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5 Steps to Improve Your B2B Website Conversion Rate

Alistair Fairweather
15 October 2024
Conversion Optimization
conversion rate optimization made simple

If you’re a marketer in B2B technology who has been tasked with figuring out how to “increase conversion rates” or perform “conversion rate optimization,” you’re in the right place! We’ll cover what it is (and isn’t) and some common opportunities for improvement.

If you’re looking for more advanced content, we recommend checking out our conversion optimization collection of blog articles.

What is conversion rate optimization? 

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the act of intentionally designing prompts or cues to convince a website visitor to perform the next step in the buying sequence. A conversion can take place at any point in the buyer journey and may be as simple as clicking a button to “learn more.”

When optimizing a web page, it’s important to meet visitors at the most logical point in their buyer journey and design prompts for them to take a reasonable or likely next step. For example, someone who lands on a blog article because of a keyword search about an educational topic is more likely to want to learn more about related topics than request a demo.

CRO is not about attracting the most visitors, getting the most clicks, or generating the most leads. CRO should be laser focused on attracting the right audience for the brand and moving the right targets through your demand generation funnel. The goal of CRO is attaining a very high quality of conversions, not just quantity.

Why spend time on conversion rate optimization?

To be proficient at CRO, it’s critical to properly set up conversion signals in your analytics platform and understand what “normal” engagement for your brand looks like across page types. It’s also vital to set up segments to understand how your preferred audience is engaging with your website.

If that sounds hard, we get it! However, your website is the hub at the center of your go-to-market flywheel. Everything marketing and sales does leads people to your website and it’s mission critical to know:

  • How well your target audience is responding to your message
  • How engaging your content is
  • If prompts are causing confusion or people are avoiding specific CTAs
  • How well your calls-to-action (CTAs) are structured in terms of visibility

Marketing can use advanced website insights to refine their profile for an ideal customer, figure out which pages have the most effective messaging, and create the content that clearly resonates with the right audience. These are certainly the foundations of any go-to-market strategy.

Please note that poor page speed performance or technical SEO issues (for example, a confusing navigation menu or page structure) can cause people to disengage from your website and negatively impact statistics even if your web page is beautifully designed and has the right content. Check your page speed here and feel free to contact us if you need help diagnosing any issues.

5 Common B2B Conversion Rate Opportunities

Now that we have a clear definition for CRO and understand that analytics (along with qualitative feedback) must guide your optimization journey, let’s look at where we most frequently see opportunities for improvement across B2B technology companies.

1. Begin with a plan.

Information architecture is where we begin each website project after we’re confident we understand the unique goals and requirements of each client. It’s a step that is often skipped, which can lead to unintended chaos. Read this article to learn more about our information architecture process

A simplified checklist would resemble the following:

If you haven’t created a conversion plan for each of your core pages by reviewing how the information is structured, determining a single purpose for the page, and optimizing around a primary CTA, now is a great time to get started. As a best practice, we always recommend that any page should have a single, primary call-to-action CTA.

2. Switch your focus to the right audience rather than brute acquisition.

It’s easy to look at topline metrics and assume that your website is healthy if traffic is high. The question we should always ask next is, “Is it the right traffic?”

We recommend creating audiences or segments that help your team quickly see what portion of website visitors are in your target market. This can be difficult with privacy-first design and GDPR, but if your visitors accept cookies and you have a solid de-anonymization tool, you have access to firmographic data on at least a percentage of your visitors.

If your analytics platform isn’t wired to identify company data, create segments using behavioral signals. For example, we know that someone perusing your career pages probably isn’t in the market to also purchase your product. On the other hand, solutions pages or demo video views are fantastic signals that your visitor is likely in market.

Narrowing your reports to show your team the data related to the audience you most care about can reveal whether your engagement is higher or lower than the accounts you care less about or if you are attracting the wrong audience altogether.

3. Make your CTA clear and logical.

Once you understand whether the right audience is engaging with your web page, it’s time to analyze which interactive elements people are choosing to engage with (if they are engaging at all). 

A very common issue is not having a clear CTA on the page. This will likely manifest in the data as a page with moderate to low engagement duration but a high exit rate (meaning they leave the website entirely instead of engaging with other content). 

We also see pages with many CTAs that aren’t differentiated in a meaningful way. These pages may have multiple items clicked, but a very low conversion rate. We always recommend choosing a single CTA per page to focus on to minimize confusion.

a website with a single, strong cta

The final CTA issue we’ll mention here is asking too much too soon from your visitor. Pitching a demo request to a person reading an article about conversion rate optimization is a giant leap. Suggesting alternative content (like this article on optimizing your blogs for maximum engagement – see what we did there? 😂) is a much more probable way to engage those same visitors.

4. Make your content engaging. 

Everyone knows that engaging content performs better. However, what works for a blog (you can read our engagement optimization tips for blogs here) isn’t what works on a home page or a solution page. Each of these pages indicate different levels of engagement and intent, and it’s important to remember that when selecting the most relevant information for the potential buyer visiting that page.

In general:

  • Page speed and performance across devices can make or break your first impression
  • Unique design that stands out from competitors is ideal unless it distracts from your story. Busy animations or long videos should be avoided.
  • People read headlines. They rarely read anything else. Particularly if the headline isn’t showing them what they want to see.
  • Don’t try to cram everything onto one page. Optimize your content to appeal to people in the appropriate stage of the buyer journey.
  • Don’t try to be everything to everyone. If your product can handle edge cases but your core use cases cater to a different audience, focus on your primary audience. You can have offshoots or different pages for the edge cases, but you should otherwise focus core pages on your largest buyer group.

To figure out if your page is resonating with your audience, filter your insights by the appropriate audience to check performance over time. If you’re attracting a high volume of people but only a fraction of your traffic is your ideal audience, it’s time to update your SEO strategy for that page and rethink your content. Another cause for this mismatch is a paid campaign with poor targeting or a mismatch between what the ad promises and what the page delivers.

chart emphasizing target audience over other segments

If you’re attracting the right people but they spend little time on the page and don’t click the desired CTAs, this is also a sign you need to rework the content and messaging.

5. Lead Volume < Lead Quality

A beautiful ad and compelling copy can still motivate people to request a demo or contact sales. These leads are only worth chasing if they’ll actually buy your product. This requires the right profile and alignment between what marketing is pitching and what sales is selling.

If your sales team complains about lead quality, marketing should listen. It’s an opportunity to re-evaluate your targeting and verify that messaging is consistent across departments.

Other things standing in the way of generating enough (high quality) leads include an unclear buyer journey, subtle CTAs, off-putting messaging or design, and poor speed performance.


Your website is your brand’s hub. All of your go-to-market activities should drive visitors to your website. Ensuring a website supports the company’s key objectives by attracting the right audience and propelling them forward on their buyer journey is critical for any business to succeed.

Because the market is always shifting, your website should constantly be updated. CRO is never done, and when done well, it can be highly technical. If you suspect your website isn’t performing like it should but aren’t sure where to start, contact our team for a free assessment.

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