Growth Hacking Strategies For Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion is the ultimate aim of a business’s online efforts.

Everything that we do as part of digital marketing is a means to this end.

We pump thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours in our ventures, and if that does not lead to a spike in conversion rate, it’s hard to not feel disheartened.

But this is the thing about success - if you get the basics right, you will be surprised at how fast you grow! Along with building a solid foundation, keeping up with current technological and design trends are great way to stay competitive. If you’re feeling unhappy with your current conversion rates, or are just looking for a way to improve them even more, here are a few growth hacks to help you gain that upwards momentum.

Optimize For Mobile

Go mobile or go home. Ok, that’s a bit of a stretch, but you know what we mean.

Take a look around. Everyone is busy on their phone. And they’re not just Facebooking, WhatsApping, or Instagramming -- people are buying groceries, electronics, clothes, paying bills, and even finding partners online.

According to Google, more searches are conducted via mobile than desktop.

It’s little wonder then that Google itself is rewarding websites optimized for mobile with a better ranking in mobile search results.

If you have been paying attention to how crucial mobile has become to our society, and if you take note of the changing consumer behavior, you know that a website that is not optimized for mobile performance is losing out on great potential business.

Start here if your approach has been desktop-heavy.

Spruce Up Local SEO

When was the last time you optimized your website for search engines? Which keywords did you optimize your website for?

If it’s been over a year, conduct fresh research on your demographics, competition, and trending keywords. Even six months is a long time go without researching and refreshing your keywords. New competitors might have cropped up. Your target audience might have a new favorite. Depending on the industry you are in, people may have taken up a new fad.

Technology moves fast, as do people’s preferences. There are even apps that can put an end to traditional businesses—a classic example being Uber taking a huge chunk out of the traditional Taxi industry’s market.

No one can afford to rest on their laurels. With SEO you want to make sure you are on top of the trends, but more importantly, optimize for local search. That is how businesses get found.

Mobile optimization + local SEO is powerful stuff. One study found that 80% of searches done locally via mobile devices result in conversion.

Optimize For Voice Search

The use of voice assistants, in tandem with the use of mobile, is climbing, too. It’s a technology that people have been slow to adopt, but a greater percentage of them are doing so with each passing quarter. Voice search is convenient and voice recognition technology is improving by the day.

Google voice searches have doubled over the past year. And then we have other voice assistants, as well. Cortana and Siri, among the more prominent ones.

Optimizing for voice search means creating content that answers full-fledged queries. Voice-based search is distinct from text-based search, and along with Google’s move towards providing intuitive answers, businesses must now look at keyword optimization differently.

Aim to provide comprehensive (but specific) answers through your website content. Web pages containing relevant and top-quality content will be ranked higher in text search or voice search. If you haven’t optimized your digital content for voice search, you should consider updating to keep up with this trend.

Speed Up The Website

This is crucial for both desktop as well as mobile, but particularly so for mobile. Smartphones have grown impressively in the short period of their existence. We now have phones with as much as 6 GB of RAM supporting them! That’s more power than what some of our laptops are equipped with.

With fast internet speeds and super-performing phone processors, there is no excuse for websites to load slowly.

Your target audience has already gotten used to web pages loading in a fraction of a second. If your website, no matter how impressive, makes them wait longer than 5 seconds, they might even ditch it and hop over to the competitor.

A study by Kissmetrics found that “47% of consumers expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less” and that 40% of consumers would abandon a website that took longer than 3 seconds to load.

Even if people are willing to hang around a slow loading website, it’s hardly in the interest of your business to test their patience.

So what can you do about a slow website? Plenty.

• Get rid of the clutter on the website. Adopt a newer, cleaner, and leaner design if you have to. Only use multimedia that is serving a purpose -- in fact, only use content that makes a point.
• If your website is resource-intensive, make sure you’ve purchased the right hosting package that allows efficient utilization of services.
• Make sure the hosting provider monitors the server for glitches, overload, and downtime. A website can lose business in a matter of seconds.
• Switch to an efficient and resilient hosting provider so that your website can withstand the fluctuations of traffic.
• Have the website checked for various security issues. There are a number of free tools available to help you with this.

Crank Up Content And Social Marketing

All businesses must have a blog. A blog can be the soul of your brand and allow you to reach out to potential customers, while strengthening ties with the existing ones.

But as important as creating extraordinary content is sharing it on the right platforms for it to reach the right people.

• Create content backed by research
• Produce content on topics that are most pertinent to your audience
• Promote it on the social platforms where your target audience is most likely to be found
• Engage in conversations with influencers in your niche
• Guest post for authority blogs; get your name – and that of your brand – known

Experiment With Different Forms Of Content

Content is a generic term used to refer to anything that is produced online. Articles, infographics, videos, podcasts or whatever you call Buzzfeed’s unique listicles peppered with funny GIFs – all of it is content, and there is no reason why a business should confine itself to only one or two forms of it. Be creative!

But then again, a lot depends on your audience as well as what you are most comfortable producing. There is a market for everything. Lengthy blog posts, such as this one, continue to be in demand. Video, on the other hand, is everyone’s favorite and a medium that is getting wildly popular. With experimentation, you might find something better than what you currently have. If not, you can stick to what you know the best.

Optimizing the conversion rate is primarily about reaching and pleasing the right audience. This can be done with quality technical performance, content that connects, and marketing that takes this content to the people. All three are important components of success in the online world.

What are some of the growth hacks that you are familiar with? How did they help you, and what insights would you be willing to share with us? Share your success stories to help other entrepreneurs find inspiration.