In today’s competitive digital landscape, driving traffic to your website is only half the equation; what truly determines success is how effectively that traffic converts. Many businesses invest heavily in marketing but overlook the critical step of turning visitors into customers, leads, or enquiries. After working with dozens of websites, we at LocalTeam see the significance of conversion rate optimisation (CRO).
In this article, we are going to define all the important terms, explain the difference between CRO and SEO, and walk you through the best CRO practices together with frequent pitfalls you can run into when trying to improve your website. If any of these issues sparks your interest, then make sure to read and bookmark this post. It’s time to learn how to maximise the value of every visitor and achieve measurable business growth without increasing acquisition costs.
What Is Conversion Rate?
Before diving into optimisation, it’s critical to understand the fundamentals.
A conversion is any desired action a user takes on your website. This action depends on your business goals and can include:
- making a purchase;
- filling out a contact form;
- booking a consultation;
- downloading a resource;
- signing up for a newsletter.
A conversion rate measures how effectively your website turns visitors into customers (or leads). It is a real metric that is based on the performance of your website. You can calculate it using the formula below:
Conversion rate can be calculated for any time period, either short or long. Let’s say you want to know your monthly percentage. If you had 5000 visitors per month and 150 visits resulted in conversion, then you would have the following calculation:
(150/5000) × 100 = 3%
This metric is one of the most important performance indicators for any digital product because it directly reflects how well your website supports user decisions.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
Conversion rate optimisation, or CRO, is the systematic process of improving your website in order to increase the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action. CRO is not based on guesses or speculations; it is a data-driven discipline that combines:
- User behaviour analysis;
- User experience design;
- A/B testing;
- Psychology and decision-making principles.
The goal of all these processes is simple: to get more value from the traffic you already have. So, CRO is never aimed at increasing website traffic. All the strategies are designed to turn passive page viewers that the website already has into active service users. Instead of spending more on attracting new people to the platform, CRO ensures your existing visitors are more likely to convert.
Difference Between CRO and SEO
Now, every second digital marketing article on the Internet is devoted to some kind of optimisation (CRO, SEO, GEO, AIO, SMO and so on). Even though it always comes to performance improvement in a general sense, all the systems differ in their objectives and practices used to achieve them.
Let’s talk about probably the most popular optimisation, SEO, and how it is different from conversion rate optimisation. First and foremost, both disciplines go hand in hand, but they are not interchangeable. The main differences are given in the table below:
SEO | CRO | |
|---|---|---|
Focus | to get traffic | to convert traffic |
Goal | to rank higher on search engines | to turn visitors into customers |
Activities | keyword research, content optimisation, technical changes, backlink profile building | conversion research, user experience optimisation, CTA changes, brand trust building |
The table clearly shows that even though both CRO and SEO are involved in the process of website improvement, they vary in many aspects. It is even possible to say that they work one after another: first, SEO brings users to your website, and after that, CRO ensures they take action once they arrive. Without CRO, even high traffic achieved with great SEO efforts won’t generate meaningful business results.
The Best CRO Strategies
Effective conversion rate optimisation is not about random tweaks; it is about structured improvements based on real user behaviour. Knowing this, LocalTeam Australia wants to share the most efficient approaches to improving conversion rates on your online platforms.
Improve Page Clarity
Think of a situation where you have a headache, and you need to book a haircut. You visit a necessary website, start clicking through ten different pages, because no page in the menu says “Booking,” so you want to find this option by yourself, you found timetable, pricing, clients’ photos, and even a list of benefits of this place, where online booking is mentioned. You found pretty much everything, but not the only thing you were looking for. And probably at this point, your headache intensifies because of the overall confusion, and it becomes even easier to concentrate and understand where this booking button can be.
A good rule of thumb is that even a person suffering from a headache or exhaustion should be able to find the service/button/link they need on your website without great difficulty. Only in this case did you achieve maximum page clarity.
Users should instantly understand what this page is for, what content can be found there and if they need it for their next action just by looking at the page name in the menu. When they have already landed on the page, their guesses must be confirmed, and their next actions must be directed by clear calls to action available on the page. Confusion kills conversions, which is why you should strive for clarity.
Reduce Friction in User Journeys
Imagine that you are in a rush and you have three minutes to quickly order pizza online and get back to business. Under such circumstances, every complication on your way will feel like a personal attack. While all you want to do is to click the menu, quickly select your favourite pizza variety, and pay, you have to deal with pop-ups blocking the menu, page loading extra slowly, ten different fields requiring all sorts of personal information just to order food, and as a result finding out that the form is broken and you need to make a call to place your order.
If every web designer and developer were taking into consideration the pizza ordering scenario while working on the interface and functionality of online platforms, then all the websites would provide simpler user journeys. The more difficulties users have on the way to conversion, the more likely they are to give up sooner or later. Below, you will see what to focus on when it comes to user journey simplification:
- Form optimisation: It is recommended to require only essential information during registration or the first order. Your platform can still have an option of adding more details in the profile settings, but it will be up to users when and whether to give this information. Another point would be “remembering” users’ information and prefilling the fields for them to save time;
- Click reduction: If you want your website visitors to convert, then make sure it can be done quickly. If it takes an average user 20 clicks to subscribe to your newsletter or to book a service, there is definitely room for improvement on your site. There is no need to prevent your users from taking actions you are most interested in. That is why deleting pages that just serve as another extra step and do not provide any value, or having a link to your most important pages, both in the header and in the footer, are not just an option but a necessity;
- Shorter wait: This recommendation is self-explanatory. Users do not want to waste time on a slow website. All they want is to satisfy their needs and to do it in the most convenient way for them. So, if your platform doesn’t check all the boxes, then they will inevitably go to your competitors. To minimise waiting times, you can optimise page load speed by compressing images, enabling caching, and minifying code. And to know when page load time starts falling beyond your expectations, you can set up Check 1 2 notifications by subscribing to one of the tiers.
Use Social Proof
Let’s consider a situation where you need the help of a dentist in an unknown city. Your friend recommended a dentist’s office in a 20-minute drive, and you found another one on the way. What are the chances that you will decide to take a risk and go to a dentist you know nothing about? The same situation with websites. If a user visits a website with no trust signals, there is a high possibility that they will end up looking for these signals elsewhere.
When users land on your website, and all they see is just a dry description of your business, they will feel reluctant to use your services. However, when they visit webpages where other clients left positive reviews, where website owners published case studies describing real projects they were working on, and where customer logos are posted showing that this business earned trust, users will unconsciously feel a connection to the brand and will be likely to start cooperation. Being shy about your achievement doesn’t convert users, but talking about your work and asking clients to write testimonials for you does.
Conduct A/B Testing
Picture this: you came to a clothing store, grabbed the first shirt from the shelf, went directly to the cashier to pay and then got disappointed at home because your random guess didn’t bring a desired result, and the shirt appeared to be small and uncomfortable. The same thing applies to conversion rate optimisation. You cannot just guess that a certain strategy will work and then be dissatisfied with the negative result. CRO is about hypothesising and testing.
Every time you want to implement changes on the page (change calls to action, layout, button size, font colour, etc.), it is necessary to keep your current page and create its copy with a desired change, then split traffic between two of them and after some time period, check which page variant received more conversions. It is important to implement changes gradually, not all at once, since it is possible that users won’t like one certain change rather than a combination of them all. If your original page performed better throughout the testing period, then the change is unnecessary, and it is time to check the other one. And if the modified page had a better conversion rate, then this change can be implemented, and from now on, this page is considered the current one to which other changes will be compared.
Common CRO Mistakes
Having read the best practices related to conversion rate optimisation, it is easy to assume that doing the opposite of what is listed as recommendations will be considered a mistake. However, there is more to CRO than this. So, we want to highlight what exactly can go wrong and explain what to do instead:
- Overloading pages with information: If your page is about internal blinds, users will be happy just to see your catalogue and read a list of features typical for these products, other than scrolling paragraphs talking about your company’s history, comparisons of different brands of security screens, and guidelines for the external blinds care. Too much content will definitely overwhelm users. Let alone too much irrelevant content. Clarity always wins quantity;
- No clear conversion path: If your pages have a clear structure, users will never be left wondering what to do next. No need to play the hint-and-guess game with your potential clients. They want a certain service type, and it should be understandable how they can get it. Utilise readable fonts, contrast colours, bigger buttons, and straightforward CTAs;
- Weak or unclear value proposition: Every business owner knows their company’s value. However, when a new user visits a website, they know nothing about the company, its services, or products, so every page must clearly communicate your value proposition. This value is the reason why users choose one business over another. Your value proposition must be specific and user-oriented;
- Designing based on opinion, not data: It doesn’t matter if your designers have the best taste and many years of experience. It is never possible to guess what specific group of people will prefer more in a particular time period. That is why all the design decisions must be taken only after testing it on real users, rather than gathering opinions of the team members;
- Ignoring mobile experience: In the modern world, more and more people use smartphones as a gateway to the Internet. It is even possible that you are reading this article now from the screen of your phone. Keeping in mind this fact, it is unacceptable to neglect the necessity of a well-designed UX for mobile users. Before publishing any pages, it never hurts to double-check how the mobile view looks like;
- Treating CRO as a one-time task: It would be great to implement changes once and to reap the benefits every day after this. However, CRO doesn’t work this way; it is continuous. There will always be ways to improve your pages based on the changeable nature of users, competitors, and trends.
Create a Successful Conversion Rate Optimisation Process Today!
If your website is getting traffic but not generating leads or sales, it is time to implement conversion rate optimisation. Your main aim is not to attract more users, but to promote these users to perform conversions.
A structured CRO approach allows you to improve user experience, make data-driven decisions, and build a more effective digital presence.
At LocalTeam, we focus on building and optimising digital products that perform in real-world conditions, not just in theory. Whether you need a full CRO audit, UX improvements, or ongoing optimisation, our team can help you turn your website into a consistent conversion engine. To get started, make sure to contact us by calling or emailing.
