Digital marketing has some interesting synergies.
Boost your social media followers and you’ll probably get more email subscribers. Keep nurturing that email list and you’ll probably get more social media followers.
But sometimes, the synergies are so closely interrelated it becomes hard to separate the discrete strategies involved.
Such is the case with conversion rate optimization (CRO) and search engine optimization (SEO). If you can use both in a complementary and functional way, you can see amazing results.
But does it make sense to think of them as two sides of the same coin?
Or is it better to keep your CRO and SEO efforts separate?
Contents
CRO vs. SEO: The Intricate Relationship
Let’s start by examining some of the key aspects of CRO and SEO.
SEO is a complicated strategy, in part because there are 14,000-some ranking features to wade through.
Yeah. It’s a lot.
The general aim is to boost your visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs), thus increasing brand visibility and web traffic. Ultimately, the goal is to get more people on your website.
We don’t have time or space to review every single ranking factor, but these tactics are primarily responsible for most of your SEO results:
- Content creation. The heart of SEO has long been considered to be content, and for good reason. Content helps you achieve several goals simultaneously, optimizing for specific keywords, catering to users, and promoting your authoritativeness and expertise. Both onsite and offsite content are important in this regard.
- Keyword research and optimization. If you want your strategy to be successful, it needs to have strategic direction in the form of valuable target keywords. These correlate to search queries made by your target demographics, allowing you to fine tune your targeting and cultivate better content.
- Interlinking and navigation. To a lesser extent, you’ll also need to consider building links within your site and perfecting your site navigation. This facilitates better user experience and allows Google to better understand the relationships between your pieces of content.
- Technical onsite SEO. Your website also needs to be polished from a technical perspective. It needs to perform consistently and reliably, and it needs to be optimized for mobile devices, but this is only the beginning; there are hundreds of little details to consider in this area.
- Overall user experience. Google rewards websites that fulfill user needs. Accordingly, the highest-ranking websites in SERPs tend to be those that offer the best overall user experience. In other words, you need to give your users what they want in a way that pleases them. Thankfully, this also works in your favor.
- Backlinks and social signals. The higher your authority is, the higher you’re going to rank. So how do you boost authority? The short answer is through backlinks and social signals. Earning citations to your content, getting your brand mentioned, and otherwise building your popularity on the web can all help you make your website more visible.
CRO has a slightly different focus. Strictly speaking, it doesn’t care about how many people are visiting your website; instead, it cares about making sure the people who do visit your website are more likely to take a meaningful action, such as buying a product or signing up for your email list.
CRO includes:
- User research and analysis. In the CRO field, everything starts with user research and analysis. You won’t be able to persuade anyone to take action unless you understand how they think and how they make decisions. There are some gold standards that are basically universally applicable for conversion optimization, but no two audiences are going to be persuaded by the exact same tactics.
- Overall user experience. User experience also matters from a conversion optimization standpoint. If your website is finicky, confusing to navigate, or otherwise “off,” you’ll be hard-pressed to get people to buy your products.
- Landing page optimization. CRO heavily prioritizes the optimization of landing pages and other priority pages of your website. Specific tweaks include rearranging elements for visibility, tweaking headlines to be more appealing and persuasive, and even demonstrating social proof to push audiences in the right direction.
- Calls to action (CTAs). You’ll also need to work on your calls to action (CTAs) if you want more conversions. The art of CTA optimization is a nuanced one, so it takes a lot of experience and expertise to do this successfully.
- AB testing. The best performers in CRO are the most active experimenters. Experiments, like AB tests, help you ferret out which variables are most important for your audience, so you can gradually inch your conversion rate higher. It’s hard to tell exactly which CTAs, photos, and selling points will land – so practical experiments are the only way to get the objective data you need.
Already, you can see that these strategies have some common ground. If you want to be successful in SEO or CRO, you need to have a thorough understanding of your audience and you need to serve them with a quality user experience.
Additionally, you can see how CRO and SEO are somewhat codependent. An excellent conversion rate doesn’t mean much if you don’t have many people visiting your website, and all the traffic in the world won’t matter unless you have a way to convert that traffic.
Still, there are some major differences between the two, especially when it comes to philosophy and approach. If you want to perfectly optimize for SEO, you’ll need to cater to search engines – and some of the changes you make in that respect could compromise the value of your pages from a CRO perspective.
As you can imagine, there are advantages and disadvantages to treating SEO and CRO as indivisible.
Why Consider CRO as Part of Your SEO Strategy?
Why should you think about CRO as part of your SEO strategy?
- Overlapping optimization goals. Guess what? SEO and CRO both require that you create good content. In fact, there’s a lot of overlap between SEO goals and CRO goals. Because search engines care deeply about user experience, mastering the art of user experience can help you in both areas simultaneously. If you have a good understanding of both strategies, you can implement tactics that work for both.
- Time/cost savings. Because of this unique relationship, bundling SEO and CRO has the downstream effect of saving you both time and money. Instead of paying separate teams or separate people to tackle these marketing niches, you can have the same people and the same experts tackling both simultaneously.
- A holistic approach. Because there are so many considerations in the field of digital marketing, marketing teams have a tendency to become siloed over time, especially in larger organizations. This is problematic, because everyone in your marketing department should be aligned with the same goals and the same vision. Treating CRO and SEO as deeply interrelated means preventing these teams from becoming too isolated from one another – and increasing the likelihood and effectiveness of collaboration between these teams.
- Mutually beneficial information. In each respective field, it’s possible to generate information that’s useful for the other. For example, in your CRO testing, you may find that a specific word or phrase is particularly appealing to your target demographics; you can use this information to find new strategic keyword targets for your SEO campaigns. Likewise, traffic patterns from your SEO campaign can help you devise better CRO tactics. This mutually beneficial information stream gets enhanced when you use these strategies together.
- Goal maximization. The ultimate goal of most websites is getting as many people as possible to convert. SEO achieves only half of this goal, while CRO achieves the other half. In this abstract sense, it’s only reasonable that you should use both in conjunction with each other to achieve the final goals of your website.
Why Not Consider CRO as Part of Your SEO Strategy?
Of course, there are also some reasons why you might want to keep CRO and SEO strategies separate.
- Competing efforts. SEO and CRO aren’t always perfectly synergistic. In fact, sometimes your pursuits in one strategy can cause conflicts with the other. Including more focal keywords in your landing page might help it rank higher, but it might be distracting to users. Pushing a focal CTA for your CRO strategy might be very persuasive, but it’s not going to help your landing page attract backlinks.
- Blurred lines. Treating these strategies together can also result in some blurred lines between them. If the two strategies are somehow in conflict with each other, how do you resolve the problem? If user dwell time on the page is aberrantly low, is that an SEO problem or a CRO problem?
- Experimentation problems. Experiments, like AB tests, can get muddied when you pursue two different types of strategies simultaneously. If you make several tweaks to a web page to help it rank higher and achieve more conversions, and you see a noticeable uptick in total number of conversions, to what change would you attribute the gain? Notably, making tweaks one at a time and gradually can help you resolve this issue.
Best Practices for Using CRO and SEO Together
If you do decide to use CRO and SEO together as a singular marketing unit, these best practices can help you see better results:
- Understand the differences. It’s fine to bundle these strategies together, but in the abstract sense, they have different goals and considerations. You need to be able to recognize these differences and understand them if you want to achieve the best possible results in both fields.
- Rely on objective data to inform your tactics. There are some subjective considerations to bear in mind when it comes to things like optimizing for user experience. However, you should base most of your decisions on objective data. If you don’t have a concrete reason to make a change, don’t make it.
- Conduct frequent experiments. Perhaps the best approach to both SEO and CRO is an ongoing series of quick, objective experiments. The more experiments you run, the more data you can gather and the more little optimizations you can make. Accordingly, you should run separate SEO and CRO experiments very frequently.
- Tweak gradually and iteratively. When you make changes to a page of your website, tweak gradually and iteratively. If you change too much at once, it’s going to be hard to pin down the root cause of any increases or decreases you see in your KPIs. Similarly, it’s going to be hard to discern whether it’s better to focus on SEO or CRO when these goals are in conflict with each other.
- Identify the strategic purpose of every page. Every page of your website needs to serve a very specific purpose. Some of them are going to be more focused on inviting and incentivizing traffic. Some of them are going to push specific user behaviors, such as exploring more sections of your website. Some of them are going to be mostly focused on securing conversions. And of course, it’s possible to have hybrid pages designed to both attract and convert traffic. What’s most important is that you can identify the specific strategic purpose of each page, so you can balance your SEO and CRO efforts accordingly.
- Prioritize user experience above all. What might be the most important best practice is prioritizing user experience. User experience represents the biggest area of common ground between CRO and SEO, and it’s important for your website even if you completely disregard CRO and SEO strategies otherwise. When in doubt, make whatever decision is going to make your users happier; Google and the users themselves will both reward you for it.
Online marketing is hard to get right.
We understand.
SEO, CRO, and about 100 other acronyms can be major thorns in your side… that is, unless you have a digital marketing partner dedicated to your success.
If you’re looking for a way to improve your marketing results, or if you just need some strategic direction, Link.build is here for you. Contact us today for more information!
Tim has spent more than two decades in organic online marketing, working with some of the most well-recognized online brands in scaling their content marketing campaigns.
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