SEO Isn’t Enough—You Also Need a CRO Strategy

“SEO is merely the tip of the digital marketing iceberg.”

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the bread and butter of any smart digital marketing plan, but it shouldn’t be the only thing you’re doing. In fact, SEO is merely the tip of the digital marketing iceberg.

If your SEO strategy is increasing overall site traffic but not translating into conversions, something is wrong. It typically means that users are getting lost or bored on their journey through your site.

That’s where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in. The goal of CRO is to increase the percentage of your site visitors that perform a specific action, which can be anything from filling out a contact form to purchasing products through your online store.

Your SEO and CRO strategies work closely together to secure customers. How? After your SEO strategy successfully attracts customers to your site, the baton is then passed on to your CRO strategy, which provides a clear, logical journey for the user to achieve conversion. Plus, paying careful attention to your conversion rate gives you a more quantifiable understanding of your return on investment.

Ready to begin building your CRO strategy? Here’s what the process will look like:

1. Gather data

Developing a CRO strategy requires you to put yourself in the shoes of your site visitors. You can do this by leveraging a platform like Google Analytics to track and analyze the current flow of your user journey. Another way to gain an understanding of your users’ experience is just to ask them — customer surveys are ideal for gleaning this type of fine-tuned data.

Your overarching goal should be to make it as easy as possible for your users to convert, so you need to consider all the factors that may be acting as roadblocks to this goal. Just a few of the questions you might want to investigate include:

• When a user lands on a page, where do they click first?
• What pages do they navigate through to ultimately convert?
• If they don’t convert, at what point do they abandon their journey through your site?
• What are my site’s friction points? Friction typically occurs when a user becomes confused or frustrated with your site.

2. Develop a hypothesis

Knowing the answers to the questions above allows you to make data-driven hypotheses about how to improve the customer journey of your site. To do this, you must first organize and evaluate all the data you’ve collected from your surveys, user tests, and observations in Google Analytics.

3. Conduct A/B testing

Once you’ve gathered all the data you need, it’s time to put your hypotheses into action through A/B testing. What is A/B testing? It is a method of comparing two versions of a piece of digital content to determine which one performs better.

There are many things that A/B testing can target, from call-to-action (CTA) text and landing page length to newsletter subject lines, social media copy, and more. In the case of CTAs, you might do A/B testing to examine whether “contact us” or “get in touch” is more effective at leading to a conversion. Or you could test to see whether users are more likely to click a CTA button if it’s at the top of a page or the bottom of a page.

Typically, A/B testing should run for several days, sometimes longer depending on the amount of traffic your site currently receives. How do you know when you’ve found a winner? It’s simple — the tested item with the higher conversion rate wins!

4. Repeat the cycle

After you’ve identified and implemented your new data-backed conversion strategy, it’s tempting to sit back and just enjoy the ride. But the internet is changing every day, and so are your visitors. Just like SEO, CRO is a long-term commitment — you can never truly stop testing, hypothesizing, or making improvements to your site.

Are your SEO and CRO strategies working together?

A strong SEO strategy can do wonders for enhancing the findability of your site and increasing traffic, but it isn’t always enough. You need a CRO strategy to seal the deal. At SiteCare, we develop SEO strategies that drive more visitors to your site and encourage higher conversion rates. Contact us today to get started.