It takes a lot of effort and planning to keep a website alive and thriving. You have to focus on SEO, SEM, CRO, content marketing, web design, and so much more – the list is long. When it comes to Digital Marketing, SEO and CRO take the front seat, and since these two components of marketing have become extremely sophisticated today, your manual efforts won’t make the cut alone.
What, then, should you do?
You should invest in the right optimization tools to streamline your efforts and deliver better results. By investing in the right tools, you can optimize your website to drive traffic and improve conversions. In this post, we’re going to focus on CRO explicitly. Hence, our topic of discussion will be the best CRO tools to power your Digital Marketing strategy.
So, without further ado, let’s look at some of the best CRO tools that you should include in your marketing strategy!
The seven best CRO tools to look out for in 2020
Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, is one of the best tools to provide you with a 360-degree view of your site’s performance. Since Google Search Console is a website optimization tool, it’s primary aim is to help boost your site’s ranking and increase conversions.
To use this tool, you have to add your website – which will be known as “property”- to the Google Search Console. Then you have to install code (it is a brief HTML snippet) to verify it on your site. After you have completed the installation process, Google Search Console starts collecting information from your website. For instance, it reports on the volume of traffic, where it is coming from, and what is the bounce rate.
Anyone who’s in the field of Digital Marketing or even uses Digital Marketing techniques knows that page load time has a direct impact on website optimization, particularly when it comes to ranking, traffic, and conversions. The greater your page loading time, the higher will be the bound rate. Nobody wants to stay around for a long time, waiting for a page to load.
Of course, no marketer wants this to happen to their website. GTMetrix is the perfect website optimization tool that lets you know how fast your pages must load and how you can achieve it. You need to enter your site’s URL into the search bar of the tool and choose the “Analyze” option. Within seconds, your results will be ready to view!
GTMetrix allows you to see your load time, PageSpeed Score, and YSlow Score. Also, it offers you actionable recommendations as to how you can improve the page load speed, and what should be the priority of each recommended solution. To sum up, GTMetrix is just the tool you need to reduce your bounce rate.
According to the official website of Yoast SEO, it is the “#1 WordPress SEO plugin” tool, and rightly so. You can install it on all of your sites. This handy plugin tool takes the responsibility of all your SEO needs, whether it’s for a blog post or a new page on your site. To use this tool, you only need to install the plugin on your WordPress website, activate it, and voila – you get access to all of its features!
Each time you post a new blog or launch a new page on your site, Yoast will provide an SEO score and readability score for the new items, thereby helping you see the areas of improvement and optimize the same. Plus, Yoast also provides an in-depth analysis of your page performance.
On Yoast, you will find a search bar where you can enter a focus keyword and your custom featured snippet, and this will then appear in the SERPs of search engines. Yoast has a free version and a premium version that comes with added features and perks.
Moz is a popular tool that is a favourite of Digital Marketers all around the globe. It is designed to help increase the web traffic, improve search engine rankings, and increase visibility in SERPs. Basically, Moz is an advanced keyword explorer tool that gives you insight into the keywords and phrases that people are searching for on your site.
Apart from keyword research, Moz comes with a host of SEO solutions, including site audits, rank tracking, search visibility, and backlink analysis. It lets you see where you stand in comparison to your primary competitors.
Moz notifies you of any problems or challenges that could prevent Google, Bing, and other search engines from crawling your website and hamper your rankings. Not just that, Moz also offers other vital metrics such as Page Authority, Domain Authority, Keyword Difficulty, and Spam Score.
Crazy Egg is a tool that allows you to gather relevant information as user behaviour reports that provide you with essential insights into the user behaviour so you can tweak your SEO and CRO strategies accordingly. With the data provided by the tool, you can determine what strategies work best for your site and target audience. Whatever be your website goals, whether it is to get more page views, or to increase sales, or to boost subscriptions – Crazy Egg can do it all.
The best part is that it is very user-friendly. You will have to install a code on your website, and once you’re set, you can start running user behaviour reports immediately! The heatmaps, scroll maps, and click reports will provide you with detailed information such as where the traffic is coming from, where people click on your site, and much more. You can even record user activity on your website and compare A/B testing elements against one another to identify the best among them.
Overall, Crazy Egg offers you a comprehensive look as to how users interact with your site and what areas you can improve to bring better conversions.
If there’s an all-rounder website optimization tool, it is Ahrefs. It has a suite of tools that cater to all your site optimization needs, like Competitive Analysis, Keyword Research, Backlink Research, Content Research, Rank Tracking, and Web Monitoring. Together, all these tools provide you with the “best and most complete data” that can help you understand the needs of your website.
You can use Ahrefs to analyze your backlinks, see your competitors’ backlinks, find referring domains, perform a background check on the authority of the sites that link to you, and so on.
Ahrefs is a nifty tool since it offers excellent customer support, tailored learning materials, and news features. What’s more, is that it has a unique private Facebook community.
Conversion isn’t an immediate thing. Usually, most people who visit a website don’t convert into customers immediately. First, they explore the site, then they compare the products and price points with other sites, and then make their purchase decision. Although you cannot guarantee conversion in every visit, you can collect leads. Hello Bar is a tool designed to help you gather relevant and quality leads.
All you have to do is enter your site’s URL and create a free account to start using the tool. Hello Bar lets you set up any overlay of your preferred choice to collect emails from web visitors via lead magnets, discount codes, etc. It enables you to take advantage of sliders, top bars, and bottom bars to capture leads more effectively. So, even if visitors leave your site, you can always market to them later.
The tool even allows you to manipulate site elements of multiple websites and even migrate from another tool. To add to that, Hello Bar experts can also create a custom strategy according to your needs!
Since SEO and CRO are two sides of the same coin (SEO drives in traffic to your site while CRO helps convert them into customers), your website optimization strategy must incorporate both these elements in equal measures.
