Traffic is nothing without Conversion, Conversions are impossible without Traffic
[Free Takeaway Inside – Checklist to Strengthen Core Web Vital Scores]
Source – Moz
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) are ubiquitous terms used in digital marketing. While the terms are often used in isolation, SEO and CRO are closely interlinked.
SEO is a type of optimization technique to attract more organic traffic and drive visitors to your portal. On the other hand, CRO is the best way to optimize the value of your traffic and turn site visitors into leads or customers.
Just imagine that you are trying to fill a leaky bucket. SEO enables you to accelerate the flow of water into your bucket. CRO plugs the holes in the bucket to ensure that the water doesn’t go down the drain. In essence, both SEO and CRO work hand in hand to generate revenue for the business by maintaining a steady stream of site traffic and ensuring that visitors don’t leak out from your sales funnel.
Source – Wikipedia
Even if one of the optimization techniques fails to work, you may face the leaky bucket syndrome in your sales – with too much water draining outside the bucket or stagnant water level inside.
How SEO and CRO work together to maximize Traffic and Conversions?
Integrating your SEO strategy with your CRO strategy is a matter of understanding where they meet.
“A website is a receptacle for traffic and a machine for conversions. The SEO goal logically leads to the CRO goal of converting traffic into customers”
– Rand Fishkin
Here are some overlapping areas of SEO and CRO that can be integrated to develop strategies that improve each other’s strengths:
- User Intent
An understanding of the user’s desired outcomes through their search behaviour and available data sets empowers SEO experts to fuel the marketing funnel with volumes of low-cost potential buyers. At the same time, presenting communication and content in alignment with the user’s search intent can convince them to take action. In short, CRO and SEO dovetail each other by comprehending user intent and carrying forward the intent intelligence throughout the on-site session.
- Content Marketing
The primary goal of SEO is to optimize the website content to make the site search-friendly. On-page SEO changes include keyword insertion into headings, content expansion to cater to new search intent and technical updates to help the page appear in Google Rich Results. These changes increase the number of visitors landing on your website.
CRO further augments content optimization by constantly iterating, testing and refining your on-site content to deliver better results.
CRO experiments can be run on content to see which type of content along with placement and CTA elements elicit greater response and action. Thus, integrating CRO and SEO can provide access to relevant content that is identified as most effective in driving traffic and conversions.
- User Experience
Page experience is an important ranking factor in Google’s search engine algorithms. 88% of online shoppers abandoned their purchase journey because of poor UX. User experience (UX) is at the heart of both SEO and CRO.
Delivering a page with strengthened core web vital scores such as LCP (Large Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay) and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) can improve your ranking on SERPs. Besides, a good UX design that has been thoroughly tested for its usability ensures visitors stay on the site for a long time and move forward in their purchase journey.
Here’s a free download of a checklist to strengthen core web vital metrics and improve user experience
- Site Speed
The loading time of your site is one of the most critical — and at the same time, overlooked — elements of SEO and CRO strategy. A long page load time is the best way to make both humans and search engine crawlers leave your website.
It’s imperative to check how your site is performing and identify if there are any ways you can improve page speed. Even a one-second decrease in loading time can create a huge impact to help your site rank higher and perform better. If not, audiences are likely to abandon your site and move on to your competitors.
- Site Navigation
Links are the backbone of any SEO strategy. Search engines detest broken links because they make it harder for bots to crawl and index your site. Visitors also navigate your site by following links. However, when visitors stumble upon broken links, 404 errors or other navigational issues in your portal, it can lead them to forfeit their session. Providing a seamless browsing experience can result in a significant improvement in your SEO and conversion rates.
- Mobile Optimization
Just like traditional factors like internal links and backlinks, mobile friendliness is an important SEO ranking signal. Auditing your mobile site workflows is a great way to find areas that are preventing your mobile traffic from converting. Since mobile conversion rates are generally below half of desktop conversion rates, it pays to gauge your site performance on mobile screens to improve the mobile user experience.
- Security
Security is a foremost factor in fostering customer trust. Search engines consider HTTPS as a vital ranking factor for a website. If your site is plagued with security loopholes, doesn’t have an SSL certificate, or consists of instances of non-HTTPS URLs, it will negatively affect your ranking. Additionally, it’s a big red flag for visitors if your site throws up a warning sign in their browsers.
- Dwell Time
Site dwell time, or the timeframe that each visitor spends on your site after clicking a link on a SERP page, is known to have a positive impact on search positions. This is because it indicates the relevance and quality of a given result.
Not just that, dwell time is an important metric to track in order to improve conversion rates. The longer the visitors dwell on your site, the more likely they are to complete an action. Optimizing dwell time by engaging visitors with enticing visual elements in your site such as imagery, videos and catchy content can boost SEO and CRO efforts alike.
Ultimately, without CRO, painstaking SEO efforts may go in vain if visitors have a negative experience when they land on a page. Likewise, without SEO, CRO leads to an optimized page with no visitors or visibility. Thus, they must work together in harmony to maximize visitors, improve conversion rates, and increase revenues.
SEO and CRO together are more than the sum of their parts. Together, CRO and SEO create a seismic force that is virtually unbreakable in a company’s pursuit of higher revenue and profitability.
