One way you can improve conversion rate (or the time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit, etc) is to better match your visitors? expectations with the website content.
We'll take the case of a keyword used in a PPC campaign and we'll improve the landing page to match the user as closely as possible (in terms of the call to action used to find your site).
Let's say you are selling perfumes online and you attract visitors using paid advertising. You created a highly targeted adgroup targeting visitors that are very close to buy a CHANEL perfume. Your keywords may look like ?buy coco chanel perfume? and the synonyms for buy as it follows, ?order coco chanel perfume?; ?purchase coco chanel perfume?; ?shop coco chanel perfume?.
Step 1: tag landing page URLs
You will need to associate to each keyword an unique URL, and tag (add a parameter to the existing URL) them according.
Step 2: create a CSS/text button
For the landing pages tied with the keywords above you should dynamically change the text on the button which starts the checkout process.
For that you will need to use a CSS trick that displays text over a background image (your button). To see a good sample button, go to Google Analytics login page and look in the source code for the ?Access Analytics? button.
A quick way to see if a button is made of text or image is to try select the text with your mouse.
Step 3: dynamically change the text content
Once you finish implementing the hybrid CSS text button, tell your programmers to read the cta parameter (can be any other name convention) when someone comes on your site and then build the landing page dynamically, by replacing the default text on the CSS button with the cta parameter.
Now, one someone comes from your PPC ads using the keyword ?purchase coco chanel perfume? the button should display ?Purchase Now? and not ?Buy Now?, which is much closer to what the visitor had in mind when they typed the query.
Do you want to go a little bit more further ? A/B tests, baby! A/B testing!
A) Display ?Purchase Now? against
B) Display ?Purchase {Product Name Here} Now?
If you decide to test the tactics above, let us know the results.
In our opinion, one of the most under appreciated tactics used for conversion optimization is URL tagging and landing page personalization (segmentation). Once properly implemented, these tactics can have a dramatic effect on your KPIs. Just think of what you can do if you combine cookie techniques with tagged urls: content segmentation, different prices for new and existing users, promotions to attract new customers, visitors frequency based prices.
