Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the work of getting a larger share of the visitors to your website to do what you want them to do: get in touch, book, call or buy.
It is the cheapest growth there is, for a simple reason: you are already paying for the traffic. If you go from 1 to 2 per cent in conversion rate, you have doubled the number of customers without spending a single krona on more visitors.
Yet most businesses spend the entire budget on bringing more traffic to a page that doesn't convert it.
What counts as a conversion
Decide this before you measure anything. For a service business it is usually:
- A completed contact or quote form
- A tap on the phone number on mobile
- A booking in the calendar
- A downloaded price list
Note the phone tap. Many service businesses get most of their work by phone and don't measure it at all, which makes the site look much worse than it is.
What is normal
Rough benchmarks to work from:
- Service businesses, B2B: 1–3% of visitors get in touch
- Local services: 3–8%, often higher because the intent is stronger
- E-commerce: 1–3%
- Landing page with ad traffic: 5–15%
If you are below the range, there is something concrete to fix. If you are above it, the bottleneck is the amount of traffic, not the page.
Find the leak before you start changing things
The biggest mistake in conversion rate optimisation is guessing. Someone thinks the button should be green, so the button changes colour. Start instead by finding out where people actually disappear.
Look at the flow in your analytics tool. Where do visitors leave? If 80 per cent leave the pricing page without going further, that is where the problem is, not on the home page.
Look at mobile separately. Most traffic is on mobile, and the conversion rate is almost always lower there. If the difference is dramatic, there is often a concrete fault: a form that is unusable, a button below the edge of the screen, a load time that scares people off.
Watch recordings of real visits. Tools like Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity (free) record anonymised sessions. Half an hour of such recordings reveals more than a month of guesses. You see people clicking on things that aren't clickable, looking for prices that don't exist, and giving up on forms.
Ask the customers who went ahead. "What were you worried about before you got in touch?" The answer is almost always an objection you don't address on the site.
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The most common reasons people don't get in touch
It isn't clear what you do
The visitor gives you a few seconds. If it says "We create digital experiences that engage", no one knows what you sell. Write what you do, for whom, and where.
There is no price at all
The most common reason someone leaves a service site is that they don't know whether they can afford it. You don't need to publish a price list, but you do need to give a ballpark. "Projects normally start at around SEK 30,000" filters out the wrong enquiries and gives the right people the confidence to get in touch.
The form asks for too much
Every extra field costs responses. Do you really need a company name, company registration number, budget and timeline to have a first conversation? Name, a way to reach them and a free-text box are almost always enough.
Nothing that makes you credible
References, real photos of real people, reviews, number of completed projects, years in the business. A site without any of these reads like a company without a history.
Unclear what happens next
"Contact us" says nothing about what to expect. "Send us a line about your project and we'll get back to you within a day with an estimate" removes the uncertainty about what you are committing to.
The page is slow
Every second of delay costs conversions, and the effect is steepest on mobile. This is as much a technical question as a design question. Read more in our guide to technical SEO.
How to test properly
Once you have a hypothesis: change one thing at a time, and let the test run long enough.
The last part is where most people go wrong. With 200 visitors a week and a 2 per cent conversion rate, you get four conversions a week. That one variant gets six and another gets three tells you nothing at all; it's chance. At low volumes, A/B tests are rarely meaningful. Make larger, obvious improvements instead and measure over longer periods.
Prioritise in this order:
- Pages with lots of traffic and low conversion: biggest effect
- Steps where most people drop off: according to the flow data
- The mobile experience: where most visits happen
- The form: usually the last obstacle before a sale
Get started this week
- Set up tracking of form submissions and taps on the phone number
- Install Microsoft Clarity and watch twenty sessions
- Open your most important page on your phone and try to get in touch, as a customer would
- Remove one field from the contact form
- Put a price indication somewhere on the site
None of these points requires a rebuild. Together they often move more than a new design does.
Design and conversion go together
A page that converts is rarely the result of nice-looking buttons. It is the result of the right information coming in the right order: what you do, for whom, roughly what it costs, why people should trust you, and what happens when they get in touch.
If you want to know where your site is losing visitors, get in touch and we will take a look at it. Also read about how to build a landing page that converts or how we work with web development for businesses.
Frequently asked questions
What is conversion rate optimisation?
Conversion rate optimisation, or CRO, is the work of increasing the share of visitors who take a desired action on the website, such as filling in a contact form, calling or making a purchase. The focus is on getting more out of the traffic you already have instead of buying more traffic.
What is a good conversion rate?
It depends on the industry and the traffic source. B2B service businesses are normally at 1–3 per cent, local services at 3–8 per cent, e-commerce at 1–3 per cent and landing pages with ad traffic at 5–15 per cent. Following your own progress over time matters more than comparing yourself with others.
Do I need to A/B test?
Only if you have enough traffic. With a few hundred visitors a week, the differences between variants are statistically meaningless. At low volumes you gain more by fixing obvious problems (a missing price indication, forms that are too long, a slow mobile page) and measuring the effect over longer periods.
How much does conversion rate optimisation cost?
A one-off review with concrete recommendations normally costs SEK 15,000–40,000. Ongoing work with tests and follow-up costs SEK 10,000–30,000 per month. Many of the most effective measures, though (shorter forms, clearer pricing information, tracking phone taps), you can carry out yourself at no cost.
Sources
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