Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 03.06.2026

Most e-commerce businesses will be investing in search engine optimisation to some extent.

The purpose, therefore, is to bring in more relevant organic traffic to the e-commerce website.

However, what happens when you’re bringing in tens of thousands of shoppers from Google, yet sales are still not as expected?

This could be because the business has not thought about CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation).

In this guide, we will set out what CRO is and how to improve it.

What is conversion rate optimisation (CRO)?

CRO, or conversion rate optimisation, is not just about generating more sales; it can also involve increasing how many people sign up, for example, for a company newsletter for example.

Too many businesses, therefore, focus solely on getting more and more visitors to a website whilst neglecting to improve other SEO metrics.

For example, if the web design main navigation is not well thought out, customers may feel as if they are in a maze, trying to find the exact product they want to purchase.

Therefore, they could abandon the website because they couldn’t find the exact item that they wanted to buy.

Therefore, CRO is the art form of converting more visitors into sales, or for example newsletter sign-ups.

 

Why are we talking about e-commerce businesses in particular?

For many local businesses, let’s say service-based businesses, often the number of pages on the website is far less when compared to most e-commerce business.

Often, e-commerce businesses, in terms of the clients that we work with, have thousands of pages.

Therefore, this is where the search engine optimisation is much more difficult. The reason is that you are not just trying to improve the website for a small number of keywords; instead, you are often trying to improve organic rankings for hundreds, if not thousands, of different keywords.

However, that’s just one half of the battle.

Once you’ve got the customer onto the correct page, it’s a matter of making sure the page answers all the customer’s queries and ultimately that they make a purchase. Other actions you may want the customer make could be for example signing up to a newsletter.

 

What is SEO?

You may not know what SEO stands for; it simply means search engine optimisation, the process of improving a business’s visibility in search engines such as Google.

The overarching aim of SEO is to:

• Make the website rank on the first page of Google for relevant search terms
• Improve the number of organic visitors
• Improve the website’s authority
• To improve sales
• To improve brand awareness, through writing helpful content
• To help gain sales locally, nationally or internationally

E-commerce SEO means:

Optimising individual product pages and category pages

Improving the technical SEO, that’s the site speed, fixing broken links, and sorting any indexation problems. It can also mean adding redirects and finding duplicate pages.

Content marketing needs to be written to make the e-commerce store relevant for certain keywords. This means improving the Google EEAT score for a particular set of products.

What Is CRO?

Conversion rate optimisation, or CRO for short, is simply maximising the number of visitors who engage with the business.

For example, that doesn’t mean the customer is making a purchase from you. Although that is the ultimate aim, it can also mean signing up for a newsletter or simply leaving your contact details for a callback from one of the sales team. It also means simply following the company on social media.

Basically, many customers may not be ready to make a purchase right then and there. This is where re-marketing comes into the equation and therefore you may want for example, take the customers e-mails address to sign them up to a monthly newsletter.

CRO could therefore include:

• A customer making a purchase
• Signing up for a newsletter
  Starting to follow the business on social media by clicking on the social media buttons
• Completing a form, for example, for a sales representative to call the customer back

 

How good web design can improve CRO

Website navigation and calls to action

Good website navigation should allow the customer to quickly and effortlessly get to the right product page. This means the customer shouldn’t feel like they have to do much work to find the right product they want to purchase.

Good web design and website navigation should offer that, even with a huge number of different products, the navigation and design should be cleverly thought out. This means it’s simple to get to the right product, for example, by clicking on large product images.

For example, a large picture of a fridge-freezer leads to the company’s refrigeration product section. Then you could have additional icons, for example, American-style fridge-freezers. Making the navigation simpler, with large visual icons to guide customers to the right product category.

 

CTA / Calls To Action

To improve sales for e-commerce businesses, it’s important to have calls to action throughout the website.

For example, this could be as simple as “fill in the form for a sales representative to call you back within the hour”. Now, if you sell, for example, package holidays, this could be enough for someone to quickly note their mobile number, which could mean that you make more sales.

Trust signals, reviews and awards

If your business has won awards, let’s say you have been voted, let’s say, the best company selling motorbike products by a magazine, make sure this is clearly visible on the page.

The reason is that sometimes businesses have many thousands of visitors per month; however, sometimes they need some encouragement to buy an item from you. The hard work of improving organic search engine optimisation may be complete.

You’ve therefore done the hard work of getting the shopper to the page; however, now it could be just a matter of, for example, encouraging them to buy from you. Therefore, adding customer reviews, awards, and the business’s qualifications, such as ISO certifications, might be enough to encourage the visitor to buy from you.

 

What can happen if my business does not improve its CRO?

Lose potential sales

A business that does not invest in conversion rate optimisation may start losing sales.

For example, thousands of products could be added to an e-commerce website. However, if the navigation is then poorly designed, customers can become frustrated when they can’t find the products they need.

This can drive up the bounce rate.

This means that Google’s algorithm detects a high bounce rate and concludes that this website is offering a poor user experience.

Meaning that U.X is poor, meaning that web design and SEO are not helping the customer to find the right products.

 

Confused shoppers

A customer might be confused into thinking you might not sell a particular product.

For example, the SEO companies might have completed their work. The business might therefore rank high for a particular keyword in Google’s SERPs.

However, if the customer can’t find the products they want on the website or encounters 404 page errors without any page redirects in place, this can confuse the customer. Also, they may land on the correct product; however, it may clearly state that it’s out of stock and doesn’t suggest a viable alternative.

This all substantially increases the business’s bounce rate

 

Doesn’t build trust

You often hear digital marketing agencies talk about improving “trust signals” to help improve sales. This means designing the website to reassure the customer.

For example, if you’re purchasing items from a company that has won a “Which” award, this would give the shopper greater confidence in the business. Therefore, trust signals are important.

Here are some of the ways that you would improve trust signals on your website:

– Clearly noting telephone numbers and company address
– Answering commonly asked questions, such as the company’s return policy
– Adding awards
– Adding accreditations, such as ISO qualifications

Removing friction from the buying process

Removing friction from the buying process is just a rather fancy marketing way of saying make it simpler for the customer to purchase an item.

For example, let’s say that by using A/B testing, and you increase the sales for a certain product. You may have achieved this through something as simple as slightly redesigning the main menu. It’s these incremental changes which can help your business to generate more sales by using split testing.

How can improving user experience signals (U.X) help improve sales

Shops and restaurants spend considerable time and effort creating business premises that you want to spend time and money in. This should be the same for your e-commerce store; it’s not just a place to sell items, but to inform, educate, and help people find the right items.

Improving UX is all about enhancing the “user experience”, which basically means helping and making it easier for the customer.

You can improve the U.X in the following ways:

• Improve page load speeds
• Make sure the mobile version of the website is well-designed
• Improving the main navigation, helping the shopper find the right page on the e-commerce store with minimum effort
• Ensuring there’s a lot of helpful advice added to each page (Google Helpful Content Update)
• Making sure the information, that is the advice, is reliable and kept up to date (Google EEAT)

 

Actively work to reduce the business’s bounce rates

A high bounce rate means many visitors are landing on a page and, for whatever reason, deciding to leave without visiting another page.

A bounce rate is detrimental to the business for two reasons: more customers leaving without buying an item.

The second reason is that Google’s algorithm is watching each business’s bounce rate.

The reason we can say that is that is when you log in to your Google Analytics account, you can see your e-commerce business’s bounce rate.

Therefore, if Google’s algorithm detects prolonged high bounce rates, especially across many pages, this shows that the average shopper is not very interested in what the business is selling.

We can say that because if the shopper were interested, they would most likely visit multiple pages.

Work to improve engagement metrics.

Just as the owner of a department store or perhaps a restaurant would like you to stay for longer and spend more, you should adopt this concept for your e-commerce website.

SEO companies refer to this as improving the e-commerce’s engagement. Here’s how you do just that:

 

Time on site

Focus on improving how long shoppers spend on your company website. You can monitor this on your company’s Google Analytics account.

It’s also often called the e-commerce’s “dwell time”.

 

Pages per session

This means that a business should aim to increase the number of pages the average shopper visits. If your average is, say, 1.2, look to increase this. This means increasing the number of pages the average shopper visits. When you increase this figure, it means the shopper is browsing more items, which can increase your business’s likelihood of making more sales.

CTR: the click-through rate

When you get a business onto page one of Google, you could even be ranked number 1; well, you’re still competing with many other businesses on that page. For example, businesses are investing in Google AdWords, Google Business optimisation, and Google AI Overviews.

Therefore, it’s important to improve the CTR, which is the click-through rate. You can do this via optimising the meta titles and meta descriptions; however, you can also obtain a featured snippet, which can attract more clicks as well.

 

Improve product page optimisation.

When optimising the individual product pages, it’s important not to fall into the common traps that many businesses do.

The common mistake that many businesses make is as follows:

• Don’t use AI text to write the page
• Don’t use internal or externally duplicated text
• Don’t add content thin pages
• Here’s instead how best to optimise the product page:
• Write unique product descriptions
• Think about Google EEAT and how you can implement this on each product page
• Add a descriptive product description
• Add real customer reviews
• Add high-quality product photos

 

It’s especially important to improve the mobile shopping experience

For most e-commerce businesses, half or more of the website traffic comes from mobile devices such as smartphones.

Therefore, e-commerce businesses need to pay particular attention to improving the mobile user experience. This means improving the following:

• Simple to use website navigation designed for smartphones
• Fast loading times
• Making the checkout process a piece of cake

 

What would you say are some of the more common e-commerce SEO mistakes that your agency sees?

Aiming to improve organic visitor numbers in isolation to everything else

A common mistake is to try to keep bringing in new visitors. However, this doesn’t account for the possibility that the pages might not answer the shopper’s question. Therefore, you have done all the hard work of getting the shopper to the page, yet the page might not have a well-written product description.

Therefore, this could mean that the bounce rate increases. Therefore other SEO metics need to be considered, such as bounce rates, dwell times, and number of pages visited. Therefore don’t just consider organic visitor numbers in isolation.

 

Duplicated or AI product descriptions

This is a massive problem with many e-commerce businesses.

That is, AI platforms may have written the product descriptions, or there may be a lot of duplicated text. If the page is not original, by that we mean it’s duplicated, for example, then this could mean that the page has a low “Google EEAT” score. Pages with a low Google EEAT score will not rank as highly as well-written, helpful pages.

 

Ignoring bounce rates

Many e-commerce businesses may ignore their bounce rates, this is a mistake.

This means that when a high bounce rate is not addressed, many shoppers leave the website without visiting another page.

Now, this could be because of something as simple as not making it clear how long the product will take to arrive.

Using split testing can help you identify where you can reduce bounce rates.

 

Out of date information

If a blog post or a product page doesn’t offer helpful advice, customers will go elsewhere.

Slow checkout process
The checkout process should be made as simple as possible. If it takes too much time or is slow, customers could leave just before they make a purchase.