iGB Affiliate 55 Feb/Mar | Page 38

TRAFFIC Figure 2: Affiliates with great UX design A glance at Upwork shows your options are quite limited, with approximately the following number of people available for the following skill-sets: SEO – 170,000; UX designer – 20,000; CRO specialist – 100. With CRO considered fairly niche within the online marketing community, there are nowhere near the number of communities for conversion optimization specialists than for designers and SEOs. The best we could find is crotricks.com which is probably a good place to hunt down a specialist. CRO vs. SEO In practice, someone who’s good at conversion rate optimization would naturally make a good SEO. The question to debate is what is worth more to you: for a CRO to double your conversion rate with the same amount of traffic, or an SEO to double your traffic keeping the same conversion rate? In a perfect world, you’d want to do both. When you start addressing issues related to conversion rate, you start to indirectly address and help your SEO issues as well. If a CRO can increase the click rate from Google to your pages, increase sales, user time spent on site and number of pages visited, as well as lower the bounce rate, these are all things that should help in your SEO efforts. Similarly, addressing user experience needs will also indirectly help address SEO issues on the site. After all, Google has a fairly good idea of which sites are better at retaining their visitors, and if users can’t be bothered to navigate your site, then don’t expect Google to be interested in ranking your site higher than someone that does a better job at this. A/B split testing - one that does design and the other conversion optimization - both will probably tell you they would be the better choice than the other, and even some good conversion specialists will admit a properly designed website will iron out some of the conversion issues in the process. That said, the argument is still open to debate, and my view is that there is an edge to having a conversion specialist work on your site rather than opting for a new design. The reason being is that the conversion specialist will test and change your site to make it perform better. You’ll also learn 34 iGB Affiliate Issue 55 FEB/MAR 2016 via this process how to convert your traffic better, and this new knowledge will help inform any future redesign. Finding a good CRO specialist Finding a UX designer is also a lot easier than finding someone who’s good at conversion optimization (CO). The really talented CRO specialists are hard to find. As an industry – or career - it’s not as big or established as SEO (despite probably being more important), and the really talented ones are probably among the most expensive consultants you can hire. The A/B split test is not exactly a new technique or concept, yet many websites and companies haven’t exactly used these to their advantage. One would think in the iGaming industry that most gaming and affiliate sites would be interested in a process that could result in a 25% increase in the conversion rate, representing substantial extra income for any company. Yet many of the top websites in the business just aren’t using A/B split tests at all. That said, not all A/B split tests are easy to implement on some websites, due to complicated programming or, worse, a complex design that renders any type of changes challenging. Last but not least, A/B testing can sometimes require graphic design changes, taking up more time and money, so their use does also very