Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies

Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies for Emerging AI Trends

The convergence of Artificial Intelligence and CRO has pushed forward a new era of data-driven decision-making and optimization strategies.

The former mindset of hiring an SEO and CRO has merged. Effective conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategies have evolved and now demand alignment across marketing teams working in a cross-functional capacity. How to reach consumers today requires developing an ongoing omnichannel strategy that spans a portfolio of tactics that tailor and align with what consumers want. It also can involve CRO Using AI prompts

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is helpful to gain a deep understanding of user trends and emerging technologies. Even with its current shortcomings, an AI prompt engineer can help you craft a personalized strategy to skyrocket your conversion rates. This article will talk about how to increase website traffic and conversions in the age of AI.

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 Whatever may change in how search helps you reach customers, by exploring AI-powered CRO tools and platforms, you are a step ahead. By learning AI processes and skills, automated data analysis can yield key insights and provide optimization recommendations. AI technologies surface optimization opportunities and create a dynamic and responsive CRO strategy. Lets start off with some basics.

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

CRO is a marketing strategy that is crafted to help increase sales and maximize a website’s potential. Conversion rate optimization is the process of increasing the percentage of user conversions from a website or mobile app. It includes optimizing a site or landing page experience based on visitor interactions and feedback. What people do when on your website is key to increasing the likelihood of visitors taking desired actions on specific pages.

Google wants to rank higher pages that meet more users’ search intent. So, it is much about how well you are engaging the user. And that is the cornerstone of SEO. Once you understand how they interact with your content, you can optimize it better. People who are pleased with your site are more likely to convert.

This will improve engagement on your site and conversions. It starts with a focus on the user experience more than it is easier to gain conversions. Insights on the customer journey help you come up better in search. When you are findable and offer excellent content, you can then optimize for conversions with better success.

So, you may be asking, what’s new in CRO tactics and opportunities?

Factor SEO and CRO into All Marketing Plans

Many CMO’s lack an understanding that SEO is more than an acquisition channel. However, their real need is to employ An SEO must lead in how effectively provide data management, “text churn”, promote new products or service upgrade options, or leverage text message marketing to re-engage past users.

SEO is then factored into all online marketing plans rather than siloed.

Treating SEO as a product includes planning for it as an acquisition channel for organic traffic and increased revenue. SEO best practices must be factored into annual business planning to ensure your website is findable and helpful. Many people are now using Google multisearch to discover your branded sites or social media pages.

For example, if you are adding whitepapers, build on this initiative across other channels you are active on. Publishing curated insights on social platforms and providing related slides for sales teams to show prospects. The idea is to build into your content marketing strategy ways to support your demand program across channels. Especially B2B audience lead gen work should create stronger brand awareness that yields richer data insights.

Clicks in Search Results are More Interactive & Personalized

Conversions theories all come back to creating the best user experience; however, there are new ways to fine-tune your conversion theory.

Google Gemini intends to help marketers deliver highly relevant content that increases conversion rates. It is created to cater better to individual searcher interests and habits.

It performs unique blends of research that encompass wider and more consumer data types. Its unique Multimodal Analysis lets the dominating search engine understand consumer behavior faster and more accurately. Likewise, CRO specialists can assess how users interact with various types of material and SERP interfaces. This aids in the development of marketing plans to target particular demographics.

Actionable content helps establish more of a real-time relationship. Interactive and personalized marketing empowers readers to solve their problems. Today, they can follow you on the SERP and learn more from your business profile data. They want to know you, who they are buying from. Savvy searchers want to know who authored the content they are reading and why they should trust them.

Continuously test and for better personalization strategies based on data insights to maximize their impact.

Steps to Improve Website’s Conversion Rate

CRO using a manual analysis and A/B testing still holds value; but don’t be limited by them.

1. Research SERP feature snippet click curves.
2. Identify your highest-converting pages.
3. Establish your conversion rate KPI.
4. Connect customer journeys to ensure your data is comprehensive.
5. Create content that connects Value Propositions to the right audience.
6. Test and improve your Call-To-Action elements.
7. Identify where user action steps cause friction.
8. Demonstrate your “Experience” strategy for E-E-A-T signals
9. Prepare a report and CRO Progress Plan

1. Research SERP feature snippet click curves

With more sales occurring on the SERP, you need to assess custom click curves that occur with a click to your website. We use Semrush (located under Organic Research) or Ahrefs (located under Organic Keywords) to export SERP feature opportunities.

You’ll have better data if your first filter out what ranks less than position 10 and has lower search volume than 100. Comparing this with your GSC data exports using the same date range.

Planning your click curve optimization with a view to gain SERP Features helps to assess CTR values. Its ary SERP Feature (usually shown in the first column of SERP Features). As your domain gains more data, identifying primary position opportunities is easier. These often vary between desktop and mobile. Additionally, you want to capture form data from both iOS users and an Android users.

This research can lead to reaching cautious consumers who have a new set of shopping values. If they face a higher level of uncertainty, shoppers can find you on the SERP. Some prefer avoiding tracking probabilities on your website, but search remains an important factor in their shopping journey. Many people don’t like having to opt in to tracking in order to read your content.

Barry Schwartz explains how Google published two new help documents around titles and descriptions in Google Search. Of interest, Google now defines title links as clickable link in the Google search results. This also should be factored into how your SERP conversions work.

2. Identify your highest-converting pages

Onsite engagement can be increased by creating more converting landing pages. Wordstream reports that increasing the number of landing pages from 10 to 15 increases leads by 55%. ^[1] Knowing that the average website conversion rate across all industries is approximately 2.35%, we may recommend adding more landing pages. Duplicating success is easier after performing a page-by-page CRO performance analysis.

Tracking user interaction signals such as low dwell time lets you know when a person quickly retreats to the SERPs. This is your clue that they believe someone else has a better web page. You may need to go back and refine existing pages or create new highly converting pages.

Peter Mindenhall posted a Twitter a comment that is so simply and practical that it made me laugh. “Find the most helpful page for the query. Think of it as though you were a dictionary – you wouldn’t add the same definition multiple times, only new/different/unique pages.” ^[2]

3. Establish your conversion rate KPIs

Conversion rate KPI helps identify if your sales and production teams are capable of turning prospective deals into real business. If 6% of your new leads become paying customers, the other 94% will benefit from your lead-to-sale conversion rate improvements.

Supportive smaller conversion events are known as micro-conversions. An effective conversion funnel often includes multiple micro-conversions, all of which together add up to the large-scale, macro-conversion. CRO also focuses on improving these micro-conversions to gain larger-scale macro-conversions.

4. Connect customer journeys to ensure your data is comprehensive

Test your conversion journey set-up directly through the website. Create a spreadsheet of which high-converting product pages successfully encourage users to take a desired action, using which contact form and noting the different URLs used.

Improved CRO requires measuring the right metrics, like user interaction signals.

You miss a lot if you only look at combined Google Search Console (GSC) data. This often produces misleading insights because desktop and mobile ranks and CTRs can be very different! Assess your mobile and desktop click curve by pulling mobile GSC data from its extension called “Search Analytics for Sheets.” This lets you compare mobile CTRs with desktop.

Know when you win position one on mobile. Your data insights inform you of which pages and user groups prefer mobile. Traditional conversion metrics are limiting in our world of emerging AI trends and tools.

Additional metrics a fuller perspective on the buyer’s journey:

• Visual.
• SERP engagement.
• Zero click positions.

Understand touchpoints throughout an omnipresent marketing strategy. This is where your research can create an outline for your content writer with topic expertise. You can use Google Analytics insights and AI tools to shape or confirm your ideas. In the end, this strategy and process needs a human at the helm. Data and ideas are one thing; knowing what to prioritize and how to implement them is a much higher skill level. It is about having the right skills to solve people’s problems. (NOTE: it is not about manipulating search engines.)

When a conversion on Google Ads occurs (a form submission on the website), you can learn more about who took that action.

Comprehensive user behavioral research includes both mobile and desktop users. You’ll know your customers best with a complete dataset to obtain insights that build a truly holistic experience. Any data gaps that keep you from making decisions on less than a full picture of your users could mean lost relationships and revenue.

Google in intent to sort out the “fluff” and “bad actors.” It is about who is present and who adds more value at each customer journey stage. This is where organic search provides the strongest, long-term win. People who can identify sponsored ads know that you paid to get there versus a business entity that did the hard work to earn that top spot. Others will benefit from an effective paid search conversion strategy.

We like to focus on making broader improvements for a site – the ones that show an increase of user engagement. It’s too easy to get in the weeds of less important metrics.

5. Identify where user action steps cause friction

User friction refers to any obstacle that inhibits users from completing a desired action on your web page(s). It’s commonly caused by poor ontology, structural issues, or annoying popups. However, strategic website design and layout optimization can mitigate user friction and heighten the likelihood of desirable conversions. Prioritize accessibility. Accessibility guidelines ensure a smooth experience for all your users; you don’t want to lose audience segments.

Identify where your selection (user action steps) is causing friction for onsite visitors who are trying to convert. This may mean reducing confusion by streamlining your conversion forms. Think about both the number of forms and using shorter forms.

It involves Conversion Science informed by data insights about user preferences by pinpointing what drives conversions and where there’s friction. It requires effective and current marketing research that understands the nature of lead funnels that aren’t “manipulative.”

Fast websites and conversion funnels mean faster shopping and higher ROI

Mobile-optimized websites aligned with your advertising needs are necessary to reach on-the-go consumers. According to invespcro.com’s recent study, low loading pages reduce conversions by 7%. If other’s providing the same services or similar products have upped their game in this regard, they can expect to win more sales.

An ideal purchase flow that leads your visitors into becoming paying customers is typically between 4 – 6 steps. People facing too many steps may lose track of the big picture. Too few steps makes it challenging to track their journey to purchase.

6. Create content that connects Value Propositions to the right audience

Conveying a great value proposition is crucial to your CRO process. What a consumer sees on the SERP can help them see the value in your offer and click. We test value proposition messaging over and over. This is another task that an AI prompt engineer can come up with using different messaging approaches. The “human” in charge can then identify which option resonates best with your target audience and tone of voice.

Captivate your audience by meeting their needs with unique evergreen content. The content you create should answer key questions and provide conversational opportunities at each stage of the customer journey. We find that AI chatbots are effective to reduce customer service load. Faster answers mean faster conversions.

After identifying your target and active audience, encourage them to take action. One great strategy to accomplish that is “value-stacking”. This is listing the benefits of going forward rather than losing time thinking about it. Find a way to trigger the readers’ perception about the risk of doing nothing.

Also, make sure your landing page is rich with local signals to reach local audiences. Identify different conversion intents; do they have a question? Do they need support for a current purchase? What other urgent need might they have?

7. Test and improve your “Call to action” elements

Personalize your CTAs.

CTAs are the most important element in marketing messages meant to stimulate leads. They need to jump off the screen and trigger the action that you really want them to complete. Here is a suggested AI prompt: “Improve on [insert CTA] and create a better CTA for my product/service using my info: [insert product/service info].”

Some color theorist now find less results. However, the CTA button color still matters a lot. Execute an compelling CTA to conclude. Depending on the purpose of your page, your CTA could be the lead magnet (enrolling them into your lead nurturing flow), a phone call, an order fulfillment, or an invitation to a members-only forum.

This is where you keep it simply and make it stand out on the page. Distracted participates are unlikely to convert.

Boost your CRO efforts by leveraging intelligent outputs to your prompts. It will generate ideas for testing scenarios and more highly personalization strategies. It’s another means to tailor your website to customer preferences.

ChatGPT’s AI capabilities empower tailored prompts based on user preferences or behaviors. For instance, for a customer who frequently purchases hiking gear, ChatGPT might generate a CTA like, “Walk further with our latest hiking boots – Shop now!” Once you have your data prepared, your AI prompt may be “Provide tips for improving my call to action.”

8. Demonstrate your “Experience” strategy for E-E-A-T signals

As marketing has advanced, SEO and SEM are integrated. They each have critical and interwoven roles and integrate with content marketing and digital strategist teams. Each one brings a new perspective that adds value to gaining more visibility in search. This directly influences your click volume. Demonstrates a high level of E-E-A-T. Building authority and trust are critical for organic visibility. Content and messaging should showcase your experience, topic expertise, reliability, and trustworthiness, positioning you as a credible source in your industry.

Example prompts: “Suggest improvements for the E-E-A-T of my landing page.” Or “What elements are lacking that would prove my topic experience?”

9. Prepare a report and CRO Progress Plan

Before submitting a CRO Progress Plan (and budget) for approval, communicate across content marketing, paid search, and on-site optimization teams to solidify the most valuable forecasting model outputs. Identify which person or team is responsible for the next steps to implement your updated CRO strategy.

We value great communication to determine the best recommendations that support business KPIs and revenue streams. Often, we need to include support documentation for extra budget needs.

After gaining clarity on which primary event we hope to produce, we map out the steps that lead to it. Once approval is gained, we can create an evergreen sales conversion funnel more rapidly and effectively.

You can run into a lot of nuances to each of the above steps that you’ll want to get right. The success of your conversion funnel depends on the details. There is a time to create shock and awe, but no one wants to feel “hooked.” Instead, provide so much value that they want to do business with you.

Before you embark on these steps in our CRO methodology, ask yourself, “Why should anyone listen to you?” They have tons of options. Okay! We’ll help you gain a better consumer following by going a bit deeper.

Proven Conversion Rate Strategies for Boosting eCommerce Sites

CRO Using AI prompts can give you wins in competitive markets.

In competitive eCommerce spheres, better conversion rates rule. Optimizing your online store means talking a look at your home page, category pages, search results page, product pages, return policies, checkout processes, and Google Merchant Center data.

Audit and eliminate any broken tracking and inconsistent tagging schemas. You can gain quality data by combining data from different platforms into a single event, dataset, or property. This avoids missed entities or double counting.

Primary conversion events differ across business niches. Goals and tracking should reflect what you can realistically obtain. In eCommerce, the primary conversion to assess is typically a “complete purchase” or action toward one. For informational or SaaS marketing sites, more likely this is a newsletter signup, a “sign up for a free trial,” or a this is a newsletter signup, a “sign up for a free trial” or download or request to contact sales.

You may need a simplified checkout process or a revised cart abandonment strategy. If your are seeking a new employee, it may be a “complete application” event. As search marketing has become more conversations, it may be a click to initiate “Chat now.”

Hire a compelling conversion copywriting service

Be prepared that often people don’t follow your ideal path.

Use data science to discover key moments between major events. Your conversion funnel set-up is crucial for tracking drop-off. If your current conversion funnels lack telling you exactly where drop-off is happening, you need better event tracking. For example, you can learn if users often drop off between the “add to cart” step and the “finalize purchase” step.

Identifying where someone drops off is a really big insight. You may need a compelling conversion copywriting service. They can assist is creating content that is suitable to generate a Google Product Knowledge Panel.

Conversion Rate Optimization Using AI Prompts

Go more in-depth with your CRO data with meticulously engineered prompts.

Traditional CRO tactics tend to require significant time and resources to execute successfully. Manual user behavior analysis, conducting A/B tests, and implementing new conversion strategies based on findings can take weeks. For large-scale sites that have thousands of pages and elements, you can experience potential CRO improvements in less time by using AI prompts.

Data analysis that leverages AI tools can surpass surface-level metrics and open up another angle on user behavior. LLMs let you process and analyze large datasets. AI algorithms quickly surface click patterns, trends, and oddities that you may otherwise miss. Your AI prompt refinements can speed up optimizing conversion funnels, suggest messaging alternatives, and spot user experience enhancements that increase conversion rates.

Using AI prompts for sales conversions demonstrates the pivotal way websites can use agile tactics. They can help you pick up user intent signals. Google AI and ChatGPT sales prompts can revolutionize your approach from research to conversion role play scripts. We love discovering ways to improve lead gen messaging with intelligent prompts.

Avoid AI results that are spammy and duplicate others’ content

Using prompts requires a masterful approach with guardrails. To use the following additional prompt suggestions, add your own variables where suggested.

• [landing page or marketing campaign]: A completed prompt could look like: “Provide suggestions for A/B testing different versions of our landing page to increase conversion rates.”
• [landing page or marketing campaign]: A completed prompt could look like: “Provide suggestions for A/B testing different versions of our landing page to increase conversion rates.”
• [landing page or marketing campaign]: A completed prompt suggestion: “Suggest possible customer pain points that we can address and improve overall user experience.”
• [landing page or marketing campaign]: A completed prompt may be: “I need a measurement strategy to improve the current landing page’s value.”
• Craft a CTA using the Attention, Interest, Desire and Action principles to encourage readers to click on a link to gain valuable and crucial info about our products. [add details].

While prompts will help you identify best practices for optimizing your landing page or marketing campaign, only a human expert should finalize the plan. This will ensure that your efforts are successful and have your personal touch. AI penalties will rise to sort out what is AI massaged and content of lesser value.

For example, if these prompts surface where users experience challenges finding product information, you could create a plan. It may clue you to add more detailed product descriptions on your website and add robust Ecommerce schema markup. You can also add a site search bar for easier navigation.

How to run Single Page CRO Performance Analysis

While there are many tools and tactics, here is where we typically start. From Google Analytics we pull the following primary insights: organic sessions, users’ journey from page to page, dwell time, and conversions.

From the Google Search Console we pull the following key insights: click-through rate, impressions, if your product schema is valid, ranking search query terms, and rich snippet wins. FAQ schema markup and visibility in People Also Ask SERPs let’s you respond immediately to shoppers’ queries.

With combined data, one can identify which types of pages converted better than others and make broader scale decisions. It falls into clear view which pages have high conversions and which have low conversions. I like how Glenn Gabe wrote about “low dwell time and how implementing something like adjusted bounce rate could help site owners get a better feel for content that isn’t meeting or exceed user expectations.” ^[3]

Heat map tools like Hotjar are helpful. Heatmaps create data visualizations using color coding to represent different values. They can enrich your user behavior data on web pages by measuring visitor activity. They are a fun way to test visitor behavior and useful when exploring large multivariate data sets. They help us identify user trends, clusters, and anomalies. Our heatmaps strategy is useful when showcasing correlations between variables. In a correlation heatmap, each variable is represented by a row and a column; cells show the correlation between them. The color of each cell represents the strength and direction of the correlation. However, they only track onsite engagements..

Try Google Analytics “customer acquisition goal”

This is one that we enjoying experimenting with. The “Conversions Summary” report is very useful. Proper tracking set-up provides greater control over which conversions are reported as “new” and which ones are “returning” site visitors.

Your primary conversion event is typically the key activity that gets the visitor closer to becoming a customer. How you strategically find and measure visitor data, create new user journeys, and modify your pages to stay current will help adjust to changing customer preferences.

“This is automatically used when you select the “new customer” acquisition goal. If your Google Ads conversion tracking is set to track “purchases”, Google can automatically create an audience list based on up to the last 540 days of campaign activity and tracked purchases. This is the easiest method for distinguishing new customers from existing customers, but would be less comprehensive because users can remove cookies and opt out. – How the new customer acquisition goal determines new and existing customers ^[4]

CRO combined with SEO helps if experiencing a decline in organic SERP CTRs

We now have clarified documentation from Google that on-page content is primarily used for the snippets that display in Google Search results. Google made this clarification because “the previous wording incorrectly implied that structured data and the meta description HTML element are the primary sources for snippets,” Google explained.

Structured data implementation works if the content it amplifies is good. And the content will reach more people if it has strong Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).

“Google primarily uses the content on the page to automatically determine the appropriate snippet. We may also use descriptive information in the meta description element when it describes the page better than other parts of the content.” – Google Clarifies the Primary Source of Snippets

Numbers help with discussing ROI but success goes beyond numbers

If you are in a competitive niche and struggle with a low budget, be realistic that the return on investment level is not always possible. However, your conversion rate optimization strategies can still reach different types of returns that let you build in the future. Additional benefits are improved brand perceptions, more positive reviews, word-of-mouth recommendations, and less pressure on your support staff.

Everyone who invests time and money has a “what’s in it for me” mindset. For example, in addition to talking about cost savings in the long run, it furthers your brand entity awareness and trust factors.

You can learn what people expect from your brand. By providing accurate, aligned, and helpful information, you build the vital “trust” factor that leads to a better conversion rate.

If your lead generation doesn’t convert clicks into customers, it’s time to reassess your strategy. For many websites, it starts by overcoming the hurdles of poor-quality content! Whenever presenting a business case or producing a proposal, we seek to include an assessment of the return on investment in a client proposal. We love reporting on improvements after project completion.

Your opportunity for these new conversations increases along with being more present on the SERP. With AI technology, we discover more value in customers’ bases. It is a great opportunity to net new opportunities to build customer relationships, create loyalty, and increase revenue.

SUMMARY: Converting New Customers Starts with Conversations on the SERP

Time to update your conversion rate optimization strategies: Lead generation is now more of a process of talking to qualified leads on their terms.

With so much of online search and buyers’ behavior out of our control, we are always honest about the CRO lessons that Hill Web Marketing has learned and that these are “experienced” best guesses. No one can realistically offer guarantees; rather, we do open a world of possibilities and offer true value.

Improve your Conversation Rates by requesting a SERP Analysis for Conversational Sales Conversions

Resources:

[1] https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/08/02/conversion-rate-statistics

[2] https://x.com/petermindenhall/status/1696429853761732764

[3] https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/highly-visible-and-low-quality/

[4] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/14005876