In digital marketing, traffic generation is only one side of the coin.
If you want to cash in on your efforts, you must also deploy conversion rate optimization or CRO tactics that monetize your traffic.
Believe it or not, CRO actually a process that starts as early as doing keyword research for your SEO and content marketing efforts. If you want to attract visitors who are more likely to convert into paying customers, you need to sprinkle your strategy with buyer keywords that are indicative of commercial intent.
Once you have identified these keywords, the bulk of your CRO will be spent on a content development strategy around them, which you can outsource from the gig economy as you focus on your core business.
Sounds pretty straightforward, right?
Unfortunately, there’s more to CRO than meets the eye.
In order to unlock maximum website conversions, you need to make sure visitors get an outstanding user experience on your website.
This includes protecting your website and the data of your customers against the possibility of cyber-attacks.
Where Cybersecurity Steps In
To further shed light on the role of cybersecurity in CRO, let’s take a closer look at its actual benefits:
More Uptime
It’s not rocket science: if your website is experiencing downtimes, your profits would also inevitably dip.
A distributed denial of service or DDoS attack is designed specifically to bring your site down. It utilizes a network of infected devices or a botnet that overloads a website’s server and denies access to legitimate traffic — hence the name.
The good news is, advanced DDoS protection is one of the staple features of cybersecurity services like Bulletproof. It works by filtering and diverting all malicious traffic to mitigation platforms that can handle the massive network load.
Aside from the short-term revenue loss, extended downtimes caused by a DDoS attack can also disrupt the indexing of your website, which could potentially lower your website’s search engine rankings.
Of course, your hosting service provider is a key player in maximizing your website’s uptime.
While most of them would promise an uptime rating of around 99 percent, not all of them can truly deliver.
What you need to do is to constantly monitor your website’s uptime with a tool like Uptime Robot. Only then can you be sure that your web hosting solution is doing its job and not compromising the growth of your website.
Build Buyer Confidence
Always remember that no online conversion could ever occur if users don’t trust the brand on the other side of the transaction.
You wouldn’t just hand over your hard-earned cash to a complete stranger online, right?
To build buyer confidence, it’s your job as a brand to address the concerns that prevent them from committing to a purchase decision. This includes uncertainties regarding the safety of a transaction from a cyber security standpoint.
According to statistics, 17 percent of online shoppers would abandon their carts because of concerns about payment security. To address this, an e-commerce business can showcase security badges that can give users the reassurance they need.
It’s akin to leveraging social proof to win the trust of your consumers, be it in the form of a customer review, testimonial, or user-generated content. The only difference is, rather than getting the vote of confidence of users, you are presenting a seal of approval from authoritative services.
You can acquire trust seals from payment gateways like PayPal and or use Shopify’s free POS credit card reader .If you implement SSL encryption, which you should, you can also acquire a seal from companies like GeoTrust along with a “secured” icon and indicator on your website’s URL.
Lastly, don’t forget to include trust signals in your emails if you promote products and special offers to a list of subscribers. Your email signature would be a good place to include these elements, be it a payment gateway seal or a return guarantee.
Increased Website Performance
Other than site down times, cyber-attacks can also drastically reduce the performance of your website.
This can negatively impact website conversions in two ways. First, a sluggish website can snap a customer out of the buyer journey and force them to look elsewhere.
Statistics show that 40 percent of users won’t hesitate to leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load.
In other words, your website could be losing nearly half of your prospective customers just because it wasn’t fast enough.
Again, DDoS attacks are among the top culprits for sluggish website performance — alongside malware infections and hacked accounts, which enable hackers to mess with or steal data from your website’s backend.
The second reason why cybersecurity affects conversions is because website performance is officially recognized as an important ranking factor by the gargantuan Google search engine. This leads us to the next and final conversion-increasing benefit of airtight cybersecurity.
Performance as a Ranking Factor
It’s been widely known that a website’s loading speed directly affects its search engine rankings in desktops as well as mobile devices.
Remember, search engines like Google are all about providing users with an excellent experience. They do it to encourage visitors to return to them whenever they need information served fast.
That’s why, as much as possible, they only want well-optimized websites with updated, relevant content on their top results. Google even offers a free tool—PageSpeed Insights—to help website owners make their website run as smooth as butter.
This is the sole reason why any ongoing SEO campaign should include performance optimization as a priority. And in addition to following the recommendations provided by PageSpeed Insights, you can also maximize and maintain your website’s speed by bolstering your cybersecurity.
Finally, attaining higher rankings not only improve conversions by pumping more traffic to your website.
The higher you rank in search engine results, the more authoritative your brand image looks to your target audience. This will make it easier for them to be perceptive of your value offers and push through with a transaction.
Conclusion
To be fair, almost every single facet of an online business is related to CRO — from content marketing to SEO. It just so happens that the roles of cyber security are often underestimated and unappreciated.
Now that you know the actual benefits of cyber security on website conversions, you know have knowledge that most of your competitors don’t. Use it well, be patient, and good luck!