What are the most difficult challenges for conversion optimization professionals?

Any CRO strategy's success hinges on research being the nucleus of the activities. User research manifests in qualitative (user testing, surveys, etc ) and quantitative (a/b testing, analytics, etc.) The best way to understand your audience is through focused research on YOUR users and YOUR audience

We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want - Eric Reis. So "understanding" them, not just listening, or responding, or speaking to is rule number 1. The ways to do this are implicitly and explicitly. Both have their flaws and both have their advantages, so like any other good sit on the fence marketing answer of "it depends", it's about doing both in equal measure.

The easiest way to understand any audience is to simply interview them. This can be done in communities or talking to customers direct one on one and asking them questions that get them to reveal what matters to them. If people focused really hard on the user then the need for heatmaps and search engine optimization simply fades away.

Be the master of every data set that you can get. Then spend your time analyzing them in-depth and map all of the pain points that your audience have.

Reviews and Competitor's Research and Analysis acts like a 1st aid in this process. Understanding the product, its features and benefits, what problem does this solve and what value does this hold for the end users, is the most important thing to do before any optimization process. In depth research on what do the customers like, hate & expect from a specific product and who are benefitting the most by addressing & incorporating these can be a great approach, because learning through other's experience is the shortest possible route to success.

Creating a good value prop requires more than just design. You can have an underwhelming design but a good copy could get the results you need. If you are not good at copy, don't be afraid to hire a professional or get your team to contribute on copy. If it comes to testing multiple messages, make them different from each other than your AB split tests will yield a clear winner. The best way to gamify this is to let people predict the winner before the data comes in.

One of the most overlooked parts of any website are combining design within the content. If you see a high ranking website, pay attention to all the details including headers, lists, images and CSS. The more you can dress up an article or blog post, you begin to remove the mental roadblocks people have when it comes to consuming content. This effort is rewarded with higher sales and more time spent on site which likely will affect SEO.

Improving your website is a journey. Don't think that a conversion rate optimization audit once every couple of years is the perfect route to take. The best CRO teams are improving their website incrementally all the time, running lots of experiments throughout the year. This work will never be done. You cannot create the perfect website, especially as consumer expectations are changing all the time.

There's also a very wide gap between testing, and running good, valid tests. It's far too easy to drag down user experience as part of poorly coded experiments and then never see uplift. Or, see uplift and then when you implement it properly it's not got a similar impact.

Always base your decision on the results from the A/B testing. That is the only way that you know that you are implementing something that benefits your company.

One of the danger elements in a CRO programme is not having other teams onboard. You need input from all relevant stakeholders to drive a successful programme from developers to implement to all layers of management as champions. Without management onboard, you won't have the support to make the necessary changes, will have site ideas implemented without testing and will have unrealistic expectations put on you. Without development support, you risk having quick fixes of successful changes being implemented via your testing tool, with the impact on site performance that that brings.

As a CRO professional, having a strong network of other professionals around you will allow you to keep abreast of the latest thinking and ideas. Attend conferences and meetups. I also recommend a subscription to Baymard to understand their latest research and have access to their decks of reviewed websites.