Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is an integral part of your business although, possibly, you might not have heard a lot about it. Emphasis is often placed on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and it does have its place. However, SEO is not the same as CRO. While SEO does a lot to increase your visibility online, CRO is what turns those leads into sales.
Therefore, this article aims to show the importance of CRO in your business. When applied strategically in combination with SEO, the results are far-reaching. Keep reading to find out more.
So, What Is Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate is the percentage of on-site visitors that complete an action you desire them to take to the total number of visitors to your website at a given time.
Naturally, the actions you want your visitors to take will depend on your goals. It could be any of the following:
Feedback
Subscription
Surveys
Making a purchase.
It is possible to attract tons of visitors to your site each day yet they do not take any significant action. When this happens, it means that your conversion rate is low. CRO helps you analyse your website visitors, their behaviour and the factors that lead to their taking certain actions, or not. In other words, CRO helps you understand your website visitors and how to optimise your site so that they take the desired action.
Furthermore, when you pay attention to your site’s CRO, it affects the user experience. The experience your users have when they visit your site will determine if they choose to return.
What Is Search Engine Optimization
SEO, on the other hand, is the process of improving the ranking and visibility of your website on the natural engine results, allowing you to attract quality traffic. If your site is well optimised for search engines, it gets you increased visibility in the search engine result pages (SERPs). This “free” and organic traffic is a good way to get leads. To learn more about SEO, you can check out this detailed guide.
What Differentiates CRO from SEO?
Interestingly, CRO and SEO are not at all the same. They are very different strategies, even though they can work in tandem for the benefit of your business. So, there are several differences between CRO and SEO. We’ve already mentioned that SEO helps you get traffic to your site, CRO, on the other hand, retains them and even turns them into customers or subscribers, depending on your goals. Below are some more differences between the two.
SEO gets you listed on search engines, getting more traffic to your site. CRO on the other hand, seeks to increase the number of visitors that take the desired action on your site.
CRO helps you understand user behaviour so that you can tune your site to adequately serve your users.
CRO also helps you know who your core customers are and how best to serve them.
The tools for both strategies are different. Whilst A/B testing is often used for CRO, it does not apply to SEO.
It is possible to engage and execute a solid CRO strategy on a limited budget, this is not the case with SEO, which requires a robust budget.
The success of SEO comes from building links offsite that will lead visitors to your website while that of CRO comes from onsite actions.
How can you combine CRO and SEO to work for your business?
To get the best result from your website, it is only ideal that you focus on both CRO and SEO because if you do not have website visits due to SEO, there will be no one to take action. Therefore, they complement each other. Here are some tips for successfully combining CRO with SEO for the growth and increased profitability of your business.
#1: Increase both
First, pay attention to your onsite optimisation. It is important to ensure that your site is ready to receive visitors. This means making sure your user experience is on-point and that your site addresses your readers’ pain points. Then work on ranking your site for search engines so that you can draw organic visitors for your keywords. So, increase your conversion rates as well as your search engine optimisation.
#2: Get all your pages properly optimised
The truth is that you have very little control over what pages your visitors are going to land on. Therefore, you should do all you can to make sure that all pages are well optimised. If you work on your pages to be sure they convert well, then you can confidently make use of SEO to drive organic traffic to your site knowing that any page can do the job of converting your leads.
#3: Have rich optimised content
No doubt, you would have heard about the importance of optimising your content for search engines. And, whilst this is all well and good, it’s of no use if that content is not also optimised for human consumption. So, we will say that you need to optimise your content for your readers; the real people who visit your website and who could potentially become paying customers. This is an important pillar of CRO.
The benefit of this is that optimising your content for readers usually tends to increase your search engine optimisation as well. This is a prime example of both CRO and SEO working together for the good of your business. Engaging in both SEO and CRO will greatly improve your online ranking, sales, and ultimately profits. Hence it is in your best interest to combine both for a positive impact.
How to Improve Both CRO And SEO of your Website
Finally, here are some easy to implement methods to help you improve the CRO and SEO of your website. By making use of these tips, you can quickly get both strategies to begin working for you.
Have a user-friendly website: let your visitors find it easy to navigate your website.
Put only high-quality content on your site: have useful content on your site, one that explains your brand in an easy to understand and engaging manner.
Use appropriate keywords and optimise the right pages: it helps if you optimise the blog and FAQ pages to boost your visibility.
Have a decisive call to action: this makes it easy for your visitors to take action by having a clear message in a visible spot. This could be a button or text, but it’s important to show visitors to your site the next step to take. This is a call to action.
Make use of A/B Testing: basically, A/B testing helps you to understand user behaviour and generates data on which of your pages, texts, images, etc., is the best performing.
Now, it is important to note that CRO and SEO do not always work seamlessly together. Yes, there are times when they conflict with each other or seem to be working towards separate goals. SEO work can impact negatively on conversion rates. Therefore, CROs and SEOs must work together to mitigate any negative impact on traffic and conversion rates.
