Falling organic traffic and rising click costs make conversion rate optimisation a more important B2B marketing priority.
For most businesses, PPC costs more than it used to. Organic search traffic may also be no longer growing as expected. The answer might seem to be to push harder on Google Ads or to invest more in SEO. But those routes are increasingly costly and uncertain, so instead of asking “How do we replace the traffic?”, perhaps we should first ask “Are we making enough from the traffic we still have?”
If our website is unclear and the calls to action are timid, we are simply – as one conference speaker I remember memorably put it – “pouring more expensive visitors into the same leaky bucket”.
Improving conversion rates changes the economics. If more of the existing visitors enquire, PPC can tolerate a higher cost per click and SEO’d traffic produces more return.
Most of us do not need a thousand more anonymous visitors – we need a higher proportion of the right visitors to believe the business is relevant. That may depend on anything from sharper page copy to a simpler next step.
There is also a useful side effect. The work that improves conversion often improves the whole business presentation. A clearer value proposition helps sales conversations and search engine understanding.
This does not mean abandoning PPC or SEO. We still need visibility. But more traffic is not always the fastest route to more business. Sometimes the better answer is to waste less of the traffic we already have.