Why Your Website Isn’t Converting (And What to Do About It)

Jeffro (00:01.683)
Welcome back to digital dominance. know, getting traffic to your website is one thing, but turning that traffic into paying customers, well, that’s where conversion rate optimization or CRO comes in. Today, I’m joined by Cody Jensen, founder and CEO of Search Bloom, an award-winning search marketing firm that helps businesses maximize their ROI through SEO, Google Ads, and CRO. Cody started his career at Google and has since built a company focused on ethical data-driven strategies that increase conversions and drive actual business growth.

So in this episode, we’re going to dive deep into conversion rate optimization, what that really means, why a lot of businesses get it wrong, and some of the small changes that can lead to massive improvements in sales. So if your website isn’t converting the way that it should, this episode is for you. Cody, welcome to the show.

Cody Jensen (00:45.624)
Thanks for having me, I’m glad to be here.

Jeffro (00:47.729)
Absolutely, know, Cody, a lot of business owners think they just need more traffic to get customers, but that’s not always true. So that’s why I’m excited to hear from you. In your words, what is conversion rate optimization and why is it sometimes even more important than just increasing traffic?

Cody Jensen (01:03.938)
Yeah, so true conversion rate optimization is the practice of testing, right? So you’re testing a control variation or the current state of the website against a different variation, right? That’s true conversion rate optimization testing. There’s also A-B testing on landing pages and things like that, which could be considered control versus variation. But often what is Unfortunately, think misused is like people say, hey, we’re going to do your CRO as a part of your PPC or whatever. And then they just do what they think is best or best practice. The thing is, is each industry is a little different and best practice doesn’t carry over from e-commerce to service. You know what I mean?

Jeffro (01:55.56)
Yeah, you should always do best practice, but you still need to test it to see what is actually gonna give you the most conversions for this particular campaign, for this particular business, in this particular region, et cetera.

Cody Jensen (02:05.326)
Exactly.

Jeffro (02:06.983)
So how do you know when you’re getting that, just the lazy version versus the actual testing?

Cody Jensen (02:13.518)
The real testing is you’re going to be using a third party software such as Visual Website Optimizer. There’s a bunch of them out there, but we love VWO. And you’re actually controlling your basis or your control against that of your variations. And you’re coding within the platform itself. So you’re making the tweaks, the changes within Visual Website Optimizer. And then you’re load balancing or you’re testing equal loads of data. So if it’s a 50-50 test or an A-B test, half of your users will see one variant, control variant, versus half of your users will see variant A, which is the test based on hypotheses.

Jeffro (02:59.293)
How much traffic do you actually need though to make a test like that statistically significant? Because if I got 10 visitors a month, obviously it’s a toss up whether that’s going to be significant or not.

Cody Jensen (03:10.626)
Yeah, it wouldn’t work if you’re getting 10 visitors a month. It wouldn’t work if you’re getting 100. We’re talking minimum of a couple thousand sessions per month to really do conversion optimization. And at that point, it’s still going to take a long time to achieve, as you mentioned, Jephro, statistical significance.

Jeffro (03:31.472)
Got it. So yeah, this isn’t something you can just slap on and get your instant answer. You got to be committed to the process and go through multiple variations. And you can do several in a row too, right? Which means it takes even longer. So maybe we increase from one to two and then two to four, then four to 4.2 or something. And you squeeze it as much as you can or as much as you decide is worth it.

Cody Jensen (03:38.71)
Yeah, for sure.

Cody Jensen (03:53.196)
Yes, absolutely. And the thing is, is with conversion rate optimization, say your website converts it like 2%, which is pretty average, right? If you can just turn that from 2 to 2.5%, you have made a big, big change in your business and the amount of lead flow that you’re getting as a service-based business. It’s just, it’s kind of like a no brainer. It’s the easiest thing that you can do in your business. Well, I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but it’s the fastest thing that you can do in your business to make more money.

Jeffro (04:23.388)
It’s a simple thing and it doesn’t require increasing the ad spend. You’re just getting more out of the leads and the traffic that you already have come against.

So Cody, when a business owner comes to you and says, hey, my website isn’t converting well, what’s the first thing that you look at to diagnose the problem?

Cody Jensen (04:40.19)
I first will see what tech stack they’re using and see if they have any sort of heat mapping software installed or click mapping software installed and I’ll review that. I’ll review their funnel report, see where some drop-off points are and I’ll just get a good basis on their conversion rate. If it’s a service-based business, we’re talking about leads, right? So I’m looking at how many of these, what is their basis conversion rate?

And what would happen if that increased to X and how do I do that is kind of like the next step, which is then you go into hypothesis mode and you look at competition, you look at other types of funnels and you develop hypotheses from there.

Jeffro (05:25.819)
So can you tell us about some of these hypotheses? I imagine some of them might be related to their offer. You might say, hey, you know what? Everything looks good except this seems too good to be true or maybe not good enough. So how do you decide when you’re going to tweak the offer versus just the layout of the page or removing navigation? There’s so many things you can optimize.

Cody Jensen (05:45.25)
Yeah, we have a prioritization matrix basically. When it comes to service-based businesses, for example, a lot of them might have a ton of good, really solid landing pages that are ranking well, or they’re driving traffic from Facebook ads or Google ads or whatever, right? But they don’t have a form above the fold. And more often than not in our playbook is, you know, having a form above the fold will increase your conversion rate by a quarter of percent. That quarter percent can translate across your entire website. So then multiply that by however many landing pages you have and now you’re getting a lot more leads. So that might be one test that we would begin with, right? Is a form above the fold. Other things, social proof is a huge one. So having a testimonial right next to the form of a pleased customer or client, with their picture and the five stars next to it, that’s another way to do social proof. I’m not talking about as seen in badges, like as seen in the New York Times or whatever. Those are helpful in some instances, but we’re looking for real social validation.

Jeffro (07:00.347)
And I want to reiterate again for people, just because these are best practices that you know generally work, you still test it, right? You don’t just assume, your form’s not here, put it there, and then move on to the next optimization. You actually do test it and see if it works in this case.

Cody Jensen (07:15.01)
Yes, absolutely. We take our own medicine as well. So what we did is we changed it on our homepage so the form was not above the fold and we made it a clickable button and then the form would pop up and then they could fill it out. But the conversion rate declined. So we learned, hey, above the fold forms for lead gen, for service businesses, or at least ours, certainly worked.

Jeffro (07:44.698)
That’s awesome. So can you talk about some of the most common CRO mistakes you see that kill conversions on service business websites?

Cody Jensen (07:53.634)
Yeah, so we have pillars for conversion rate optimization. One is user experience. It’s an acronym. It’s UTU. It’s not the most sexy acronym, but UTU. User experience is the first U. So if your website is not mobile friendly, we don’t even need to run a test. We’re just going to make it mobile friendly, right? Because it’s going to provide a better user experience, right? But other tests that you could you could leverage with user experience might be a on your form. You could have two buttons instead of just submit. You could have call now as well, right? To have two different options to see depending on the type of service business that you are to see which one converts at a higher rate.

Jeffro (08:42.298)
Gotcha. So what about the other letters, U-T-U, in that methodology?

Cody Jensen (08:46.91)
Okay, the other pillars. So T stands for trust signals. What they do is they help reduce friction. So basically helping alleviate concerns about any doubts, any fraud or anything like that. things like, we’re trusted by McAfee or we’re trusted by Norton, Antivirus. These types of trust symbols, these badges that you can buy that are very cheap and you actually pay for them with your SSL anyway.

They’re very, very valuable. Also little things like, Hey, we hate spam and won’t spam you. That works that. mean, maybe not across the board, but in every test that I’ve run, those types of things really, really work. So, trust signals are, are, are important. and I mentioned like the, social proof that that’s another form of trust signals. other, other things like, like I mentioned, trust sales, professional like

Overall, your website aesthetic and information architecture is structured very well. That’s also very, very helpful. The last one is urgency. Urgency has to do with basically accelerating decision-making time, right? So it’s the principle of scarcity. If you only have 10 left, then people are, and you tell them that you only have 10 left, then people are much more likely to…

convert now as opposed to tomorrow when they think about it again.

Jeffro (10:19.802)
Well, it’s interesting to think about the fact that that’s still effective because that’s been used so much and people have abused that when there are, it’s on a software platform, there’s unlimited seats, but I’m restricting it to 10 arbitrarily, but it still helps people get off the fence.

Cody Jensen (10:37.816)
But here’s the reality though too is in the event that it’s real scarcity, it works even better. For example, with Search Bloom, we have a lot of demand for our SEO services. A lot of people wanna work with us for SEO and Google Ads. So we have to schedule them out on a wait list and they can start in two months from now, right? And we’ll get going with them on that particular project. That’s not a scarcity practice that we implement on our website by design, but we do leverage it in ourselves process, not because it’s unreal, because it also works and it’s all and it’s backed by real information too.

Jeffro (11:21.228)
Yeah. So have you found that, how did you arrive at that two month windows? That’s just because that’s what it takes you guys to ramp up for.

Cody Jensen (11:28.014)
That’s when we’re available. Yeah. We only have so many humans, right?

Jeffro (11:31.532)
Yeah, okay.

Sure. Cool. So what about when you’re doing the CRO for a client? How long do you stay with them until you’re like, okay, we’ve optimized everything we can optimize. Goodbye. You do they leave or do you, I’m assuming you don’t leave, but what does that look like?

Cody Jensen (11:51.406)
I think it’s different for everybody. But most importantly is, did we achieve goal? And if so, by how much? And how quickly did we’re really able to do it? And do we have any more hypotheses or more tests, ideations that we can test incrementally? It really just is a matter of return on investment with CRO. Even if I move the dot by 0.1%, you’re going to see a return on investment because I charge so little in comparison to what you’re seeing, right? So I don’t see a lot of our CRO partners that leave us. They don’t leave us. At some point we might have exhausted our conversion rate, which is, okay, we’ve now hit 18 % conversion rate. That’s awesome. Great. Can you continue? Yes. But you’re at an inflection point really where do more dollars, more time, more tests equal more output or more ROI? And it’s the same with, I think, every channel or anything like that. But it’s the same sort of inflection point with conversion rate optimization.

Jeffro (13:03.605)
Right, at that point you might as well turn your attention to a different channel or different campaign or something and optimize that instead.

Cody Jensen (13:10.254)
Use those dollars to drive more traffic, to drive more revenue because you’re sitting at an 18.25 % conversion rate and it gets better than that, but not much, you know?

Jeffro (13:22.069)
Yeah, yeah, that’s pretty awesome. So what you mentioned mobile optimization before that that’s just a no brainer. You need to have it. What about website speed? How much does that impact conversions?

Cody Jensen (13:33.21)
it dramatically impacts conversions to the point where we do not need to achieve statistical significance or even run a test on it. We just know factually that if it runs faster on both mobile and desktop devices, it will be more performant from a CVR point of view. CVR meaning conversion rate.

Jeffro (13:54.263)
So if obviously, if it loads in 10 seconds versus three seconds, three seconds is going to win. But if we’re loading in three seconds versus 2.75, is that still a worthy investment? Because the faster you make it go, usually the more time and effort is required to get the page to load that much faster. So where do you kind of draw those lines?

Cody Jensen (14:16.63)
Well, again, different for each use case, different instances, right? So if I’m dealing with a Shopify store, there’s only so much you can do to decrease your LCP and all of that, right? There’s only so much you can do. But if we’re talking about WordPress, lead gen for service-based businesses, we can make the website load as fast as we almost want it to. Now it’s just a matter of how do we incorporate design, impact, urgency, and all the other elements of conversion rate optimization into that page without slowing it down too much. There is an inflection point to speed though. Like, are you really going to get that much of an increase in CVR from going from 3.2 total load time to 2.7? No, you’re not. And we wouldn’t test that. We would test something else.

Jeffro (15:07.415)
Okay, real quick, going to circle back. mentioned LCP, which is the large contentful paint. Can you just explain to people what that means and why it matters?

Cody Jensen (15:16.396)
Largest Contentful Paint is the biggest part of your website. It’s the most, it’s the biggest components of your website and how fast those load.

Jeffro (15:25.14)
Right, and so that’s what, you know, people don’t see anything for first five seconds, that’s a problem. But if they only see like the menu and nothing else, that’s still a problem, right? So you gotta get at least the main chunk of it for the page to be considered loaded and actually having an impact.

Cody Jensen (15:43.564)
Yeah, it’s a part of Google’s core web vitals systems and ultimately largest contentful paint can be dramatically reduced simply by reducing the size of the page. Most people, in fact, we have data on this, 80 % of people don’t scroll past the fold. That’s it, right? So like you have your fold above fold to deal with. That’s what matters to the consumer. So what do you have above the fold?

Usually it’s a hero, you have an H1 tag, and then you have value propositions maybe in bullet points, and you have a form on the right hand side. Those are the elements that we’re testing, the value propositions, the guarantees, the security badges, all that kind of stuff.

Jeffro (16:29.814)
Okay. I have another question on the performance optimization. Cause obviously on desktop, you know, we’re used to a certain experience. but on mobile, the lighthouse page speed insights, they use a really slow, it’s like a three G connection that they’re testing. And I, I feel like most people have a faster connection than that these days on mobile. So how much stock do you put in that? And is it just a matter of getting it as fast as you think is reasonable on mobile?

Cody Jensen (16:57.966)
I think the latter part of that is accurate. Getting it as fast as possible is really what we’re after because yes, we can make it faster, but that would also mean we have to rebuild your entire freaking website, right? Because it was built wrong or there’s something weird or funky with it, with the database or this or that, right? If we really want a fast website, we just code it all in HTML because that’s the fastest, right? But it just doesn’t look that sexy you have to incorporate CSS and other layers of design and user clues or user experience to get them to convert.

Jeffro (17:38.057)
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so I want to touch on the trust factors again. You mentioned testimonials tend to help. And I think we can thank Amazon and the concert reviews for everything for that. We’re just used to looking at what other people think, because it gives us a little glimpse into what it’s like to work with this person. Like, hey, if they trusted them and they got a good result, okay, maybe it’s going to work for me. So does that mean just having one testimonial is enough? Do you recommend having a bunch?

Carousels I tend to not like, I mean, what do you see?

Cody Jensen (18:09.932)
Well, let’s talk lead generation for service businesses. I would put one testimonial directly beneath your CTA, your call to action, which is the button that they click to complete the form. I would have one there. That reduces friction because it helps them know, hey, this person is happy too. That’s helpful. But there’s other things that you can incorporate as well.

For example, if you won awards for your service, we, for example, we’ve won a number of different awards. We incorporate those awards in our landing pages. Industry specific certifications, awards, highlight that expertise and credibility in that, in your particular field can really change the game. So for example, for us, we won best SEO company for mid-market companies.

And we have that on our landing page. And we have that Forbes badge on there. Same with Clutch and Design Rush and others.

Jeffro (19:18.197)
Got it. Yeah, and I think for lot of service businesses, you can just apply for some of these certifications, especially if you’re already doing that work. Yeah, maybe you got to tweak a couple of things, but it might be worth going through that process anyways, because now not only are you improving the way you’re doing things, but you get to put it on your website and improve your conversions too.

Cody Jensen (19:39.714)
Yeah, and all the while you’re testing placement, you’re testing everything. A lot of the tests that we’re running, especially for service-based businesses, is all above the full test. So we’re making our primary value propositions bigger and making the certifications or the badges smaller as a test. And those types of tests yield interesting findings and it’s not unilaterally one way or the other way that wins. In, for example, HVAC, we’ve noticed that people don’t give a crap about your value propositions. They care about how fast you can get to them or that kind of stuff, right? So it’s testing all the time continuously and iteratively based on data and

With the advent of AI, it’s really cool to be able to feed data from your systems into something like Gemini or ChatGPT and leverage that information to then forecast out additional hypotheses as well.

Jeffro (20:54.772)
That makes sense. So you mentioned heat maps earlier. How often do you actually use those in deciding, okay, which things should we tweak? Because that kind of ties into what you’re talking about. Okay, if people aren’t looking at this section at all, do we want them to, then we know maybe we should make that bigger.

Cody Jensen (21:11.274)
I glance at a heat map, but I thoroughly investigate a click map. Totally different, same systems that you’ll use, but I’ll glance at a heat map to see how far people are going down in the percentile, how far they’re going down the page. But then I’ll look at the click map and I’ll look at what they’re clicking on. And is it buttons that they’re clicking on? Or are they, is it taps? Are they scrolling on their phone?

And is there like a glaring thing? So for example, with us, it was very glaring. You know what? When people come to searchbloom.com, the most important button click that they click on is case studies. They want to see proof. So what did we do? We made sure that it’s in our hero menu. We made sure that it’s right there popping for everybody to click on.

Jeffro (22:01.307)
I like that. there any CRO strategies you can use to nurture the leads that aren’t ready to buy yet or contact you yet?

Cody Jensen (22:12.099)
CRO strategies to nurture leads that aren’t ready to contact you.

Jeffro (22:17.619)
I guess like moving them towards getting into your ecosystem. Is it simply just then leading them to opting in so that you can send your sequences or is there anything else?

Cody Jensen (22:26.612)
yeah, yeah. So we often refer to these as like lead magnets, right? It depends on the type of business where these work or not. If it’s more of a commoditized business, if I can get this from 17 other people that are right around me, then I wouldn’t say, hey, let’s lead off with some lead magnets, which is effectively like a freebie. Think of like a 70 point SEO checklist, right? Well, sure, we’ll give you a 70 point checklist for free.

Just give us your email, tell us where to send it. But what we’re going to do next is add that email to a sequence and we’ll drip to you over time, right? That will warm you to the point where you’ll fill out a form to get in touch with us and have a discovery meeting.

Jeffro (23:09.479)
I like that you highlighted, not everybody needs a lead magnet, but obviously if you’re optimizing for conversions, you need to know what you want people to do. Is the goal to have them request a quote? Is it to pick up the phone? Is it to get on your list so you can talk to them later? Is it to buy something now? And obviously that’s going to change kind of the way you approach the layout and what you highlight and all of that.

Cody Jensen (23:32.578)
Yeah, absolutely. For example, with e-commerce, we’re testing on category pages, we’re testing quick view products where it pops up the product in a quick view versus an add to cart right now. That’s a play that we run quite often in e-comm. Whereas with lead generation, we might start with lead magnets for a divorce attorney because maybe someone is not ready to file for divorce yet, or maybe they’re not ready to contact an attorney, but they might be interested in learning

Jeffro (23:40.402)
Mm-hmm.

Cody Jensen (24:02.506)
on when it’s time to call it quits. Here’s a 25 page book on when to call it quits.

Jeffro (24:10.451)
Well, that makes a lot of sense and I appreciate you going through all this with me. Hopefully it sparks some ideas for people listening and realize how much they have they could actually be optimizing. So thanks for being on the show today, Cody. I’m glad, you know, conversion rate matters so much. I’ve actually done a couple of recent webinars on this topic too and people seem really interested because they’re starting to realize it’s not just traffic. Like you got to do the right stuff with that traffic.

For those you listening at home, can connect with Cody and his company, Search Bloom, using the links in the show notes. Obviously, they’re really good at what they do. So check them out if you’re looking for somebody to help you with this process. Last question for you, Cody, before we wrap up. If a business owner wants to start improving their website’s conversion rate today or landing page, but they kind of feel overwhelmed with all these options that we’re talking about, what’s the first action step that you’d recommend?

Cody Jensen (25:00.494)
Let’s say it’s just a smaller business looking to get more leads. would say install Microsoft Clarity. It’s free. It’s easy. You can install it on your website using Google Tag Manager. And all you’re doing is copy, paste, publish. And then a week later, you look at the data. Look at your heat maps. Look at your click maps. Look at session recordings. You can look at session recordings and see where people got in your funnel and didn’t

actually convert.

Jeffro (25:32.676)
Very cool, I appreciate that. Thanks again for being here today. Thanks to all you guys for listening. If you found this episode helpful, please leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. And remember, your website’s never done, so start making some changes to improve your conversions. Try out these tools that Cody mentioned. But that’s it for now. Take care and we’ll see you next time.