Recently updated: May 25th, 2023
The two most effective and popular digital marketing techniques of today’s time are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). When you run a business, it’s no use of focusing on either just SEO or CRO. Instead, you should include both SEO and CRO in your digital marketing strategy to achieve desired results. Today, we will discuss how SEO and CRO work together to help scale your business. So, if you want to perfect your SEO for higher conversions (a.k.a. lead generation), you will find this guide very handy.
- Introduction to SEO & CRO
- Importance of SEO & CRO
- Role of CRO for Better SEO Results
- Advantages of SEO & CRO Working Together
- Key Elements of CRO in SEO
- How to Make SEO and CRO Work Together for Better Results
- How CRO & SEO Working Together Helps in Lead Generation
Introduction to SEO & CRO
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization, in short SEO, is the ongoing process of optimizing your website and its content. The purpose of SEO is to rank your website higher and make it more visible to users when they search for something that relates to your business.
For example, you provide a waterproofing service in Florida and have a business website that is well-optimized for search engines. When someone uses Google Search, Bing, or any other search engine to search about waterproofing in Florida, there are higher chances that your website will appear in the top results and the user will click on it.
However, if your website is not well-optimized for SEO, it is least likely for your website to appear in the top search results and get the users’ attention.
With a well-thought SEO strategy, you aim to improve the ranking of your website on search engines so that it becomes more searchable, discoverable, and visible to your potential customers. The higher the ranking of your website is, the higher the chances of your website getting clicked and visited.
But your SEO work doesn’t complete here. You need to keep working on your SEO strategy to maintain higher rankings and to entice the visitors to explore your website for longer; otherwise, it can be quickly replaced by competitors’ websites that are being optimized continuously. With being said that, acquiring the top positions on the first page is not a piece of cake. It takes commitment and dedication and months of hard work to improve the ranking of a website.
What is CRO?
CRO, an acronym for Conversion Rate Optimization, is a more focused approach of experimentation and testing to generate more leads from the targeted audience. When a visitor completes a desired action on your site, such as signing up for a newsletter, taking part in a Quiz, or purchasing a product, it is said that the visitor has converted into your customers. Hence, the process is referred to as a conversion.
While SEO focuses on improving the ranking of your website and bringing more visitors to your website, CRO focuses on converting those visitors into interested consumers who engage with your website and complete desirable actions. Its main target is to convert potential customers as soon as they arrive on your website, and hence, it largely deals with landing pages and other elements that increase your conversion rate.
How to Calculate the CRO of Your Website
Divide the number of visitors who complete a specific desirable action by the total number of your site visitors. Then, multiply the resultant number by 100 and you will get your conversion rate.
Importance of SEO & CRO
With the rise of digital age and the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, more people are becoming accustomed to seeking advice online, doing shopping online, and interacting with online businesses. Consequently, more and more businesses are relying on their digital presence to find new clients and boost their revenue. This has made it paramount for a modern business to have a website that ranks on the top for relevant queries made by potential customers and to have a smart strategy to convert site visitors into actual customers.
Doing simply SEO and not focusing on your conversion rate simply means your site is attracting visitors but they are adding no actual value to your business. You are getting only exposure, which is important but not sufficient when you are looking for ways to earn money.
On the other hand, if you are not focusing on SEO and devoting a lot of time to creating an effective CRO strategy, it is also not going to work. For testing and experimentation (which is the main part of CRO), you will need data on how your site visitors explore your website, where they click, which pages they are exploring more, which pages are getting the least attention, which CTAs are getting more clicks, if they are scrolling your site till the end, whether they are abandoning your site quickly, and a lot more.
Thus, when your site is not appearing in the top results and not getting clicked by many people, you are not going to have the data that is needed to test and experiment with your CRO strategy. Therefore, for businesses, it is critical to work first on SEO and then CRO to achieve what they seek.
Role of CRO for Better SEO Results
To get better SEO results, you need to dig deeper and gather more data. For that, you need to develop an understanding of a user’s desired experience through their search behavior and available data sets. This is what allows you to fuel your marketing funnel with a higher number of potential buyers.
When you work on CRO, your main goal is to convert every website visitor based on the stage of their buying journey. When an Internet user visits your website, they could be at any point in their buying journey. They might be looking for some information, exploring their options but not ready to purchase anything, comparing the prices of products they want to buy, or have the intent to buy a product/service.
CRO allows you to boost the value of every website interaction and acquire more leads that ultimately result in more revenue. When your SEO strategy starts working and more site visitors engage with your website, it acts as a signal for search engine bots that your website is worth visiting and people who are coming to your website are finding it helpful and useful. Hence, the ranking of your website improves further and you see better SEO results.
Still, didn’t get it? Google’s ranking algorithm shows those websites on top in search results that are found beneficial for its users. Therefore, in the beginning, you will improve your ranking through SEO, then you will work on CRO, and when users start engaging more with your website in any desired way, it will, in turn, bring more traffic to your website.
Thus, if done the right way, CRO plays a big role in improving your SEO results.
Advantages of SEO & CRO Working Together
To achieve desired outcomes for your business, it is important to work on SEO and CRO together. Now, let’s take a look at the advantages that you will enjoy by combining the strategy of SEO and CRO.
- Improve Your SEO Results
As we discussed above, SEO helps implement CRO properly and CRO, in return, indirectly increases the targeted traffic to your website. Thus, by polishing your website and optimizing your conversion rate, you will notice a significant boost in your SEO results.
- Enhance Consumer Experience
While doing SEO, you focus on improving user experience (UX). With CRO, you take this approach one level further as you work on elevating the experience of your consumers. CRO involves testing different elements on websites, such as CTA buttons, landing pages, product pages, service pages, and long-form content.
Based on the results of your tests and experiments, you optimize your website and make it more consumer and user-friendly. Therefore, by working on SEO and CRO together, you continue to refine the experience of users that come to your website.
- Gather Key Consumer Insights
By integrating CRO with SEO, you gain key consumer insights that you won’t get through SEO alone. CRO helps you learn what works and what doesn’t work. With a CRO strategy in place, you can collect information about the preferred language of customers, graphics, and messaging that helps draw in more conversions and the ones that don’t help convert. When you have consumer insights in your hand, you can prepare future strategies better and improve your content significantly.
- Expand Your Customer Base
When you also focus on CRO along with SEO, you are going to benefit from an increased customer base. Every business ultimately wants to bring in more customers and retain them. This is what makes a positive difference in the bottom line of any business account. With the combination of SEO and CRO, you will not only be able to retain existing current customers by tracking their shopping behavior and analyzing their interactions but also gain future customers. In fact, it’s the Holy Grail for those businesses that are looking forward to branching out and expanding.
When you are able to expand your customer base by retaining current users and attracting new customers through SEO + CRO, you are going to see a significant jump in your returns on investment.
Key Elements of CRO in SEO
When implementing CRO along with your SEO strategy, there are some key elements that you should work on. Some of these are:
1. Creating CTAs within Blog Posts
While CTA buttons can be easily added to a blog post, it is better to create text-based CTAs within the blog post. Most often, big, flashy CTA buttons and banners fail because readers develop banner blindness.
2. Adding Lead Flows on Your Blog Posts
Another CRO element that you can include on your site is a lead flow. Lead flows are specifically designed pop-ups to attract attention and offer value. Depending on your offer, you can choose a slide-in box, pop-up box, or another type of lead flow element. Lead flows are highly converting pop-ups as they are known to amplify your CTR substantially.
3. Testing Landing Pages
Landing pages are standalone web pages created especially for marketing or advertising campaigns. They are called so because it’s where visitors land after they click on an email link or ads from Google, YouTube, social media, or similar places. Since it’s the landing page where a person becomes a lead for your business or an existing lead starts engaging more with your brand, CRO strategy focuses more on testing landing pages via A/B testing to identify the best designs and content features and optimize them.
4. Create Conversion Pathways
Not all site visitors are there to explore or seek information. Some visitors want to talk with your sales rep right away. These high-intent leads can easily become marketing qualified leads (MQLs) if you create smooth pathways for them to take instant actions. For that, you can create a couple of thoughtfully designed web pages and compelling and clear messaging along with eye-catching CTAs.
5. Using Automatic Emails
Now, with marketing automation software, it’s easier to know when someone views the pricing range on your website or adds products to their shopping cart. If that person happens to leave your website without converting, you can send emails with a link to book a meeting appointment or to a shopping cart as a reminder.
Apart from this, you can also add a live chat feature to connect with visitors in real-time to offer support or guidance, leverage retargeting techniques, and create blog posts on topics that are trending and can entice visitors to convert.
How to Make SEO and CRO Work Together for Better Results
Consider SEO and CRO as two digital marketing techniques that complement each other. You can use them as a multi-step process. First, begin with SEO and as soon as your website starts getting traffic, then start working on CRO as well. CRO works better and gets more accurate as you gather more data. Ignoring CRO means you are not getting any value even if your site is visited by thousands of users a month.
So, work on both SEO and CRO in a parallel manner. Most businesses see the sales funnel as a three-step model: 1) Acquiring potential visitors, 2) Pushing them to take some action, and 3) Converting them.
If your sales funnel is also like this, then you are not going to see the desired results. In reality, a visitor may visit your website regularly but may take months or even years before converting. Thus, you need to fine-tune your SEO and CRO techniques.
SEO is the first step for CRO and you need to keep working on it. With a solid SEO strategy, you can instill trust among visitors for your brand. Meanwhile, with a solid CRO strategy, you can ensure a conversion eventually.
To make SEO and CRO work together, you need to find a balance. There is no cookie-cutter approach. While some businesses may get better results with a 60/40 split, others may reap more benefits from the 70/30 split approach. So, work with your SEO team closely to find the balance and create SEO and CRO strategies.
How CRO & SEO Working Together Helps Generate Leads
Remember one simple thing. With SEO, you will just improve the rank of your website and drive more organic traffic to your website. It doesn’t get you more leads. If you want to get more leads and boost your revenue, your SEO strategy needs to be combined with a CRO strategy. Only this way, you will reach your conversion goals.
For any business, what matters most is that their visitors are taking actions that contribute to their short-term or long-term business goals. What do these actions look like? They might be:
- Signing up for your newsletter
- Purchasing a subscription
- Requesting a quote
- Buying a product or hiring a service
- Booking an appointment
- Taking a quiz or survey
When your SEO and CRO strategies work together, it will help you polish your brand by focusing on what works for your business, which marketing campaigns are doing better, what kind of messaging your targeted audience responds to, and what remains ineffective. With CRO and SEO going hand-in-hand, you can be more intentional with your content, landing pages, marketing campaigns, advertisements, and CTAs.
Besides, you can also identify gaps in your marketing funnel and fix them. Let’s say you have a product or service page that is receiving a high amount of traffic. This looks great on the surface but when you dig deeper and see a very low conversation rate, it’s a red flag that there is something wrong with the page. It might be the messaging, lack of information, inactive button, or anything on that page. You need to find the problem that is turning away your potential customers and then fix that.
When your website is fast, user-friendly, secure, and has every key element optimized for conversion, it is certain that you will start seeing spikes in your lead generation. With thoughtful planning, you can convert more of those leads and hence, increase your revenue as well.
Conclusion
Integrating SEO with CRO is a holistic approach to generating more leads and boosting business revenue. To make them work together the best way, you need to find the right balance between them. Your SEO agency can help you identify the gaps in your SEO strategy to improve rank and traffic and help get more leads and conversions through CRO integration. Always remember that your business website has a huge potential to drive more customers to your business. However, if the website itself is obsolete, unattractive, or designed without planning, it’s time to first redesign your website and then optimize it for search engines as well as conversions.
If you are ready to generate more leads and boost your business revenue through SEO & CRO or have any queries, please feel free to get in touch with our experts.
