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
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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