Conversion Rate Optimization in the Longer Run

Today a comment by Analytics guru – Avinash Kaushik made me to pause and take a re-look at my perspective on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Conversion Rate Optimization is the science behind increasing the conversion rate of the pages of a website.

Let’s say that you are running an Adwords campaign for your website, then most likely you would use a specific landing page built purely for conversions (be it purchases or be it lead generation). With the interaction that I have had with the different Search Engine Marketing agencies in India, the default target conversion rate that is considered acceptable is a measly 5%. At EduPristine, we try for 30% and on an average generate a healthy 25% lead generation conversion rate.

However, the tactics that we ended up using were pretty much what Avinash has mentioned to avoid … most of the time when we conduct CRO experiments, it is with a short term focus of getting an incremental raise in the conversion rates. Here is an excerpt from the comment –

Then I realize that I’m sure someone tested this. I’m sure some “conversion rate optimization guru” was brought in to do this. I’m sure they got 10% more leads. I’m sure their lead conversion rate went from 1.67% to 1.84%. I’m sure to them this looks awesome.
But what about the other 98.16%? People who did not convert, many of whom, like me, might have thought this was distasteful? Some of the 98.16% surely thought “This is not the type of company I want to do business with?”

So where does this put us?

I used to think that 25% conversion rate is awesome (and believe me, it is! :-) ). However, what is happening to the user experience on the site … a modal pop-up here, a lead generation form there … do the visitors on my site really want to see that?

The pragmatist within me says that the purpose of the site is lead generation, and that it is doing brilliantly.

However, the idealist says that in the long run the site needs to welcome the user … it needs to provide that the same user keeps returning again and again for clear value that he gets from visiting the site. The %age of repeat visitors needs to increase … and that metric is something that a CRO specialist hardly looks at.

How about a metric which measures the number of unique visitors who visits your site more than x times? That could be a measure of customer retention.

So what needs to be done?

Instead of focusing on incremental changes on the page to get a temporary raise in conversions, focus on user experience and ask yourself this question … would you visit your own site again?

What are your thoughts on this?

5 WordPress Plug-ins you should Install

WordPress plugins

I have been working with WordPress for more than four years now, both as a personal blogging platform and also as a full fledged Content Management System for websites. It’s been a great four years, right from the day I found the awesomeness of WordPress to the multiple releases on WordPress and the day I started regularly contributing on one of the major WordPress forums.

Any WordPress user worth his salt will know that the full power of the CMS platform is behind it’s series of plug-ins and that’s what this post is about. The top 5 WordPress Plug-ins I always install whenever I deploy a WordPress based site.

The reason why I chose these plug-ins as the top 5 is because they resonate very well with the top 5 things that you need to do when you launch a site.

Jetpack

Jetpack plug-in by Automattic

This is the ultimate plug-in by the good folks who made WordPress, Automattic. It comes jam-packed with some awesome set of features such as –

  • Social Sharing options below your post
  • Stats embedded within your Admin Dashboard
  • A mailing list functionality to email your subscribers your post content which you publish to your blog
  • Auto-sharing functionality to share your post’s link to your favourite social networks
  • A beautiful carousel for browsing through a series
  • A mobile theme adapter which ensures that your site looks great on mobile clients as well
  • You can connect your app to WordPress.com and manage all of your WP stacks through one location

The awesome part is that the Jetpack team keeps adding to the amount of features available – you can download the Jetpack Plug-in here.

A word of caution here, do not activate any more features than what you actually need! If you do, that increases your script size … ultimately increasing your web page loading times!

WordPress SEO

WordPress SEO Plug-in by Yoast

There are a lot of SEO plug-ins out there in the WordPress community, but THIS is the ultimate plug-in that you have to install. A couple of years back, if you would have asked me to recommend an SEO plug-in, I would have recommended All in One SEO, but trust me folks, WordPress SEO is so much better! In fact I think it’s the cat’s paw of free SEO plug-ins.

The good part that I liked about this plug-in over all the other plug-ins, is the level of granularity to which you can go to control your on-page SEO. It is also linked to LinkDex which gives you a clear understanding of how your on-page optimization is changing with the content level changes that you are doing for each and every page. This plug-in has been authored by Joost de Valk (aka Yoast) who simply rocks when it comes to SEO and WordPress, he has contributed to some of the best plug-ins to the WordPress community.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Google Analytics for WordPress plug-in by Joost de Valk

I cannot sing enough paeans of Google Analytics. However to add and edit a WordPress theme could be quite difficult if you do not know HTML or do not want to edit your theme (since they frequently update and you end up having to enter your Google Analytics code again and again). This plug-in helps you avoid this by giving you a simple method to integrate Google Analytics code in your WordPress theme.

If you do go ahead with this plug-in and you use Google Analytics, then this is the best Custom Dashboard that you can immediately use. The Custom Dashboard has been created by Yoast for the users of his plug-in, it works very well only if you use the plug-in. Otherwise most of the data reported might be misrepresented.

Google XML Sitemap for Images

This plug-in and the next one are created by an Indian, and I find them pretty awesome. Amit Agarwal has created a simple image sitemap generator plug-in which creates an image specific sitemap for your WordPress site. The reason I rely on this plug-in is simple … search engines index content on your site. If you are running a WordPress based site, then you would be using good images for illustrations for your posts. These images are a rich source of higher SERPs on different search engines.

All of us know that Google shows images when you search, having well optimized images and submitting them in a separate sitemap ensures that your images get indexed by Google and other search engines. What that means is that your content slowly starts ranking higher.

Google XML Sitemap for Videos

The Video sitemap Plug-in is also an excellent plug-in to install if you are embedding videos on your site often. Videos rank higher than images which in turn rank higher than simple links when Search Engine Results are being displayed. Having a mix of rich media helps a site.

Ensuring that this rich media is correctly submitted to search engines and getting those indexed is the main trick in getting good search results.

Bonus – Akismet

Once, your WordPress site begins attracting site traffic, people and spammers will start coming to your site. They will leave behind comments on your pages and then it will be difficult to judge whether the comment is a good comment by someone who actually appreciates your site or is it by some spammer who wants a backlink to their site.

This is where Akismet comes into picture. I mentioned this plug-in as a bonus and have not included this in my top 5 only because this plug-in comes default installed in WordPress, but you still have to activate it and submit your Akismet key.

Remember one thing, when you launch a WordPress plug-in do not go haywire and install many plug-ins. They eventually slow your WordPress install, so chose carefully and only make do with those plug-ins that you really need.

What are the top plug-ins that you cannot go without when you deploy a WordPress based site?

Checklist for International SEO

international seo checklist

I always get into a quandary when it comes to setting up the SEO strategy for a site which spans across multiple geographies. What would the best course of action be, to use sub-directories and depend on the equity of the main site, or to spawn separate Top Level Domains (TLDs) and increase the quanta of work.

In fact sometimes this becomes a case of Analysis-Paralysis … inaction which comes from considering too many pros and cons.

This is where Aleyda Solis has shined through with a simple infographic for people like me. Here’s the gist of this, and that’s why I love this infographic –

If you have content for all the different TLDs, then go ahead with multiple TLDs since that’s the best approach. If you do not have that much content, then you can use language based sub-directories with the hreflang attribute and meta content language.