How To Guides on Increasing Conversion Rates

The Definitive How-To Guide For Conversion Rate Optimization – one of the best guides to conversion rate optimisation

General articles on conversion rates

CAPTCHAs decrease conversion rates – ‘With this design, they had a conversion rate of roughly 48%. They then removed the CAPTCHA, and it boosted the conversion rate up to 64%’

Increase Your Conversion Rate by Making Your Site Uglier – Interesting article exploring other methods of increasing your conversion rate.

Case Studies on Increasing Conversion Rates on Landing Pages

[Case Study] Using Video to Lift Landing Page Conversion Rate by 100% – Vidyard did some tests to see what converted better on their landing page. Either no video, an inline video or a modal video. Hint: The videos massively increased the conversion rate

Other Conversion Rate Case Studies

How the new Chrome Web Store increased signups by 100% – Last week’s release of a renewed Chrome Web Store by Google increased signups to Handcraft by 1000%.

Optimizely Increases Homepage Conversion Rate by 29% – A nice case study article on how Optimizely increased their homepage conversion rate by using their software.

How AquaSoft increased their sales by 20% with A/B split testing – AquaSoft managed to increase their sales by 20% by doing some simple A/B split tests on their website. This article goes over their findings

How We Improved Our Conversion Rate by 72% – Care Logger staff optimised their Diabetes software website with small and easy to do tweaks that resulted in a 72% higher conversion rate.

Freemium Conversion Rate

Evernote.com discuss their conversion rate for their freemium model – their overall conversion rate for their freemium users to premium users is about 3%. But they go into a lot more interesting statistics (youtube video). The longer users use evernote, the higher chance they have of going premium

Offline Conversion Rate Articles

How I got a 100% conversion rate cold calling prospects for customer development – not related to online really, but was an interesting article.

When doing keyword research to determine the competition, the next step is to look at the first page on google for your keyword since these are the competing pages that you want to beat.

There are several factors you will want to look at for each competing page to solidly your keyword selection. Accessing all of this data is easy when you are using the right tools.

One tool that will save you a lot of time is SeoQuake. This tool is a Firefox SEO extension that displays several important attributes for each page in the search results that are important SEO factors for ranking on the first page of google.

Domain age

How many year(s) a domain name has been established. I like to think of it more in terms of site age instead of domain age to see how long the indexable content has been seen by the search engines.

Older sites tend to get more love from Google probably because they can be trusted more. A domain may have been registered years ago, but if its not established with a site and indexed in the search engines, then its no different then starting fresh with a new domain name. You can check the age of the site using archive.org.

Page Rank

Page Rank (or PR) is a mathematical calculation based on the PR value that has been passed to a page via links, both external and internal links. More PR or link juice is passed by external links because a “vote” from an external website means more then a link from your own site.

Google assigns a number from 0-10 with 10 being the best and there are essentially four categories of PR:

0-3: Websites with minimal links pointing to them

4-5: Popular websites with many links pointing to them (authority sites)

6-10: Extremely popular websites with hundreds/thousands of links, many of which are from trusted sources with high PR (google.com is a PR10 website)


Whilst PR is not everything when it comes to ranking on the first page on Google, it certainly will give a quick indication for the popularity of a website and the competitiveness for ranking a given keyword.

Keep in mind that PR is updated on the toolbar periodically so it may not always be an accurate representation of the true PR of a page/website. Ok, that is me done for now on PR.

Total Number of Links to Domain

Google has stated that there are over 200 SEO factors to order websites in the search results. But without a doubt, some of the most important SEO factors are the number, quality, and relevance of links to your site.

The number of links is one indication of the importance and popularity of a website. Generally, the higher the number of backlinks to a domain, the stronger the authority it has.

Links to Specific Page

You also need to consider the number of backlinks to the specific page that you want to beat. The more links to the specific page, the higher the authority this page becomes. Combine this link data with PR, anchor text analysis, and you should be able to get better insights into why the page is ranking.

Number of Links from Trusted Sources

Does it have a DMOZ listing? This requires a manual review from a trusted web directory, so Google is likely going to give this link more weight.

Does it have a Yahoo listing? Pretty much like DMOZ. This is another signal of trust. Yahoo requires you to pay $299 per year to be included in the directory, with no guarantee you will be listed.

Educational (.edu) and government (.gov) links are usually very authoritative and trusted sources of links.

Keyword Domain Name

Is it a keyword domain name or brand? If it’s an exact match domain (EMD) it will be receiving EMD benefits to help the site rank.

Final Note About SEO Competition Research

Getting a quick overview of all these SEO factors will certainly help your decision making when determining what keywords you should be trying to rank that aren’t extremely competitive. Don’t get discouraged if your keywords seem to be competitive, you can always target relevant keywords that don’t get searched as often as they tend to be less competitive. Focusing on the long tail traffic tends to convert better as well, since the user knows exactly what they are looking for.