Conversion rate optimisation sounds like something a consultant invented to charge you more. It isn’t. So what is conversion rate optimisation? Strip off the jargon and it’s simple: getting more of the people who already visit your website to do the thing you want them to do. Ring you. Fill in the form. Book. Buy.
I’ll be straight with you. When I started out, I couldn’t have explained it either. I’d heard the terms thrown around, but I couldn’t have told you what they meant. So this is the guide I wish someone had given me: what conversion rate optimisation is, what people think it is (and isn’t), and where to start on your own site.
What is conversion rate optimisation? Think of a ladder
A “conversion” is just a visitor taking a step you want them to take. It doesn’t have to be a sale.
Picture a ladder. Someone lands on your website. They read the top of the page. They scroll. They look at a service. They click “contact”. They fill in the form. They press send.
Every rung is a small conversion, and at every rung some people step off and leave. Conversion rate optimisation (CRO for short) is the job of finding the rung where most people fall off, working out why, and fixing it. That’s it. Everything else is detail.
How to work out your conversion rate
You need two numbers: how many people visited, and how many did the thing you wanted.
Conversion rate = conversions ÷ visitors × 100
For example, 1,000 visitors and 10 enquiries in a month gives you a 1% conversion rate. (Those are made-up round numbers to show the sum, not a target or a benchmark.)
You’ll find visitors in Google Analytics. For conversions, count the real thing: enquiries in your inbox, calls, bookings, sales. Then write the number down. That’s your baseline, and it’s the only benchmark that really matters, because it’s yours.
What people think conversion rate optimisation is (and what it isn’t)
It isn’t more traffic. If people arrive and don’t act, sending more of them just means more people leaving. As one business owner put it:
“2000 visitors and 0 sales is a conversion problem not a traffic problem.”
— Reddit, r/smallbusiness
It isn’t changing the colour of a button. Small tweaks have their place, but they rarely fix a page that doesn’t make sense to a stranger.
“CRO usually plateaus when you keep tweaking headlines but ignore the structure underneath.”
— Reddit, r/ecommerce
It isn’t tricks. Countdown timers, “only 2 left!” pop-ups and fake urgency might get a click, but they cost you trust. Most people can smell them a mile off.
It isn’t only A/B testing. Testing two versions of a page against each other is useful when you have a lot of traffic. Most small business websites don’t have enough visitors for a test to give a reliable answer. For them, the better route is to find the problem, fix it properly, and measure the result against their own baseline.
What it mostly is: making sure your website talks to the person reading it, about their problem, in words they’d use themselves.
The few buyers on your site right now
Here’s how I look at it.
At any one time, only a small slice of people looking at what you sell are actually ready to buy. There’s real research behind this. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s “95:5 rule” found that around 5% of business buyers are in the market at any given moment, and the other 95% won’t buy for months or years (Marketing Week).
To be clear, that’s about all the buyers in a market, not your website visitors, so it doesn’t mean “5 in every 100 visitors”. But the point stands: the people who are ready right now are few, and they matter a lot.
And in my experience, the ones who are ready aren’t calm. They’ve got a leak, a court date, a house to sell, a website that’s costing them money. They’re worried, or keen, or both. People in that state decide on feeling first and justify it with logic afterwards. That’s my view from watching how people buy, not a law of science, but it’s shaped how I write everything.
So if your website speaks directly to what’s worrying them, and shows them clearly how you fix it, they’re far more likely to pick you. Whether you’re the cheapest, the dearest or the newest matters less than you’d think.
I’ve seen this work. On one client’s site, I changed the wording from bragging about the company to talking straight to the customer about their problem. Results started coming in. I’d love to show you the numbers, but the client later closed the business and the site went with it, so there are no figures to share, and I won’t make any up.
Where conversion rate optimisation starts: a stranger’s first few seconds
When someone tells me “I get traffic but no enquiries”, I look at their site the way a stranger would. Three questions, in this order:
- Are they talking to me? What’s the first thing I think when I see this page? Do they have what I want?
- Do they understand my problem? I do a quick scroll. Does anything catch my eye in a blink that says they get it and can help?
- Can I tell if they do what I need without digging? I’m not reading the whole site to find out. I check the top of the page, scroll the homepage once, and maybe look at one or two reviews if I’m keen. That’s it.
If a site fails the first question, nothing further down the page gets a chance. Plenty of people feel the same:
“If I land and have to think for more than 3 seconds about what you do, I’m gone.”
— Reddit, r/smallbusiness
This is what the copy and messaging check in my audit looks at first.
Common conversion leaks
These come up again and again:
- The copy is about the business, not the customer. “We do this, we provide that.”
“sites that technically look fine but sound like they were written for a board meeting instead of an actual customer.”
— Reddit, r/smallbusiness
- The owner is too close to see it. You know what every page means, so you can’t read it like a stranger. That’s not a failing; it’s just being close to your own work.
“I’m probably too close to this project now to see what’s wrong with it”
— Reddit, r/smallbusiness
- The proof is hidden. Reviews live on a separate page nobody visits, instead of next to the form where people are deciding.
- It falls apart on a phone. Text you have to pinch to read, a phone number you can’t tap, a form that’s a pain to fill in.
When to get help
You can do a lot of this yourself. Ask a friend who’s never seen your site to look at your homepage for five seconds, then tell you what you do. If they can’t, start there.
If you’d rather have it checked properly, my free website audit scores your site out of 100 across design, copy, SEO, trust and mobile, with a screenshot and a plain-English fix for every problem it finds. It runs on screen in about ten minutes. If you want the fix written for you, that’s what the Conversion Blueprint is for.
And if you’ve already tried the usual fixes and nothing moved, read why trust badges, faster loading and new photos didn’t fix your conversion rate.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good conversion rate?
There’s no honest single number. It depends on what you sell, what it costs, and where your visitors come from. Be wary of anyone quoting one “industry average” at you. The figure that matters is your own: work out your rate for the last three months, then aim to beat it.
What’s the difference between conversion rate optimisation and SEO?
SEO is about getting people to your website from Google. Conversion rate optimisation is about getting more of those people to act once they’re there. You need both, but there’s little point paying for more visitors if the site can’t turn them into enquiries.
Do I need lots of traffic for conversion rate optimisation?
No. You need lots of traffic to run reliable A/B tests. You don’t need lots of traffic to fix a page that doesn’t explain what you do, hides your reviews or breaks on a phone.
How long does conversion rate optimisation take?
Some fixes, like rewriting the top of your homepage, can be done in a day. Judging whether they worked takes longer: give it enough normal traffic to compare against your baseline. Weeks, not days.
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