CRO as a part of SEO

When we promote our business on the Web, we face a lot of tasks. Mostly, they need constant control and fast reaction. To not go insane and save your time experts advise dividing marketing into subcategories such as SEO, SMM, CRO and others. Nevertheless, any subcategory is conditional. Thus, we have a situation when all well-built actions are necessary on all of the directions at once.

Besides that, there are often situations when influence on one marketing subcategory causes changes in another one. For example, when the traffic amount of your website grows, the number of social networks visitors will become bigger as well. Or when the number of visitors grows, but the conversions drop sharply.

Motivation is very important in marketing. A lot of things depend on your ultimate goal and the way you form it, especially its achievement. There is a huge difference between “I want to increase conversions” and “I want to increase user’s loyalty”. Nevertheless, the increased loyalty may entail a gain in sales. Thus, we can ensure that user’s loyalty is more important than conversions. Of course, this statement is a bit exaggerated because things can’t be that simple and univocal. But there are a reason and a consequence. From their correct defining the success of company mostly depends.

Ideas of site promotion using CRO

As a marketing tool, CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is aimed to satisfy user’s needs. If a user comes to your website and finds what he needs then your work is done well.

This is what Google thinks:

“Landing pages are kind of like cars – make sure they’re tuned-up properly, and you’ll likely get better performance and savings out of them down the road. Get more mileage out of your landing page by making it easier for visitors to make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or do other things you want them to do on your website.”

CRO makes us look at a website from human’s point of view, to think and analyze how a web page should look like to satisfy user’s needs.

Don’t forget to consider few metrics that are very important for CRO: Total Amount of Conversions, Conversion Rate, Bounce Rate, Exit Rate, Average Time on Site, Average Pageviews per Visit. All of them let you evaluate how much users like your website, if it’s convenient for them and relevant to the query they enter. If you work on making the named features better, you will see how users’ trust rises. It is the well-known rule, if a site is trustworthy, its authority will grow. So now we can see positive influence of CRO on SEO.

Problems that can be solved

If you only care about SEO metrics it can play a low-down trick with you. There is a quite common problem when users visit a website but there are no conversions. This is clear sign to start using CRO methods. The issue can be caused by inefficient content and attracting wrong audience. To fix this problem you will have to find the reason that caused it.

1Check the queries your website is found by. You’ve tried hard to get to the TOP by using the massive amount of keywords, but what kind of audience do they bring? Maybe people who visit your site don’t want to buy anything. In this case, you should seriously reevaluate keyword list and organize a campaign aimed to customers attraction.

2Determine those pages which bring you the most number of conversions and concentrate your efforts on them. You can improve the quality of content for a user to make an action. As these pages are the most important, you must treat them the best you can. Equally important to know where your visitors find you as it can be the critical factor of marketing strategy. If you know that social networks bring the most amount of visits, then you should work harder exactly in this direction.

3Another important moment is received data analysis. Let’s pretend that you decide you need to make the number of conversions higher. So you’ve made a research and analysis of the current situation. You should consider that there is great part of returning visitors that must be excluded from the general statistics. If you don’t do that, it won’t be possible for you to estimate objectively the whole picture.

4Don’t overuse the design of your website. Especially if it disadvantages its functionality. There are so many successful websites that can hardly be called beautiful. For example, Amazon. There is a need in thinking about convenient usage because not always colorful and attractive menu is handy to use. You’ve cared about users, but the menu needs to be cared about as well. Any changes in functionality, redesigning, a content update will cause a lot of troubles and inconvenience. Don’t complicate the task, the simpler your website structure, the better its work.

CRO methods that work for SEO

CRO is a pretty powerful marketing tool. But by virtue of the fact that it doesn’t presume getting quick results, it is often underestimated. Besides that, most of the tips may not seem noteworthy and that’s why they are unused. Nevertheless, CRO has a lot of tips that really work.

Analyse page’s content

First of all, you should work on content. Don’t rush to write articles optimized for keywords. Your ranking will go up, but not for a long time. Think about your visitors, what they want to get, what words they use to describe their needs, use obvious CTA statements.

1The best-ranked pages are the most relevant to the users queries. Evaluate your content from the point of user’s expectations. What customer do you want to get? What needs may he have? What are his interests and likes? The answers to such questions will help you to create useful content.

2Always listen to your audience and take into account what they think. There is a need to use their professional slang and style of presenting information. Try to use their language to make a dialogue with them. It will make you closer to your visitors.

3Website content must answer your potential visitor’s questions. If these questions always appear in your users’ heads, there is a point to answer them.

4Calls to action and catchy slogans are integral parts of CRO. They help to increase the visibility. For example, McDonald’s slogan “I’m lovin’ it” is recognizable. Thanks to it they have run so many successful SMM campaigns. Now it is a strong key phrase that McDonald’s is associated with.

Content isn’t just a text

Content isn’t just a published article with words, but also images, videos, pages design in a whole.

For the last time there has been the boom of visual content. People don’t want to read but they are willing to see attractive pictures with understandable text. Such type of content is difficult from SEO viewpoint but often proves its worth. Anyways, we can rarely find only one type of content on a single page. As a rule, there is a short text added to video or audio post. Usually, it contents the main message of a post.

The conversions value can involve the number of video views. In this case quality of the content should be brought in the first place. You shouldn’t ignore video styling which includes text as well. For example, overuse of advertisement can distract a lot and cause slow loading of a page. The quality of video itself influences loading speed.

Management of user’s actions

If you want to make a user to do certain actions, you need to look at your interface in details. The usability is a very delicate subject. Without special knowledge, it is hard to make a right decision about where the certain button should be. What size or color is better to choose? What text should be written? Even the most qualified specialists often do different tests. But certain rules of a web page structure are constant.

1The most important information should always be set on the top of a page. People usually don’t scroll till the end of it. Even if they want to see full details, the decision about it is still made on the top of a page.

2Don’t play with a disposition of familiar buttons. For example, the button “Add to cart” is usually set in the top menu. Most of the users will look for it there. If you decide to move it, a user won’t be able to find it. Thus, the deal won’t be completed just because your customer can’t find where he puts selected products.

3Empty space is very important. Emptiness helps visitors to concentrate on the main information of a page. If you place big button surrounded with free space, then people will definitely notice it.

3Don’t make your audience think! Steve Krug wrote a book concerned with this subject. Nothing has changed since that time. If you waste your time on searching for something then you’ve chosen a bad website. You will probably leave it and never come back. Any visitor makes a decision if a website is good enough and can satisfy his needs in only a few seconds. That’s why it is very important to give a good impression at a very first time.

Website Structure

Optimization of the sitemap is a part of work for a CRO specialist. Also, it is quite important for SEO. If visitors leave your website because they can’t find what they need, then it will be hard for you to get strong and high positions at any of search engines. It is proved that excessive depth has a negative influence on visitor’s experience.

Even if you have a huge web portal or an online store with millions of products this rule still works for you. Moreover, it is even more strict. Internet users can be lost in the ocean of information, that’s why you must remember about being friendly to them and provide an easy navigation.

As for SEO, a site map is the thing that helps Google bot to find all your website pages and to index them faster. So there is no doubt in its necessity.

Avoid conflicts!

The main stumbling block for SEO and CRO is A/B testing. The thing is that while the A/B testing is conducted an amount of terrible pictures with duplicate content appears, painful rewriting of articles starts, etc. But Google loves your website already and you don’t want to lose positions that you have at the moment, do you?

Anyway, using of CRO methods themselves don’t threaten websites positions directly. In the most cases there are no reasons to be afraid to get negative attitude from search engines towards duplicate pages that can be found at the end of A/B testing. Google often uses this kind of test. So it expects such actions from webmasters.

After all that is aforesaid we think no one has doubts that your end-consumer is your king and god, the main goal of your business. We just wanted to remind you that there are simple ways to get higher positions on Google and they will give you long-term results after all. Avoid conflicts between CRO and SEO. Work in both directions and you will get results sooner. Of course, it seems easy to get a lot of traffic to a website and only then think about how to get more conversions. But what is the point in doing two jobs instead of only one? Think about it, maybe you will have more problems by choosing easier and simpler, at the first sight, way.