<p>A high-converting website is a crucial step in transforming users into customers.&nbsp;</p><p>The more people that discover your brand, the more leads you’re going to acquire. This is why ensuring you have the right messaging in your webpages is key to acquiring new prospective customers. This includes a clear call to action (CTA) so readers know what to do next, a great value proposition to explain why a customer should do business with you rather than a competitor and positive trust factors, so your audience and crucially, Google, recognises that you’re safe to do business with.</p><p>In this guide, we’ll look at what conversions mean for your website and how you can make positive changes to attract new business through conversions.</p><h2>What is conversion rate optimisation (CRO)?</h2><p>CRO is the method of turning passive website visitors into committed customers. A conversion doesn’t necessarily have to be a purchase; it could be the creation of an account, the completion of a contact form, an app download, or something else entirely.</p><p>To do this, websites must understand and focus on what drives, stops and persuades users so they can provide the best user experience.</p><h3>Improving CRO with integrated reviews</h3><p>One of the most fundamental aspects of CRO comes down to a simple equation: building trust = higher conversions. The good news is that there are proven ways to build confidence with customers. Our own research shows that <a href="https://en.business.feefo.com/blog/feefo-consumer-report/">almost seven in ten</a> trust other shoppers’ recommendations — so integrating reviews properly is the first step.</p><h3>Spilt test</h3><p>Split testing is an excellent way to determine whether integrating reviews on a page makes a difference in conversions, or if there’s another issue holding visitors back from converting. A Feefo client ran a split test to measure the impact that showcasing reviews had on bookings. During the test, some visitors were shown Feefo service ratings close to the basket summary, while others were just given the basket summary.</p><p>The results of the test proved that the presence of the Feefo service rating increased consumer confidence and led to a 3.01% uplift in revenue per visitor and a 2.94% increase in total bookings.</p><h3>Integrate product reviews</h3><p>If you have an eCommerce site, it’s essential to integrate your product reviews. Our research found that <a href="https://en.business.feefo.com/resources/whitepapers/consumer-report/">over half of UK consumers (66%)</a> say reading reviews is the first thing they do when making purchasing decisions. If there aren’t any present, and they’re not sure about the product, then they are unlikely to buy.</p><h3>Display your accolades</h3><p>It’s important to highlight when your business wins awards or gains recognition for great service and products. Displaying award badges adds an additional layer of authenticity to your brand, helping to reassure customers that you are reputable.</p><p>At Feefo, we seek to reward every business that delivers an exceptional service to their customers, as we believe that consumers greatly benefit from knowing which brands people like them trust most. That’s why we run the <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/company/trusted-service-awards">Trusted Service Awards every year</a>— all winners receive a special badge recognising their achievement which they can place on their site.</p><p>This acts as an excellent trust signal, as businesses must collect at least 50 reviews in a year and achieve a service rating of 4.0 or higher. We give Gold Trusted Service awards to businesses that gain at least a 4.5 rating. When customers see the Trusted Service badge, they know they’re dealing with a business that consistently delivers a fantastic experience, thanks to ratings from previous customers.</p><h2>Increase your conversions with no media spend</h2><p>Possibly the most attractive aspect of CRO is that the only investment you need to make is time. There are no fees, hidden costs or subscriptions. All you need to do is:</p><ul><li>Alter something on your page</li><li>Test the new variant against the original</li><li>Assess the results after a few months and implement the winning variant.</li></ul><p>In reality, just increasing your conversion rate from 1% to 2% actually doubles your sales numbers. So, how do you do this?&nbsp;</p><h3>1. Conversion rates and social proofing</h3><p>Social proofing is the inclusion of third-party reviews, testimonials or support, e.g. customer reviews, on your site. They are an important way of showing potential customers that they’re not the only one who thinks that your product is amazing. It <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/features/brand-reputation">builds trust in users</a> for you and your product, making people more likely to buy.</p><p>There are several ways to do this:</p><ul><li><a href="https://support.feefo.com/support/solutions/articles/8000079019-widget-gallery#:~:text=Feefo%20Highlighted%20Snippets%20widget%20is,your%20on%2Dsite%20customer%20journey.">Review Snippets</a>— this is a Google code that takes ratings and reviews from review sites and adds them to the search results. This means that your excellent 5-star rating shows up in ads, on your site and in the organic results of search engines too, giving you extra exposure.&nbsp;</li></ul><ul><li>Third-party review sites — a great way to include a more quantitative perspective of your product, is by offering a rating, instead of words. Third-party sites will often have a <a href="https://support.feefo.com/support/solutions/articles/8000082218-on-page-reviews">on page display tool that you can easily&nbsp;add to your site</a> to show off your rating and keep it updated.</li></ul><ul><li>Written testimonials — adding these provides potential customers with a more in-depth idea of the specifics of your product. Written reviews can also improve your search engine optimisation (SEO), by increasing the number of times you include a certain word or phrase on the page, without making the copy unreadable. Google ranks pages higher when they are relevant, clear and use keywords often and organically.</li></ul><h3>2. Conversion rates and mobile compatibility</h3><p><a href="https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/device-use-marketer-tips/">Google studies show&nbsp;</a>that 40% of people only use their mobile phones to search online in an average day, and that there are more Google searches taking place on phones than on computers.</p><p>As such, your site needs to reflect this shift in how people use devices. When optimising your site, make sure any changes are compatible with mobile screens and are visible in these altered displays. Small, unreadable text or sections of a page that are only partly visible are examples of mistakes to watch out for. There are several tools for mobile performance analysis but looking in your <a href="https://search.google.com/search-console/about">Search Console</a> is a great place to start.</p><h3>3. Conversion rates and call to actions</h3><p>You cannot overestimate the importance of having a clear call to action (CTA). Lots of buttons, links and menus on your page, all leading to a variety of other areas of your site, will confuse customers about where they should go next&nbsp; to buy your product — they might even get lost on your site.&nbsp;</p><p>Try to have one clear CTA that you repeat throughout the page you’re optimising. Have a button that clearly leads to the next step in the buying process, and ensure you repeat that button several times on the page as well, to make it clear what the next step is and how to get there.</p><h2>Use your online booking process to improve conversion rates</h2><p>From travel companies to restaurants, businesses that feature a booking system have an additional tool for improving conversion rate optimisation (CRO). Here are some tips to ensure your booking process captivates your customers so that they book directly with your business.</p><h3>1. Make it clear that you offer online bookings&nbsp;</h3><p>58% of visitors to your site come to check prices and availability with the intention of booking, so you need to make the process as clear and easy as possible if you want to seal the deal before they look elsewhere.</p><p>Make your “Book Now” CTA a prominent part of your homepage, so visitors are in no doubt that you offer an online booking service. Live availability tracking, an easy-to-navigate search function, and clearly presented search results all contribute to a seamless booking experience that makes it easy for visitors to find the information they need to secure their booking with minimum fuss.</p><h3>2. Optimise the booking process for mobile</h3><p>In 2022, mobile still beats desktop in the online shopping statistics, with <a href="https://contentsquare.com/blog/mobile-vs-desktop/">58% of all visits coming from mobile phones</a>. So make sure your booking process works seamlessly across both mobiles and tablets to engage with as many people as possible. Simply optimising your site might not be enough. <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/resources">The way people interact with your business</a> on mobile differs massively from a desktop, so pay careful attention to every aspect of your booking process to make sure the mobile version is up to scratch.</p><h3>3. Reward people for booking online</h3><p>By booking online, travellers are saving your business precious time and money, so why not give something back? Offering exclusive discounts for making their purchase online gives users more reason to book directly through your website and helps increase online sales.&nbsp;</p><p>Take the opportunity to encourage people towards online booking, whether that’s in your brochure, email footer or even your reception’s answer phone message. Offering different discount codes for each contact point lets you track which channels are most effective for pushing people towards booking online.</p><h3>4. Collect and share customer reviews</h3><p>Showcasing <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/features/display-reviews">customer reviews</a> during the booking process is an incredibly powerful way of building trust in your business and reducing basket abandonment from indecisive shoppers; especially if you’re collecting your feedback using an independent and reliable source. 94% of consumers check feedback to help them choose which hotel, car rental company or airline to go with.&nbsp;</p><p>For the biggest impact, incorporate your reviews into every stage of your online booking process — from the moment visitors land on your homepage, right the way through to the checkout. There are even plug-ins, such as our very own Feefo <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/features/dynamic-topic-display">Dynamic Topic Display, </a>that make it easy for customers to find the reviews that matter most to them. By letting them filter feedback by topics such as location or WiFi quality, they can start making decisions with confidence based on the stuff most relevant to them.</p><h3>5. Add images and videos</h3><p>An online booking process that shows, as well as tells, users what they’re getting creates a more compelling shopping experience for travellers looking for that picture-perfect destination. Better yet, encourage previous customers to share their holiday snaps with you. Using authentic and unique user-generated content to showcase your holidays is far more convincing than yet another boring slideshow of perfectly framed stock photos.</p><h3>6. Use AI to offer real-time support during the booking process</h3><p>Prominently displaying contact details throughout your site is an easy way to show that you have a helpful customer support team just a phone call away. However, many online users seek quick and simple solutions to their problems or they will likely try and find them elsewhere.</p><p>AI chatbots aren’t the revolutionary piece of tech that they were several years ago, but they’re becoming more sophisticated every year. They offer the ideal cost-effective solution for travel companies looking to give real-time support to customers during the booking process, without sacrificing the time and manpower that traditionally comes with offering 24/7 customer support.</p><h3><strong>7. Keep the conversation going</strong></h3><p>Just because a customer has confirmed their booking, it doesn’t mean the booking experience is over. Make sure you keep the conversation going right up until they’ve touched back down after their holiday. Follow up the booking with an automated email confirmation that includes all of their booking details, and make sure to personalise the email journey by giving them some handy content tailored to their trips, such as a helpful city guide or travel advice.</p><p>Also, why not ask them for a review of your current booking process? You can learn from their feedback to improve the process for future customers and create an even better customer experience for them the next time they book with you.</p><h2>Improve your CRO with social proof</h2><p>As a final piece of advice from Feefo, find out how you can boost conversions to your eCommerce site by using social proof in our 45-minute webinar. We've teamed up with Yieldify to bring you this masterclass in which you'll learn what social proof is and six ways to use it. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssEcD_kqmgE">Watch thevideo</a> here.</p>

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Conversion rate optimisation: What is it and how can it help you win customers?

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<p>Getting to the top of search engine results is a great way to boost organic web traffic and brand awareness. The process of getting there is called search engine optimisation, or SEO.</p><p>The aim is to move your way up the rankings by making your content as valuable as possible to search engines. SEO is a huge topic covering lots of different areas, but it’s usually divided into two main pillars: technical SEO and content management.</p><p>In this guide, we look into how technical SEO and content management can work together to attract more visitors to your website.</p><h2>What is SEO?</h2><p>Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of making sure that your website pages appear higher than your competitors in the organic search engine results. It means creating content that search engines can find and consider relevant enough to show in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher you appear, the more likely you are to drive visitors to your site.</p><p>Keywords are still very important in your SEO. You need to know exactly what keywords you want to target, then make sure to use them strategically throughout your content. Here are some important areas where you’ll want to place your keywords:</p><ul><li>Headers (H1 and H2s)</li><li>Meta title</li><li>Meta description tags</li><li>Hitting a specific keyword density in your body text</li></ul><p>You mustn’t overdo your chosen keywords, known as “keyword stuffing”. Try to use keywords strategically so that your pages maintain a logical flow and a high-quality level of content. The Google algorithm will pick these up and show the pages for the relevant search queries in SERPs.</p><p>There are strict <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies?hl=en&visit_id=638379756973123853-3305592050&rd=1#keyword-stuffing">Google guidelines</a> about keyword usage, so it’s best to brush up on the dos and don’ts.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><h2>What is technical SEO?</h2><p>Technical SEO is about making websites easily accessible to bots so that they can be indexed and show up in the search results. It can significantly increase the amount of organic traffic to a site, especially if the website wasn’t initially built with SEO in mind.</p><p>It encompasses everything from fixing broken pages, dealing with redirect issues and site speed to tackling complex JavaScript issues. Technical SEO specialists will be able to offer plenty of solutions to get your website ready for the search engines when their bots come crawling.&nbsp;</p><h2>What is content management?</h2><p>Content management takes care of the content strategy, keywords, and improves where the site appears in the SERPs. Creating a content strategy is the process of planning out what content you’re going to publish on your website and in which order to increase organic traffic.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p>Creating an effective strategy can help you to create content which is meaningful, engaging and most importantly, relevant to your target customers. It can also help you to:</p><ul><li>Build trust with your audience</li><li>Engage with your customers on a personal level</li><li>Improve your brand awareness</li><li>Increase visibility and organic traffic to your site</li></ul><p>There are a few things that you’ll need to consider and include when planning out your content strategy.</p><h3>1. The basics</h3><p>No matter which industry you operate in, there are some specific pages that you need to include on your site to keep the organic traffic coming in. They will tell your brand’s story, remain relevant over time, and will answer all of your customers’ questions. These are:</p><ul><li>Your homepage</li><li>Your ‘about’ page</li><li>Your contact page</li><li>Your products or services pages</li></ul><h3>2. Blog articles&nbsp;</h3><p>Your blog section can do a lot to increase your organic traffic. Publishing fresh content regularly means that search engines, like Google, will know that you’re relevant. This will help them to crawl and index your site more frequently.</p><p>Blog articles are usually written with a set of keywords in mind. While SEO-optimised blog posts are beneficial for increasing organic traffic, articles which haven’t been optimised, such as news stories, can help to keep your site relevant too.</p><h3>3. Website architecture</h3><p>Website architecture is about how you link your pages together, so search engines can easily find what they’re looking for.&nbsp;</p><p>For example, if you have pages on your site that are several clicks away from your home page, a bot will have a hard time finding those pages. The key is to keep things simple, with every page on your site no more than four clicks or so away.&nbsp;</p><p>With the right keyword strategy in place and the more SEO optimisation you do across your site, the higher the chance that you’ll start to rank better in search and become more competitive in your niche. All of which are crucial in encouraging more organic traffic to your site.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><h2>What is organic traffic?</h2><p>Any visitor that lands on your website from a SERP after clicking an unpaid search result makes up the organic traffic to your site.&nbsp;</p><p>They may have searched for your brand specifically and landed on your homepage, or maybe they were looking for certain information that a page on your site happens to rank high for. Either way, if they find your website after using search engines like Google or Bing, they’ll count towards your organic traffic.</p><p>It’s important to remember that SEO is a long game. There’s no quick fix that will get you to the top of the SERPs overnight. It requires a well-thought-out content strategy and paying constant attention to the technical aspects of SEO to build momentum.</p><h2>How can you improve your organic traffic?</h2><p>A combination of technical SEO and content management techniques can get your site moving up the rankings and improve your organic traffic.</p><p>Here are a few of the techniques we’d recommend:</p><h3>1. Content marketing</h3><p>To gain as much organic traffic to your site as possible, you need to make sure that you’re writing content aimed at your buyer personas and catering to the journey that they’re on. What do they want to hear from you? What will they engage with?</p><p>This won’t send your organic traffic through the roof, but it means that your content will be more engaging, more valuable, and more shareable.&nbsp;</p><p>Here’s what we suggest you think about before you hit ‘publish’ on your latest piece of content:</p><ul><li><strong>Is the content findable? </strong>—Make sure your content includes everything it needs for Google to find and understand it. That includes relevant keywords, H1 and H2 tags, metadata, and alt tags for any images you’ve used.</li><li><strong>Is the content readable?</strong>—Have you included easy-to-read, bulleted lists, and headers?</li><li><strong>Is the content understandable? </strong>—Have you considered the audience’s reading level? Is it in context? Have you considered the personas that you’re writing for?</li><li><strong>Is the content actionable? </strong>—Have you included a call to action? How about a place to comment? Have you linked to any other related content?</li></ul><ul><li><strong>Is the content shareable? </strong>— Have you given the reader a good reason to share your content? Is it saying something new or informative? Can the content easily be shared to the reader’s social media and then personalised with their own comments and hashtags?</li></ul><h3>2. User-generated content (UGC)</h3><p>User-generated content, or UGC, is any type of content such as photos, videos, text, or even customer reviews that are created by your customers. UGC is uploaded to social channels, review platforms, or your own website.</p><p>Not only is UGC completely free, but it’s also more authentic. <a href="https://www.nosto.com/blog/report-consumer-marketing-perspectives-on-content-in-the-digital-age/">90% of consumers say that authenticity is important when deciding which brands they want to support</a>, so the more you can do to humanise your content, the better.&nbsp;</p><p>UGC can also benefit your organic traffic by:&nbsp;</p><ul><li><strong>Ranking for long-tail keywords </strong>— It’s likely that fewer sites will be targeting hyper-specific long-tail keywords (three or four-word phrases), but identifying them can be difficult. Your customers’ positive and negative comments highlight what matters to them, so use these phrases to your advantage by including them in your product descriptions to optimise your product pages.</li><li><strong>Improving your social media optimisation (SMO) </strong>— It’s just as important to optimise your brand’s social media account as it is your website. UGC helps to create interactions like shares, comments, and likes which can have a positive impact on your SEO. Posts linking back to your brand with a lot of interaction are likely to appear high in search results when someone searches for your business.&nbsp;</li><li><strong>Incorporating photo and video reviews </strong>—Search engines value video and photo UGC because this is exactly the type of rich media content users are searching for. A search engine’s role is to provide the most relevant and high-quality content to its users, so as long as your content is optimised, it has a chance to rank well organically.</li></ul><h3>3. Internal linking</h3><p>Internal linking is how your webpages connect to create a navigation menu that both users and search engines can use to get around your site easily and find the content they need. An internal link is any link that takes you from one page on your website to another page on the same site.</p><p>The easier you make it for search engines to move around your site, the more likely it is they’ll find the content they’re looking for and rank your pages higher in the SERPs.</p><h3>4. Backlinks</h3><p>Backlinks are just as important, if not more so, as internal links for improving your ranking and driving organic traffic to your site. Backlinks are all the links on the internet that link from external websites back to yours.</p><p>Theoretically, quality and relevant backlinks increase your website’s Domain Authority (DA). High DA translates to more trust in the eyes of Google and can have a positive effect on the rankings of your website.&nbsp;</p><p>Here are a few methods for building trusted backlinks for your website:</p><ul><li>Broken link building (finding a dead page on a website and asking linkers to swap to your site)</li><li>Contributing guest articles to third-party sites</li><li>Infographics &amp; Digital PR Campaigns</li><li>Promoting your own content</li><li>Contacting webmasters, journalists, and third-party content creators</li><li>Interviews and PR activity</li></ul><p>To get the best results, you should pay close attention to both backlinks and social mentions. Create an SEO strategy that responsibly builds backlinks but also helps develop your brand identity, so you organically create linkless mentions wherever possible.</p><p>For more on how you can develop your brand and start improving your linkless mentions, check out our article on brand development.</p><h3>5. Off-page SEO marketing</h3><p>Off-page marketing is any activity that takes place outside of your own website, either on third-party websites or social media, to try and improve its rankings.&nbsp;</p><p>The aim is to increase your brand recognition around the web to help tell the likes of Google what others really think of the quality of the content on your site. The more backlinks and brand mentions you have elsewhere, the more search engines can trust your content and will view you as ‘subject matter experts’ in your field.</p><p>Backlink building falls under your off-page SEO marketing efforts and perhaps plays the biggest and most important role in influencing your search rankings and organic traffic. However, there’s so much more to off-page marketing that, if done right, will further your SEO cause even more.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p>A few other off-page marketing tactics include:</p><ul><li>Increasing brand mentions by:&nbsp;</li><li>Guest blogging</li><li>Appearing on podcasts</li><li>Doing interviews with key online publications</li><li>Optimising your <a href="https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/business/">Google My Business page</a></li><li>Collecting customer reviews through trusted third-party sites</li><li>Growing your social media presence</li></ul><h3>6. Schema</h3><p>Also known as structured data, schema plays a big role in your site’s ability to drive organic traffic.</p><p>Schema is essentially a semantic vocabulary of structured data that you can add to your website’s HTML. It allows search engine bots to better understand the content of each web page so search engines can decide the most relevant pages to show a user in the SERPs.</p><p>JSON LD is the preferred language for Google right now, which is what we use here at Feefo in our integrations. Its simpler script-based approach means that you can easily insert it as a single block of code within the &lt;head&gt; or &lt;body&gt; of the page.</p><p>Adding product schema to your product pages, although not openly admitted by Google, is a great way to help search engines rank your pages for related product searches. The more information you can give to the likes of Google, the more detailed and informative your search results appear to consumers.&nbsp;</p><h3>7. Reviews</h3><p>Whether you’re using our on-page integration to display your reviews across your website or using product schema to create more compelling search results for your key products, there’re plenty of ways your customer reviews can help you drive more organic traffic to your site.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p>Used properly, your customer reviews can have a huge impact on:</p><ul><li>Search rankings</li><li>Organic traffic</li><li>Conversion rates</li><li>Bounce rates</li><li>Time spent on page</li></ul><p>A steady flow of fresh, original, and relevant content hitting your site is a good way of building up pages without much text and indicating to search engines that they’re worth showing in the SERPs.</p><p>You should make it as easy as possible for the Googlebot to crawl your reviews by using JavaScript prerender tools wherever possible. As an extra help for Googlebot, our on-page integration inserts Review Schema markup and marks up review content on your pages so that search engines can easily find it and count it towards your SEO.&nbsp;</p><p>Collecting customer feedback can also make you eligible for Google Star ratings: a trust signal which shows alongside your organic pages. Learn more about Google reviews and Star Ratings here.</p><h2>Get help with your SEO today</h2><p>There is so much you can do to increase the organic traffic to your site; a combination of a solid content marketing strategy with some well-chosen and placed technical SEO measures are likely to do the trick.&nbsp;</p>

Conversion rate optimisation: What is it and how can it help you win customers?

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