CRO and SEO should go hand in hand. However, it is not always so simple. What Google rewards as perfect optimisation often goes again designs and content that converts. An example is content.
There must be sufficient content for a page to be understood by Google, but not so much that a potential customer is not put off.
Drive Sales:
Data-Driven SEO
No CRO
If your traffic is low, conversion ratios and optimisation may not be high on your list of priorities. This is an error. Google clearly states ‘focus on the user, and all else will follow.‘
CRO
Working out your CRO
- Traffic 1000 visitors
- Of these 1000, 10 visitors enquire (buy)
- CRO is 10 enquiries/1,000 web visitors * 100 = 1%
- Your conversion ratio is 1%
- See improving conversions
Lead Gen
How much is an enquiry worth?
If we increase your CRO to 2% then we have created 120 new enquiries per annum, no additional traffic required.
Data-Driven SEO
Focus on the user, and all else will follow.
Google explicitly instructs that an SEO strategy that centres on content and less on code is more likely to succeed.
One of the advantages of a clear set of monthly CRO tasks is keeping your content plans and SEO work focused. You will have noticed many of your competitors writing new blog posts, often with seemingly no thought or plan other than it might be interesting to a user.
This type of content creation has little CRO thought behind it.
A better use of SEO time would be to study a list of the site’s top-performing pages. Then, once clear goals have been added to Google Analytics, it is straightforward to start tracking a user journey and how the website converted that user into a customer.
Once the journey is mapped, we can see where the drop-off was. Example questions that can be examined include:
- What did other visitors need to know that we did not tell them
- What possible questions did they have that we did not answer
- Would we get a better conversion rate if we added an extra incentive? If so, what?
- Are there easily identifiable exit pages that we can improve?
- Do we need to have a more professional-looking design/graphics?
SEO is no longer solely about coding content with the correct H1 and H2s or creating suitable meta titles. It is about improving the user journey. All of the sales words and USPs we might use for a customer are, in fact, part of optimisation.
SEO without CRO is like a shop without a till.
More on Google and 10 things we know to be true.
