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If you’ve been pondering these questions, we don’t blame you. Countless brands are on the hunt to discover more ways to connect with their audiences based on their unique interests, needs, and behavioural patterns.
But here’s the deal.
When we’re talking about providing the most impact, both SEO and CRO are equally crucial. While SEO strategies bring users to your website, CRO practices help convert these visitors into paying customers. In other words, it’s not wise to have one without the other.
If you’re eager to strike the right balance between the two, stick around to learn how to work with these potent sales and marketing strategies.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of boosting your site’s organic traffic by applying principles based on search intent.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) means consistently reviewing your website performance metrics and applying these valuable insights to encourage more sales. CRO aims to improve the percentage of visitors that take a specific action you’d like them to take on your site — otherwise known as “a conversion”.
CRO relies on a deep understanding of:
TL;DR: While SEO seeks to increase visibility and generate organic search traffic, CRO aims to convert that traffic into leads and customers. Obtaining the proper balance between the two can considerably impact your authority score and rankings as well as help you build qualified leads and customers.
Now that we’re clear on the differences between SEO and CRO, let’s take a look at some strategies you can implement to improve your organic traffic. After, we’ll review how to apply CRO principles to help boost your site’s conversion rates.
Center all of your content and web copy around your target customer’s searches to provide a personalized experience and encourage higher rankings.
Here are some quick and easy checklists you can use to implement this strategy:
Optimize your blog, knowledge base, resource center, and help center content by:
Optimize the content on your home page, site pages, and landing pages by:
Take search intent up a notch by focusing on providing tremendous value to your target audience in your content.
How?
Personalize your brand tone and messaging to your ideal customer, weave in actionable steps and takeaways, and demonstrate key concepts with informative media, such as screenshots and infographics.
For additional brownie points, consider including pull quotes from industry experts, case study snippets, and real-life brand or customer examples. Don’t forget to back up your stats and data with reputable sources. We also highly recommend scanning your content using a plagiarism checker like Writer or Grammarly to catch unwanted plagiarism mistakes.
If you have a brick-and-mortar business or provide local services, it’s pivotal that your website makes it clear to Google and local customers that you’re nearby and ready to serve.
To drive conversions and increase visibility in local search results, focus on optimizing your website and content for local SEO. This involves incorporating location-specific keywords, creating location pages, optimizing your Google My Business listing, and offering same-day delivery.
It’s also important to work with a developer to include local business schema, so search engines can pick up which cities you’re near to, what your address is, and other important business data, such as your hours of operation.
For instance, take a look at the following website by Watermill Flowers, a local flower shop in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
In this example, Watermill Flowers’ site incorporates location keywords relevant to local searches in its city, such as "Fort Lauderdale florist", "Fort Lauderdale floral delivery", and “Fort Lauderdale flowers”.
It also includes pertinent location data, such as the store’s address, phone numbers, and business hours.
Now that we’re clear on how to drive traffic to your site, let’s focus on how to turn that traffic into leads and sales. Follow these tips to encourage higher website conversions.
Prevent rage-clicking and high bounce rates by paying close attention to factors that decrease your website performance and speed. You can pinpoint these using heat maps, website performance tools, and by conducting A/B tests.
For instance, if a heat map shows rage-clicking patterns on a section of your home page where you have high-resolution graphics, this may signify that your visuals are taking too long to load.
In this case, you could compress the images and sacrifice quality for site speed. Or, you could ask your designers to use vector graphics instead. Vectors not only retain their clarity and quality regardless of device or size, but they also take up minimal space which speeds up their load times.
Grab your visitors’ contact information as soon as possible by encouraging them to sign up for your email newsletter.
Place this call-to-action (CTA) button at the top or near the top of your home page to capture user attention when they arrive on your site. You’ll also need to give them a reason to sign up, such as offering a generous discount on their first order or promising specialty, high-value content you don’t publish anywhere else.
If you’re using another CTA button or CRO strategy at the top of your home page that’s working well, consider including your newsletter sign-up form at the bottom of your site, as business strategist Marie Forleo does in the above example.
Before adding your opt-in form, plan a segmented email campaign series so your leads and customers will automatically receive relevant emails according to which marketing funnel stage they’re in after signing up.
If you’re unsure how to set up segmented campaigns, reach out to a full service email marketing agency for support. An email marketing agency can help you build automated welcome email campaigns, lead nurturing campaigns, and sales-targeted campaigns to help you drive higher conversions.
Make website visitors want to stay a while by creating a seamless and engaging user experience (UX).
Here’s a quick checklist you can use to revamp your site’s UX:
And there you have it! Today we discussed the key differences between SEO and CRO and how to leverage both of them to create maximum sales impact.
Ready to put these insights to good use? Save this article for reference and be sure to set aside time to monitor your analytics, SEO ROI, and UX metrics. Then, apply what you learned to course-correct and make adjustments as needed.
And if you’re looking for an easier and quicker way to track forms and monitor checkout analytics, look no further than Zuko. With Zuko, you can start tracking data in minutes without a developer. You can also get data on each form field to understand when, where, and why visitors abandon your forms
Want to give it a spin? Get started today — no credit card required!
Ioana Wilkinson
Ioana is a Business, Digital Marketing, and SaaS content writer for B2B brands. Born in Transylvania and raised in Texas, Ioana has been living the digital nomad life since 2016. From Barcelona to Puerto Vallarta to her new abode in windy, Oklahoma City, you’ll never know where Ioana will head off to next.
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