You may be celebrating getting large amounts of traffic to your website.
But the real thing you should be focusing all your attention on is this. How many of those visitors actually turn into paying customers?
It’s all very well getting 1,000 people to visit your store. But if 999 of them click away without buying something, then you have a big problem.
Enter CRO for eCommerce and SEO optimisation for online stores to save the day.
What is eCommerce CRO?
eCommerce CRO (conversion rate optimisation) is when you find out how many people visit your site compared to how many of them ‘convert’ into paying customers.
If the conversion rate is too low, then you clearly have an issue with the product page that needs to be urgently addressed. That’s when you have to find out what the problem is and fix it. Your conversion rate will then hopefully increase.
Therefore, conversion rate optimisation is the process of optimising your website to increase the possibility that a visitor will turn from a casual browser into a shopper.
After all, impressions don’t pay the bills.
How to Calculate CRO
There’s a certain way to calculate various aspects of conversion rates, which we’ll look at below.
There are many conversion rate metrics to consider, but the one metric you absolutely need to know is the basic conversion rate.
You can easily calculate it as follows:
- Get the total number of visitors per month. You can get this from Google Search Console or Google Analytics.
- Now, get your calculator out and divide the total number of monthly sales by the total number of visitors. So if you had 500 sales in one month and 10,000 visitors, then divide 500 by 10,000. Then multiply by 100 to get the percentage value.
Therefore, using the stats above, the conversion rate would be 5% (five out of a hundred visitors bought something.)
Figure out how to get more of those visitors to buy your product for the conversion rate to increase. Then, you’ll be making more money for less ad spend and less overall effort.
The Importance of eCommerce CRO
Look at CRO this way.
If 10,000 people visit your website per month and only 2% convert into customers, that’s 200 orders per month. 200 orders obviously isn’t too shabby, but considering you had 10,000 visitors, 200 is a bit on the low side.
But if you manage to increase your conversion rate to 4%, that’s 400 orders with the same traffic. Again, 10,000 visitors versus 400 orders is still rather low, but you’ll agree that 400 orders is a lot better than 200 orders!
So, by doubling your conversion rate, you’ve doubled the income you were previously getting.
But if you didn’t know what the conversion rate was in the first place, then you wouldn’t have been able to get this improvement. That’s the value of knowing the conversion value of your products.
If you have a very tight budget for ads or SEO, then increasing the conversion rate is going to increase your sales without having to increase your marketing budget.
So, as an eCommerce entrepreneur, improving conversions through SEO is going to make all the difference. Make it one of your highest priorities.
How to Improve CRO With SEO on your eCommerce Website
Now for some tips on how to increase that conversion rate.
None of it is really advanced SEO for eCommerce. So, you should be able to implement these suggestions fairly quickly and then see a quick improvement in your conversion rate.
1. Improve website speed
It doesn’t take long for a site visitor to get impatient and click away. In fact, it can take merely seconds. So, having a slow site speed is definitely going to impact your conversion rate.
Google will register the click, but the person can then leave if the page isn’t loading fast enough.
You can improve website speed by:
- Removing all unnecessary page clutter, such as popups and social media widgets.
- Optimising your images to either WebP or AVIF, using TinyPNG.
- Moving page scripts to the footer instead of the header of the website.
- Enabling a cache on the page.
- Adding Lazy Load to all your images so the page loads faster.
Then, use Google PageSpeed Insights to check your score and get recommendations on how to improve the speed.
A higher speed equals a higher search engine ranking for eCommerce, which will likely mean a higher conversion rate.
2. Improve the mobile version of your site
The number of visitors shopping on their mobile has shot through the roof - Google even now peforms model-first indexing - so a badly designed, badly thought out mobile shopping experience is also going to make your conversion rate go south quickly.
If you use WordPress or Shopify, then most themes are now mobile responsive. But if you use another platform, you may find your mobile store to be less than satisfactory.
In this case, you may find it helpful to bring in a developer to either make your site responsive, or to make an entirely new mobile version of your online store.
Once you do? Then improving online visibility will be one fringe benefit. Higher revenue will be another.
3. Make site navigation simpler
If you arrive on a site and you suddenly get confused about where to go to find the product, wouldn’t you just leave, too?
Store visitors like clear navigation aids to show them where to go. In fact, Google likes it, too. This is why you need:
- A simplified menu
- Site breadcrumbs for Google to follow
- A search engine with autocomplete features
4. Make your page text more persuasive
If you find that a large majority of page visitors are just leaving, then figure out what on the page is putting them off. Maybe it’s the product description?
Tweak and optimise the product description to sound more persuasive and appealing.
5. Make checkout easier
Some stores make the fatal mistake of either offering too many payment options or too few.
Like site navigation, customers like simple. So, choose the three payment methods and stick to them.
This is usually credit cards, bank transfers, and digital payments like PayPal, Google Pay, and Apple Pay.
Anymore than that and people will not bother. So remove those customer details fields asking for their favourite colour and favourite song lyrics.
6. Send abandoned cart emails
People put things in carts and then leave them there. They may decide to return the next day, or they’re distracted by the latest reality show on TV. Then needless to say, they forget to come back.
You can mitigate this problem by automating abandoned cart emails. This not only reminds them of the unbought items waiting, but you can also take the opportunity to offer them a discount voucher or two to nudge them along.
7. Display shipping costs and sales taxes at the beginning
When someone likes the look of your price, the last thing they want is to suddenly be hit by a huge shipping cost, as well as a thumping amount of sales taxes on top.
Not only does the price then look extremely unappealing, but it will annoy them too that you’ve misled them.
The simple solution? Put the postage costs and sales taxes on the product page. That way, people know what they’re getting into right from the get-go.
Final Word
Unfortunately, one of the least desirable jobs in eCommerce is SEO and conversion rate optimisation. Anyone who hates stats with a passion is going to avoid this job as much as they can.
But as we have hopefully demonstrated, optimising the conversion rate can have an immediate effect on the number of orders and therefore your profit margins.
So, as boring as it sounds, put your stats hat on and start figuring out the numbers. Your eCommerce SEO strategy will greatly improve as a result.
