With an upsurge in the number of online users, it has become essential for businesses to hold a strong online presence. Even, this number is increasing every day, and hence, businesses have to deliver a variety of information to serve the unique needs of customers with different behavioral patterns.
Encircling all this is the fierce competition among businesses to drive traffic to their sites. In simple terms, businesses are competing with each other to secure top rankings in the search engine results. It is because only then online users will be able to discover them easily.
Though there are fantastic search engine optimization strategies available, which businesses can use to gain top rankings, this does not always guarantee increased profits or revenue. Once visitors get engaged to your site, the next challenge is to ensure that it definitely makes a purchase. This calls for a distinct range of strategies, known as CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization.
Most of the times, marketers are struggling which one to select between CRO and SEO. If you too are experiencing the same issue, then the best solution is – An integrated approach of SEO and CRO strategies.
But before we learn how you can practice an influential and impactful CRO and SEO combined strategy, let’s dig into some important details, which are necessary for a better understanding.
Understanding CRO:
CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization involves site optimization to offer potential customers a smooth, hassle-free, and uninterrupted experience. Its core focus is to result in a conversion. Most of the times, people relate conversion solely to monetary goals, but conversion can actually result in customer engagement on a broader scale.
It can result in:
- A purchase
- Addition of an item to the cart
- Subscription to email list or newsletter
- Downloading of the content
- Giving feedback or comments
- Participating in a survey or poll
- Content sharing on social media
- Upgrading products or services
- Availing an offer or discount
- Other KPI which is valuable to the company
With these and more such ways, people can engage with your website. Hence, your website must be well-prepared for all of them. CRO is an ongoing process, which any business must use to ensure their site is functioning in the best possible way.
This technique focuses on reducing friction of potential clients so that they can take actions on your website or webpage, which you desire. With CRO, it becomes possible to reduce all sorts of problems and inconveniences, which a potential customer might face when he visits your website. As a result, your site is able to deliver a personalized and rich experience to them.
Hence, with CRO:
- You can test problematic areas of your site
- Conduct qualitative as well as quantitative research to gather data related broken parts of your site
- Generate a conversion roadmap for your site
- Check your online competition and inform you about your competitor’s website
Understanding SEO:
While CRO is all about optimizing your website for user experience, SEO is related to optimizing your website for search engines and their relevance. SEO aims to optimize your website in a way that it can impress the search engines. This way, your site is able to secure top rankings in the search engines, like Bing and Google.
Once your website gains higher rankings in SERP, it increases the chances of your website receiving more traffic through organic search results. In a brief, SEO is all about focusing on various aspects of your site, like:
The quantity of Traffic – Higher rankings can bring more potential traffic to your website.
High-Quality Traffic – SEO is also about working on your website to attract visitors who would be keen to purchase your services or products.
Earn Organic Results – You can increase organic traffic on your site through SEO.
Boost Paid Results – Ads constitute a major part of SERPs and can bring immense paid results to your website.
As far as Google is concerned, it gathers details about your site content and ranks it based on the digital index. The index is then stored within Google’s algorithm, which it uses to present online searchers with the best results based on their preferences and actions. With the use of personalized and targeted SEO tactics, it is possible to boost your online presence and appeal search engines as well as visitors.
CRO and SEO – Prominent Differences:
It is clear that though CRO and SEO have certain things in common, still both of them have some major differences. This is what that makes both of them two different techniques.
The focus of SEO is on increasing the number of site visitors through organic means. The way your site visitors behave and engage with the website does not fall under SEO.
Contrary to this, CRO focuses on improving the conversion rate of your website by prompting visitors to take desirable actions on the site. It does not generate a direct impact on the overall number of users visiting your site.
Another key difference between SEO and CRO is that CRO involves conducting A/B testing. This is done to determine the specific version of the landing page, which delivers the highest conversions.
CRO does not rely on on-page or off-page link building. Also, keywords don’t play a major role in CRO, which is the case in SEO. But one thing is that CRO has a direct impact on revenue. Also, any changes in the search algorithms do not affect CRO, which also makes it an amazing technique to increase business revenue. As far as SEO is concerned, you need to make necessary changes as soon as an algorithm update is announced.
CRO and SEO – Relation between the Two
One thing important to highlight is that there are numerous major differences between SEO and CRO. But despite this, the two of them have a strong relation.
On a very first note, you can perform SEO and CRO strategies and gain success only if you have a user-friendly site design as well as quality content. It is essential to consider various aspects of your site like site architecture, page speed, responsiveness, navigation, and more to ensure that your CRO, as well as SEO strategies, deliver the desired results.
Moreover, the two of them are highly dependent on each other.
If your website is not receiving enough traffic, which is possible only through SEO, then your CRO tactics will not yield ideal revenue. Similarly, if you are driving bulk traffic to your website and web pages but your site pages are irrelevant then this will lead to lower conversion rate and engagement. Alternatively, a well-optimized web page for users is more likely to earn backlinks. It is because users will perceive it as useful and valuable content.
Another key similarity between CRO and SEO is that both of them focus on enhancing the bounce rates of the web pages. A web page with a higher bounce rate is not attention-grabbing to the visitors. This implies that visitors will leave the site without performing the desired action. If the process continues for long, then there can be a drastic decrease in the volume of traffic received by your site because of low search engine ranking.
Most importantly, SEO and CRO are interlinked to each other as both these strategies work to further strengthen your CRO efforts. Similarly, if you optimize your website for conversions then there are higher chances that it will perform better with your SEO strategies.
CRO and SEO – Combining the Two
Eventually, every business aims to gain high conversions and earn huge profits. This is possible only through a powerful online presence and higher rankings in the search engine. Hence, the best approach to achieve this is a combined approach of CRO and SEO.
Here learn the best ways to combine both these concepts in order to create a strong strategy for your online business.
Best Ways to Interlink SEO and CRO:
Begin with Simple Measures:
A lot of issues can be avoided by keeping your strategy simple. The very first way to do this is to reduce the numbers of links on every page. This will reduce distractions and impart more value to relevant links. Furthermore, you must filter out your purpose and include visuals and content with a clear call to action.
It is best to offer audiences concise information and offer them engaging content that can encourage visitors to spend more time on your site. Most importantly, keep your website navigation menu simple, specifically those that can serve the ultimate goal of increased conversions.
Focus on Users First:
Just remember, your users are your top priority. Your CRO and SEO strategy must focus on improving the user experience. Offering users with informative and engaging content is a great way to boost your search engine rankings. Your content must offer a solution that satisfies your user’s search intent.
Try enhancing the overall journey of your customers by offering them with a seamless and enjoyable experience overall.
Create Attention-Grabbing Yet Clear Headlines:
Everyone on the internet is looking out for stuff that is easily available and understandable. Being a business owner, your prime focus must be to ensure that search engines, as well as your potential customers, understand what your website or webpage is talking about.
A great way to achieve this is by creating clear and relevant headlines. It must give a clear understanding of the content available on your webpage in just a glance. Optimize the headline for SEO. Your Meta title must also match the headline on the webpage. It is best to include a targeted keyword in your headline.
Target the Relevant Keywords:
It is not important to gain top ranking. More important than this, is to rank for appropriate keywords that also attract your potential customers. For this, you must have a proper understanding of your target audience and search queries raised by them. Using relevant keywords will help you target a specific audience.
Follow a Focused Approach:
A focused approach highlighting your service or product to a specific segment generates lucrative results. Your SEO strategy must revolve around your site’s core competencies that will help search engines to target your site. Similarly, a site design revolving around CRO will help increase conversions to a great extent.
Use Social Proofs:
Social testimonials and reviews are proofs and they carry huge weight. Most importantly, it helps to build your website authority and credibility among visitors.
Reviews and testimonials can greatly influence mobile, Google map, and local searches to a great extent. Hence, do include some great testimonials from your clients on your website’s homepage and service or product pages to get desirable results.
Optimize Web pages:
Pages of your website like checkout and cart are less likely to receive traffic from search engines. It is therefore not much necessary to optimize these web pages. Contrary to this, pages like FAQ and blog of your site are expected to receive high traffic. Make sure such pages have high-quality content that is useful to readers. Also, the content must be optimized for keywords you intend to rank for.
Curate User-friendly Design:
Even search engines want to offer the best experience to the users. For this reason, they give preference to websites delivering rich user experience.
Your website must have ease of navigation and mobile-responsiveness. You can use free or paid online tools to test your website’s performance for various aspects to ensure that your site holds a strong visitor’s attention.
Include a Call-to-Action:
With a call-to-action button, it becomes easier to inform visitors about possible actions that users can take on your site. Though it is essential to drive conversions, this must not be limited to only certain pages. Hence, include a CTA button in almost every webpage.
Maintain the Balance:
CRO and SEO must function in tandem to curate a powerful strategy for your business. Your website can succeed only if it receives a balanced level of traffic and conversions.
Final Words – SEO and CRO Works Great Together
When used strategically and in a complementing way, SEO and CRO can reap great results. They can boost your website’s efficacy as well as drive in lots of sales. So, use the above-mentioned ways and plan an integrated CRO and SEO approach to achieve the best results for your website.