, Web Design Agencies, website optimisation

Optimising your checkout process

online shopping photo

Photo by FootMassagez

If there’s just one area on your site that you focus on it should be your checkout process.

A small change here can have a big impact on your bottom line.

Focusing on optimising the shopping cart and checkout process is one of the quickest ways to increase revenues for your business.

What if I don’t have a checkout process?

Even if your website doesn’t sell things, improving the ease with which customers can input data on your site to enquire, apply for services or sign up to newsletters is an essential and fundamental area to improve your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Classic mistakes…

Having worked with many businesses over the years we’ve seen a wide range of mistakes that can seriously affect the performance of both your shopping cart widget* and the checkout process itself.

*What’s a widget? – it’s the interactive element that both adds an item to the shopping basket when you click “Buy Now” and usually it sits as an icon in the fixed element at the top of the web page.

For shopping cart widgets these issues range from bad widget design and placement, to poor or non-existent basket update advice as well as the loss of shopping cart items when users click the back button in the browser.

Checkout processes are generally more complex and varied but also have the opportunity for more, far ranging issues. These can include:-

  • not recognising returning visitors when they come back to your site but before they login
  • not remembering previously abandoned shopping cart contents
  • bad login/register/guest checkout page design
  • poor or unclear input box text labels
  • not making it clear which input fields are mandatory
  • input box sizing that doesn’t correspond to the required input data (e.g. full screen width boxes for a telephone number)
  • poor or overzealous field validation and inefficient error messaging (a major issue)
  • bad page design where buttons are hidden below the bottom of the screen (desktop, tablet and mobile)
  • not using the browser pre-fill function

Do you recognise any of these issues on your site?

How do I get help with these?

 

For more website design tips have a look at Top Homepage Design Tips or Top 5 Website Optimisation Tips