Anyone who runs a website will know how often the phrase “Conversion Rates” gets bounced around. You’re constantly bombarded with blogs, tools and reports that offer secrets to sky rocketing those conversion rates.

Many times however you, the website owner, are the absolute worst person to be optimizing website conversions. Wait that can’t be right? You know the business inside out of course you’re the best person to make improvements. Wrong..

You’ve become blind

Every day that you spend working on your site is another day that you get more comfortable with the way things are. Things that once seemed painfully hard have somehow become bearable.

You’re not as critical as you once were of the problems across the site, settling instead for excuses like “its too hard to change that” and “we would make changes if we had more time”.

2 things have happened. You don’t feel the pain your customers feel anymore and instead you’ve succumbed to inertia / resistance to change.

You need professional help

The longer you’ve been immersed in a site the harder it is to get any fresh perspective. The only way to get an honest opinion on how your site is really doing is through someone completely new to your site.

I almost always recommend websites to get a conversion rate optimization (CRO) audit at least once a year from an external professional. Here’s why..

Fresh eyes

Just like a first time visitor, an external CRO audit offers fresh eyes to your site. There is zero baggage on “how things already work” and complete focus on “how things should work”.

Customers only care about how you’re going to help them. If it’s too hard they’ll leave. Getting fresh eyes onto your site and providing feedback is the closest thing you’ll get to a real customer.

You aren’t the only site they’ve audited

No surprises here but you aren’t the first website a CRO professional has seen. CRO professionals can carry out hundreds of audits a year and this means they know a lot about what works and what does not.

All that experience gives them a unique eye for identifying the nuances that you’ll probably miss. While not every website they’ve worked on is the same, CRO professionals know what best practices can be carried over and applied to your site.

You pay them to be ruthless

If you’ve ever received a professional CRO audit you’ll know how blunt they can be. Unlike you, CRO professionals have no emotional ties to your company. They’re not thinking about how over capacity the tech team is or how understaffed marketing is. All they’re thinking about is what works and what doesn’t.

This ruthlessness allows zero room for excuses. If it doesn’t work you either fix it or accept that it will forever be that way unless you do something about it. Appreciate the ruthlessness of CRO audits, it could make a big difference to your bottom line.

What now?

If you haven’t done so already look at getting a comprehensive CRO audit for your site. It many cases it pays for itself within a matter of months.

 

What experiences have you had optimizing your own site? Have you ever had an external CRO audit done? Share your thoughts and experiences with us.