Conversion rate optimisation: what it is and how to improve it

Search for “conversion rate optimisation” and page one is software vendors, analytics platforms and long guides from companies that sell testing tools. They are written for teams with a dedicated optimiser and thousands of visitors a day. Most small businesses have neither, and still lose enquiries every week to a website that gets people to the door and fails to get them through it.

This is the version for that business: what conversion rate optimisation is, how to improve a conversion rate without a testing programme, and what it looks like when it works.

What is conversion rate optimisation?

A conversion is the step a page exists to get: an enquiry, a booking, a purchase. The conversion rate is the share of visitors who take it. If 1,000 people visit and 20 enquire, the rate is 2%.

Conversion rate optimisation, CRO, is finding out why the other 980 did not, and changing the site so more of them do. It works on the visitors you already have. That is why it is often cheaper than the alternative, which is paying to bring more people to a page that loses most of them.

How do you improve a conversion rate?

In the order that tends to save the most time:

1. Check the numbers first. Many conversion problems start with figures nobody can trust: a tracking script that fires twice, a form that is not counted, a bounce rate inflated by bots. Fix the measurement before changing a single word.
2. Find the step where people leave. Not the page that looks worst, the page where visitors actually drop out, and what they saw immediately before they did. Analytics that shows entry pages, exit pages and the path between them is enough for this.
3. Change one thing. A better headline and a shorter form and a new button colour, all at once, tells you nothing about which one worked. One meaningful change at a time means its effect can be told apart from everything else.
4. Compare against the before. If it helped, keep it and look for the next leak. If it made things worse, roll it back. A change you never measured is an opinion.

On a site with modest traffic you will not get clean statistical tests, so the changes need to be bigger and fewer, and judged over a longer stretch. That changes the shape of the work, not the logic.

What is the difference between SEO and CRO?

SEO decides how many people arrive. CRO decides how many of them do something once they are there. They fail separately: a page can rank well and convert nobody, or convert beautifully and never be found. They work best together, because better rankings send more visitors and a better page turns more of them into customers.

What is the difference between conversion rate and click-through rate?

Click-through rate is about the step before your site: of the people who saw an ad or a search result, the share who clicked. Conversion rate is about your site: of the people who arrived, the share who took the next step. A strong click-through rate with a weak conversion rate usually means the ad promised something the page does not deliver quickly enough.

A real example

Koolcube, an online store, was paying for Google Ads clicks that arrived and immediately left. The work on that landing page did not start by changing the ads or buying more traffic. The scroll data from my own analytics showed about 60% of visitors leaving within the first tenth of the page, before they reached anything to act on. Two things were behind it: the hero image was slow to load, and the page gave too little detail and no clear action in view.

I moved the call to action and the key information up and improved the hero image. About 15% of visitors now leave at that point, down from about 60%. Conversions rose by 58% after the page and the campaign were changed together (the campaign change is in the marketing strategy guide), with enquiries coming in better qualified than before.

Where to start

Pick the one page that receives the most visitors and sends the fewest on. Look at how people reach it and where they go next. Ask what a visitor from that source expects to find within the first screen, and whether it is there. That single question explains a surprising share of lost conversions.

If your paid traffic is landing on pages that were never built for it, that is the first place to look, and it is the same logic behind paid search done properly. If you would rather have someone read the numbers with you and decide what to change first, that is what conversion optimisation at Doppio is, and it starts from checking that the tracking can be trusted.