Conversion is the ultimate goal of all marketing techniques including SEO strategies, content marketing and others. What is the point of indexing your website, being more visible, or having many subscribers, if you cannot get people to make enough purchases from your website?
To fix this issue companies providing SEO services implement various techniques to drive the traffic and get conversions.
The statistics
Conversion is not easy to achieve. You can create a responsive website and provide fresh and engaging content. But conversion paths are always unpredictable. Even a conversion rate of 3% is difficult to achieve. 5% is a good rate. Only the most popular websites worldwide go anywhere near 10%.
What do we deduce from this? Even if 50 out of 1000 visitors make a purchase, it is a good thing. Now we need to find out how to make it happen. Of course we do not stop at 5% but let’s make that target our first milestone.
SEO foundations
SEO is all about lead generation and visitor engagement. It is about ranking the web pages high on all popular search engines. With increased traffic, you increase the chances of conversion. The rate does not matter at this stage. What matters is the number of conversions.
Factors common in SEO and CRO
SEO and CRO are two closely related concepts. There are some common factors. They are:
- Advanced CRM: Customer relationship management systems need to be intuitive and more focused on qualitative feedback than on quantitative reviews.
- Visitor empathy simulation: When you see many people leaving even after adding something to the cart, you need to look at things from their perspective. Of course retargeting is there. But you first need to find out if anything is wrong with the site itself.
- Impact marketing: Nobody buys cliché advertising anymore. Customers are smarter now.So create impact more with the help of impact marketing tactics rather than impress. Generate more loyal and active followers than numerous inactive leads.
- Content marketing: Content marketing and content SEO isn’t just about keywords anymore.The content has to be fresh, crisp, motivating. It has to be relevant and helpful. The click bait fad is over. A well verse digital marketing agency must be aware of these aspects.
- Brand image building: Search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization, both involve brand image building. With a strong and inspirational brand image, with a relatable theme for the brand, convincing people to buy your products will get much easier.
These are just a few factors that are common to SEO and CRO. These are primary factors that affect sales but they aren’t everything. We need to see how we can achieve both, SEO and CRO goals.
- Optimise page load time
Slow loading pages result in a high bounce rate. Even the search engines start noticing the time consuming nature of your website and your rank will start going down soon.
- Slow loading pages result in a high bounce rate. Even the search engines start noticing the time consuming nature of your website and your rank will start going down soon.Hence, you must be on a web host that offers 99.9% uptime.
- Make sure images load quickly even if they are of high quality. Use all the tools you need for that.
- Your website must be responsive. Have both, web and mobile compatible modes.
- Save data on cloud for faster data fetching.
- Use cookies to load information faster.
- Make sure your website is hosted on a platform with high bandwidth and storage.
Get your web developer to fix issues that could be delaying the page load action.
- Focus on content
This is where CRO and SEO meet each other and stay together.
- Create engaging headlines with targeted keywords.
- Content needs to be fresh.
- It needs to be coming in regularly.
- It need to be unique.
- It has to be relevant to the product being sold.
- You need to know where long content works and where short and crisp messages work.
- The content has to be simple and readable.
- Use a lot of infographics.
- Create helpful content so that people stay interested.
- Create engaging content and ask for feedback or opinions so that people stay involved.
Maintain customer relationships by catering to the comments in every thread.
3. Social sharing: Boost social sharing for every page. Landing page, home page, everything.Social sharing influences both, CRO and SEO. For SEO, it increases the website visibility which eventually affects the Conversion rate.
4. Give away information generously: Keeping the best or most valuable information for the end does not work anymore. You do not want to take a risk by annoying the visitors. Not only will it increase bounce rate if they found nothing useful in the top half of the page, but it will also reduce your website value in search engine algorithms.
Give useful tips and candid answers without holding back. This will increase credibility and fetch a better ranking. That in turn will lead to higher traffic, higher engagement, and higher chances of conversion.
5. Give only the important actions: People get confused when there are too many options. We are not talking about product modification options. The size, colour, style, and every feature of a particular product you sell, must be available. But if you put too many call to action options, the ‘Buy Now’ can start fading in the background. Keep the right balance of Call to action button for better visitor response.
Do not keep visitors waiting for the right content, do not play games. Don’t hide valuable information from the landing pages. Be as informative as possible. SEO and CRO work hand in hand to increase sales and sales rates.