SEO Vs CRO: Which Works the Best For Your Website?
Many people confuse Search engine optimization (SEO) and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) as the same. But it’s far from the truth.
For many, SEO is sufficient for a website to not just gain organic traction but convert for your business. It may or may not work for your business website but CRO’s role can not be ignored either.
And over the course of reading the blog, you’ll be able to discern
- What Makes SEO and CRO Important for Your Website
- How SEO and CRO Are Interrelated
For instance, Amazon website ranks so well for many keywords on search engines and is equally convertible as well. For a query, pure leather shoes for men, you can find Amazon ranked on the first page.
Do you know the average conversion rate on Amazon stands at a whopping 74% for Prime members and 13% for customers who have not subscribed to Prime membership. This is a testament to the amount of work that goes behind making Amazon a popular choice of the customers.
What is so great about the Amazon website?
- Meaningful content or product descriptions
- Customer reviews
- Product videos
- Clear images
- Safe and secure transaction
- Brand value
On the contrary, there are competing websites that are ranked on the 1st page of the search engine results page but are not converting into a real business. What does that say?
This means you may have got the SEO right but that’s not sufficient to convert website visitors into sales leads for your products.
Let’s find out what exactly makes SEO different from CRO:
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process that entails improving the number of website visitors taking desirable action such as subscribing to a newsletter, purchasing a product so on so forth.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process that improves the online presence of a website while improving the ranking across popular search engines.
They may both sound one and the same thing but you can find the difference just merely looking at the website. Let’s discuss the two different scenarios:
1. Optimising for SEO and not CRO
Every website aims to rank at the top of the SERPs. However, it is not a static process but a dynamic process where your website is continuously optimized to serve the user intent and rank better on popular search engines.
Google’s search algorithms are changing and thus what works for your website SEO today may not be relevant after the next update. So you have to be vigilant to how your website should be optimised to match the search engine guidelines.
Meta title Tags & Description: Optimize the meta titles for the targeted keywords of the website while the description provides relevant information for users. This is what meta tags look on a search engine result page
Website Content: Draft high-quality website content that answers most user questions. Also, you’ve to optimize the content for selected keywords as well. A balance between user information and SEO keywords must exist to gain high-quality organic traffic.
Optimise Site Speed: Studies suggest that more than half of the visitors will likely bounce off to another website if the page does not load in 2-3 seconds. So, fix the website speed to soar the user experience.
Strong backlink profile: Create good quality backlinks from websites with good page and domain authority.
Structured data markup: It’s a code that Google bots crawl, index, and display in a rich snippet. This helps search engines better understand the webpage’s content ( text or video).
Site Security (SSL Security/HTTPS): Every website visitor expects a safe and secure browsing experience so that their information is not manipulated for some malicious act. Google also ranks websites better with an SSL certificate and has HTTPS rather than HTTP.
All these steps are integral to attracting more visitors to your website, but what if the visitors could be more result-driven? This means they visit the website for aimless meandering that adds nothing valuable to your business.
Does this justify why your website must also be optimized for conversion? But before we determine the same, let’s study the other scenario.
2. Optimising for CRO and not SEO
Your website is a digital representation of your business. Whether you have a visitor in your office or on the website, generating sales is your ultimate goal.
Optimizing your website for conversion is all about winning the trust of visitors in a way that they are convinced to make a concrete action on your website. Be it sharing their email id, inquiring about a product, or possibly making a sale online, you’ve prospective customers on your website.
Here’s a catch. Every customer is not equal, and they can be at the top, middle, or bottom of the sales funnel, so your website design should be in congruence with the user intent.
For instance, if the visitor is looking to purchase a black shirt and happens to visit your website, the landing page is bland and flooded with content about the manufacturing process.
Will you blame the visitor for abandoning the website? Not exactly because the visitor did not get the information they sought.
Ideally, the landing page should have
- A short product description
- Product measurements
- Price
- Shipping details
Additionally, any lucrative offer on the page would have just done the trick.
So, if you have observed such behavior on your website, optimize the web page for conversion following the methods as mentioned earlier:
A/B Testing: This is a popularly used technique that allows you to compare and examine the performance of the two versions of the product page. Avoid enforcing UX tactics that confuse visitors from finding the most important information.
Heat Maps: What do visitors like on your website? What they click or ignore, such critical information is shared in heatmaps. If you wish to find what works and does not work for user engagement, heatmaps are the right solution for your website.
Call to Action (CTAs): Adding relevant content to your website is important, but what to do with that information? Add a clear and compelling call to action to web pages so visitors know what to do to fulfill the purpose.
Focus on targeted keywords for your website: You do not have to optimize every page. Focus on the pages optimized for targeted keywords for SEO. Examine the same pages on content, images/videos, and CTAs.
Do you know 68% of small businesses don’t have a documented CRO strategy? This speaks of the lost opportunities for many companies to generate sales revenue. Whether or not you’ve invested in SEO, every website visitor must have a meaningful experience to generate value for your business.
Couple of website SEO and CRO
We have witnessed that SEO and CRO are important for your website to be a profit center of your business. They have their own set of benefits surpassing the conservatism, and some website owners have to try one or both.
Look at the image of a typical Ecommerce conversion funnel wherein out of 1000 website visitors, only 5% are converted into customers. Every website loses potential customers across the sales funnel, but you can improve the conversion rate with consolidated SEO and CRO techniques.
Let’s see how SEO and CRO are interdependent and affect each other:
Poor website speed is a significant factor, so even if you have an excellent CRO-driven landing page, the odds are that visitors will dump your website in a few seconds.
Poorly designed landing pages are a major turn-off for website visitors. Directing website visitors to such pages does not serve any purpose. That hampers user engagement and conversion rate as well.
A CRO-optimized page is more likely to receive quality links from 3rd party websites. And building a strong backlink profile benefits your website SEO.
A website that ranks at the top of the SERPs and is optimized for conversions allows users and search engines a complete experience.
While SEO draws people to visit the website, CRO makes the journey easy for visitors to convert into customers for your business. So, they are like two sides of the same coin, and the existence of one without the other is not a sustainable solution.
Let’s think practically; businesses need website visitors and those who convert their visits into money. And that’s why site owners aim for high-quality organic traffic to improve the lead conversion rate of your website.
The bottom line
SEO and CRO are buzz words often interchangeably used in digital marketing. But they are different and bring unique benefits for your website performance.
Most importantly, any website owner expecting a high ROI should encourage both SEO and CRO for websites.
