Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
As defined by Hotjar, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website. This action may be anything from scrolling through the entire page, filling up a form, adding a product to a wish list or buying a product outright. But at the heart of it is a meaningful action that the marketer desires the user to take.
Why do SEO and CRO complement each other so well?
There are three things you should know about your users to have the best user experience.
- First step: Find out what they want and need from a website.
- Second step: Focus on giving those needs, not only to convert but also to continue coming back as customers or potential clients of yours.
- Third step: Make sure everyone knows it.
While SEO increases the traffic to your website, CRO helps in making the results meaningful. For example, while SEO may help you rank for the keyword “buy black jeans”, a good CRO tactic will help you in increasing your sales percentages and reducing your abandoned carts or bounce rates.
You cannot have a strategy where the sole purpose of your SEO is to rank, regardless of the searcher’s intent for the query. This makes it important that the right keywords rank for the right kind of web pages. At the core of it, you need to answer user queries and satisfy the visitors.
Here are a few tips that will yield more from your SEO and CRO efforts, when worked on in tandem.
1. Boost page load time
According to Google, the bounce rate of a website decreases by 32% if it loads in between 1 and 3 seconds. Your site is like a car — if it does not start right away, people will leave you stranded and find something faster.
Many factors affect how consumers perceive your brand. One of these is page speed. If your page is too slow or clunky, then you can make an unprofessional impression which will turn off potential customers.
2. Utilize neurodesign to enhance the user experience
Neurodesign harnesses the power of psychology and neuroscience to create visually captivating digital products. It does this by studying people’s responses in different situations, like when they land on a website, and learns the kind of triggers that make them more likely to purchase a product.
For your business to thrive, you need more than just new visitors on the site. You need users who are engaging with what resonates best from their perspective. So, a clever design can help you retain visitors and entice them to act.
Related: 5 Tips for Choosing Your Next SEO Firm
3. Use dynamic content for more organic reach
With dynamic content, you can personalize your customer’s experience and maximize revenue by intelligently tailoring the website to user needs. This is possible because dynamic content responds based on signals such as in-session behavior, user data (e.g., location) and other similar characteristics — which means that each time a customer visits a page with these types of smart elements, the website will be able to provide relevant information about products tailored just for them.
This helps you nail the search intent every time a visitor comes to your site. From geo-specific recommendations to dynamic product listings, you show content that is sure to keep your website in your audience’s good books.
4. Leverage videos and visual elements to increase visit duration
Through research, Wistia found that pages that contained a video had an average time spent of almost 8 minutes while those that did not have one were only seen for just about 3 minutes.
How Google determines search engine rankings is a mystery, but there is evidence that they may be using dwell time as part of their equation. Dwell time is a measure of how long it takes for someone to return to the SERP after clicking on a link, and Google seems to be interested in tracking this data and putting it to use.
Bounce rate versus average time spent per user visit form the main metrics that can tell us about the dwell time of a website, so it is good to use videos to increase the time spent on a page.
Related: 7 Reasons Why SEO Matters for Every Startup
5. Create quality content along with long-tail keywords
According to Statista, about 95.88% of searches on Google have a query with four words or more. The people who make these kinds of searches tend to have higher levels of buying intent, which makes them perfect for targeting with quality content.
Long-tail keywords often predict when someone is getting close to converting. Having this knowledge alone will help give you an edge over competitors.
6. Consistently optimize web pages and blogs
The right content can mean the difference between visitors staying on your website and taking necessary actions as opposed to just browsing. Your words can verbally hook these visitors in and keep their attention, which means more of your traffic turns into leads.
So, you can always take user feedback, monitor your web pages and improve them or realign them based on user needs. This is an SEO tactic that will have a definite impact on your CRO.
7. Add strong and relevant CTAs
A call to action is an essential part of any website, the lack of which could mean losing connection with your customers. There can be design guidelines that need following, for you as a company and customer to recognize each other. Eye-catching and well-written CTAs will help optimize CRO while attracting more traffic back towards the products being showcased.
Overall, SEO and CRO go hand in hand. In a way, they are simply inseparable. The idea of bringing more traffic to your website and then filtering relevant visitors to take any action on your website is the funnel that has a direct impact on your ROI. In this funnel, the more targeted you can be from the onset, the more your profits. And that is what marketers care about.
This article is from Entrepreneur.com
