Conversion rate optimization is crucial for business success in the digital world. With so much competition online, having an effective website that persuades visitors and turns them into customers is essential.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of improving the percentage of users who take a desired action on your website or digital platform. These actions, often referred to as “conversions,” could range from completing a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or filling out a contact form, to more micro-level engagements like clicking on a specific link or viewing a video.
At its core, CRO is about understanding how users interact with your site and identifying barriers that prevent them from converting. It’s the science of combining user behavior data, testing hypotheses, and applying design or content changes to achieve measurable improvements in performance.
Unlike strategies focused solely on driving traffic, CRO hones in on making the most of the traffic you already have—essentially turning visitors into leads, customers, or loyal followers. It’s the perfect complement to SEO, ensuring that the users who discover your site through search engines are met with an experience that drives results.
How is CRO and SEO Interconnected?
CRO and SEO are like two sides of the same digital marketing coin. While their primary goals differ—SEO focuses on driving traffic to your website, and CRO focuses on converting that traffic—they are deeply interconnected and work best when strategically aligned.
How SEO Fuels CRO
SEO ensures that your website attracts the right audience by optimizing for relevant keywords, search intent, and content that ranks well on search engines.
But getting users to your site is only half the battle. Once they arrive, CRO takes over, optimizing the user experience and guiding visitors toward taking specific actions, whether that’s making a purchase or filling out a lead form.
A well-executed SEO strategy can positively impact CRO by bringing in high-quality traffic. For example:
- Targeted Content: Optimizing for keywords aligned with user intent ensures visitors are more likely to engage with your content.
- Site Structure: SEO-optimized architecture often creates a seamless navigation experience, which CRO thrives on.
- SERP Features: Rich snippets or featured snippets attract clicks from search engines and often pre-qualify visitors by addressing their specific needs.
How CRO Enhances SEO
While SEO feeds CRO with traffic, CRO improvements can amplify the effectiveness of SEO in return:
- Lower Bounce Rates: Google uses engagement metrics like bounce rate and time on page to assess the quality of your content. A CRO-optimized page keeps users engaged, signaling to search engines that your site is valuable and relevant.
- Improved Dwell Time: By addressing user needs quickly and effectively, CRO increases the time users spend on your site, further boosting your SEO rankings.
- Conversion-Friendly Landing Pages: Pages that convert well often align with high-ranking SEO practices, such as clear CTAs, fast load times, and mobile responsiveness.
The Perfect Partnership
Think of SEO as the tool to drive the right audience to your site, and CRO as the method to capitalize on that traffic.
Together, they ensure you’re not just attracting visitors but also converting them into loyal customers or engaged users.
Neglecting one limits the impact of the other, making their collaboration essential for maximizing your digital strategy’s ROI.
How to Calculate Conversion Rates
Calculating your conversion rate is straightforward and provides valuable insight into how effectively your website or campaign is turning visitors into actions that matter to your business. The formula is:
Breaking It Down
- Number of Conversions: This is the total number of desired actions completed by users. Examples include purchases, sign-ups, or form submissions.
- Total Number of Visitors: This is the total number of unique visitors to your website or the specific page you’re analyzing within a set timeframe.
Example Calculation
Let’s say your landing page received 1,000 visitors in a month, and 50 of them completed a contact form. The conversion rate would be:
This means 5% of your visitors converted into leads via the contact form.
Why Conversion Rates Matter
Understanding your conversion rate helps you:
- Identify strengths and weaknesses in your funnel or website.
- Evaluate the performance of specific campaigns or landing pages.
- Prioritize optimization efforts for the highest ROI.
With this formula in hand, you can measure the effectiveness of your CRO strategies and set benchmarks for improvement.
What is a Good Conversion Rate?
There is no universal “good” conversion rate, as it depends on the industry, business model, and goals of the specific website. However, here are some general benchmarks for average conversion rates across different sectors:
- Ecommerce: The average ecommerce conversion rate is 2-3%. Top performing ecommerce sites see conversion rates of 4-5%.
- Lead generation: For lead gen, a good conversion rate is usually between 2-5%. High performing sites can achieve 8-12%.
- Services: Service-based businesses tend to have higher conversion rates, around 4-8% on average. Exceptional services convert at 10% or higher.
- B2B: For B2B companies, conversion rates tend to be lower, averaging around 2%. 5%+ is considered a good rate.
- Informational sites: Blog or content-focused sites have very low conversion goals, so rates below 2% can be decent.
While these benchmarks provide a general idea for average rates, the optimal conversion rate will depend on your business model and metrics. The key is to continually test and optimize pages to increase conversions over time. Even minor improvements of a fraction of a percent can translate into significant revenue gains.
Average Conversion Rates in Healthcare
As a healthcare professional, attracting new patients is just the first step. The real challenge lies in converting potential patients into booked appointments and loyal clientele.
Understanding industry benchmarks for conversion rates can help you gauge your practice’s performance and identify opportunities for improvement.
To provide actionable insights, we’ve compiled average conversion rates across various medical specialties. Whether you’re a dentist, plastic surgeon, IVF clinic, mental health provider, or telehealth service, these statistics can serve as reference points to optimize your marketing strategies and patient acquisition efforts.
Keep in mind that while these numbers offer general benchmarks, your practice’s unique factors—such as location, services offered, and patient demographics—may influence your actual rates.
Dentists
- Visitor to Prospective Patient Conversion Rate: Approximately 3%
- Prospect to Patient Conversion Rate: Around 60%
Plastic Surgeons
- Visitor to Prospective Patient Conversion Rate: Approximately 2.3%
- Prospect to Patient Conversion Rate: Around 67%
- Consultation to Surgery Conversion Rate: 70–80% for top-performing practices
IVF Clinics
- Consultation to Treatment Conversion Rates:
- 20–30%: Lower end (limited coverage areas)
- 40–50%: Average for non-mandated or lower-coverage locations
- Up to 70%: Higher end (mandated insurance coverage or high-benefit groups)
Mental Health Services
- Website Visitor to Appointment Conversion Rate: Approximately 2%
Note: This means 1 out of every 50 users who visit your website will make an appointment.
Telehealth Services
- Average Conversion Rate: Ranges from 10% to 30%, depending on service type, target audience, and market conditions.
General Medical Practices
- Lead to Appointment Conversion Rate: ~40–50% (for new patient leads)
Getting Started: The Conversion Rate Optimization Mindset
Where to optimize?
What to optimize?
Who to optimize for?
These three simple questions derive the complex riddle of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). On the surface, many people think that CRO involves A/B testing the color of buttons to see what performs best, changing header colors to red, or copying competitor strategies in landing page design.
But… this couldn’t be further from the truth.
No, conversion rate optimization is more defined and systematic than guesswork or copycatting. There isn’t some magic button or immediate solution to CRO and there is no single framework for optimization. At its core, CRO is designed around a powerful mindset: developing an empathic understanding of your website visitors and customers.
1. Diagnosis
In the discovery phase we are diagnosing the strengths and weaknesses in your marketing funnel. We’re looking to your customers for valuable insights into why they won’t buy, why they can’t buy, and why they want to buy by studying these three factors:
- Week persuasive techniques — what language is powerful/ineffective
- Usability issues — what functions are user-friendly/objectionable
- Page relevancy — what landing pages are valuable/misleading
We’ll use these customer metrics to identify which pages to focus our efforts on and which elements to improve or replicate.
Use a spreadsheet to organize your findings.
- Create three tabs with won’t, can’t, and want
- List all reasons given by customers and sales staff
- Identify common trends
- Brainstorm ways to overcome obstacles and enhance successes. Add these to to a second column
2. Hypothesize
You’ve gathered data from your website, your customers, and your staff. You’ve identified the pages to test. You’ve analyzed the CTAs, copywriting, and layout of these pages. Now, it’s time to hypothesize your weakness and their solutions.
Again, look to your customer surveys to identify converging trends between qualitative and quantitative data. This will assist your brainstorming process.
At the end of this process, you should have a better understanding of why customers aren’t converting with ideas on how to change that. Now it’s time to test your theories.
3. Testing & Expirementation
Start by redesigning, or rewriting, the pages you’ve identified based on the hypotheses you’ve formed.
Google Optimize is a free tool that will help you A/B test your conversion optimizations. Optimizely is another trusted alternative for split testing your new site designs and copywriting.
Here is some framework to help you stay on track in the experimentation and testing phase:
- Are the changes directly testing my hypothesis?
- Are the changes keeping the design on brand?
- Are the changes technically doable?
Be aware that your site optimizations might not always work as planned. So, expect that there will be trial and error in this process. Don’t get discouraged! All marketers anticipate that some solutions might not be the best solution for optimization.
Once your newly improved optimizations are in place, it’s time to test their effectiveness. You’ll need to track the quality of traffic coming to your site once more to determine if your optimizations are working. Redeploy The People Method and The Analytics Method to see if your conversion rate optimizations were a success.
10 Conversion Rate Optimization Tactics
- Improve website speed – Optimize images, minify code, use caching, upgrade hosting for faster page load times. Every 100ms delay reduces conversions.
- Mobile optimization – Make site responsive or create dedicated mobile pages. Leverage accelerometers, tap targets, and mobile-friendly CTAs.
- Fix navigation – Eliminate dead ends, mismatches, and errors. Ensure easy pathfinding to key pages. Use breadcrumbs, sitemaps, and wayfinding cues.
- Structured data – Implement schema markup for rich snippets, product details, reviews, events, etc. Helps SEO and provides details for conversions.
- Compelling copy – Use concise, scannable copy focused on visitor needs and benefits. Target key landing pages first.
- Clear CTAs – Drive action with strategically placed and designed call-to-action buttons/text links.
- Reduce distractions – Remove unnecessary elements that distract visitors from converting. Declutter layouts.
- Install CRO plugins – Tools like Hotjar record user sessions to pinpoint struggle spots.
- Dedicated landing pages – Create focused pages with clear copy and layout to drive conversions.
- A/B testing – Continually test variations of copy, headlines, designs, offers to gain incremental improvements.
The Newest CRO Tactic: Mosaic
In an effort to provide even more value to our clientele and expedite the timeline to ROI for SEO, we created Mosaic—a programmatic SEO solution that masterfully blends SEO visibility with CRO to deliver powerful results for businesses.
Mosaic is designed to target long-tail, hyper-focused queries—the type of bottom-of-the-funnel searches performed by users who are ready to convert. By addressing these highly specific needs, Mosaic helps businesses capture qualified traffic and turn it into actionable results with unparalleled efficiency. Here’s how:
- Hyper-Targeted Landing Pages: Mosaic creates local landing pages at scale, each optimized for specific geographic areas and services to target highly specific, intent-driven keywords. These pages are designed to rank quickly, often making it to the first page of Google for their targeted queries.
- Intent-Based Traffic: Unlike broad, high-traffic keywords, Mosaic focuses on users in the consideration and conversion phase of their shopping journey. These are visitors who are actively looking for services or products and are ready to make a decision.
- High Conversion Potential: While individual traffic per page might seem modest—sometimes as low as 20 visitors per month—the conversion potential is significant. These visitors are primed to act, resulting in higher conversion rates compared to general traffic.
- Scalability for Exponential Growth: When compounded across hundreds or even thousands of pages, the results are extraordinary. The cumulative effect of hyper-targeted pages means a massive increase in qualified traffic and conversion rates.
- Seamless Integration of SEO and CRO: Mosaic ensures that the traffic it generates is not only plentiful but also aligned with user intent. By addressing specific needs and delivering a streamlined user experience, these pages naturally convert visitors into customers.
If you’re looking to increase both your search engine visibility and conversion rates, Mosaic is the solution to scale your business while driving bottom-line results. Learn more about this innovative service and the cost savings here, or check out this awesome case study:
Get Started With Conversion Rate Optimization
CRO may seem like a long winded process, but, necessity aside, it will turn your website into a seriously powerful profit generator. The more you stay on top of your analytics tracking and customer sentiment engagement, the easier the process will be moving forward. If you feel the full scope of CRO is too demanding at this point, check out these 3 quick hacks for improving conversion rate optimization.
Regardless if you don’t see the numbers you’re after, trust that your customers will appreciate your dedication to improving their shopping experience. In most instances, your customers are buying into your brand, not just your product. So, catering to their happiness is in itself a worthy thing to optimize.
Want a CRO plan delivered to you? Get in touch with our team to discuss a comprehensive SEO strategy that will turn your website into a lead generation (and conversion) magnet.
