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Increasing Your Conversion Rate for SEO Traffic - Video Summary
The journey your customer takes should be at the centre of your focus when it comes to increasing your conversion rates. This journey refers to the steps a customer takes, prior to engaging with your business up to the point where a conversion takes place.
If your business operates online, you could consider the journey your customer takes as beginning when they search for products that you sell.
Through online marketing or search engine results, they may discover your brand and take the desired action of making a purchase from you.
However, any digital marketer knows that the experience of conversion action is rarely that simple.
Once a potential customer interacts with your business online for the first time, there are various elements of any given website that will encourage them to make a purchase or not.
They are influenced by everything from your homepage to your SEO tactics, the user experience you provide or the responsive design of your website.
A well-researched website that creates valuable content, focuses on SEO, and creates a positive customer experience, can expect a conversion rate improvement.
In this article, we discuss the website optimization techniques you can use to improve your customer’s journey, ultimately resulting in a higher conversion rate, and how you can combine SEO and CRO to generate more sales qualified leads and improve your conversion over time.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Firstly, it’s important to understand what conversion optimization actually is, so you can use it to your advantage when it comes to maximizing the potential of your organic search traffic.
Digital marketers tend to focus on driving website traffic and simply hoping their specific audience are enticed enough to engage with the brand and make a purchase.
However, this is just the start of the journey a customer takes.
Maximizing the potential of the existing organic traffic to your site, rather than trying to generate more search engine traffic through SEO, is what can truly boost the success of your brand. This type of growth is what can improve the sustainability of your brand.
So, how can you increase the conversion rates of visitors to your specific pages, increasing your profits in the meantime?
You can achieve this by focusing on your conversion rate optimization. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) can help you to gain more conversions and use the existing potential of your site visitors to your advantage.
Read on to discover the CRO techniques you need to employ to make the most of the organic traffic visiting your site.
Using Conversion Optimization Techniques to Improve The Customer Journey
Conversion optimization techniques can work in tandem with search engine optimization to help you improve your performance in search engine results, while maximizing the performance of your conversion funnel.
Use the following steps as a guide to improving your conversion rates and making the most of those hard-won website visitors:
1. Reduce Your Website's Scope
Search engine users want answers, and they want them now. This means Google is going to push websites to users that will answer their queries as efficiently as possible.
To stand a chance of appearing on the first page of the SERPs, you need to focus on creating content that answers the questions of a specific audience. To increase your chances of improving your conversion rate, make your customer’s journey better by answering their query.
By reducing the scope of your website and providing focused landing pages for the topics your visitors actually care about, you’re creating a great experience from their first interaction with you.
Use SEO and conversion techniques to provide valuable information to your potential customers. Ensure your website is structured in a way that guides the customer to where you want them to be.
2. Focus on High-Converting Content
The content of your website is one of the most important factors that impact your conversion rate.
The content of your website can also be used to implement the right keywords, attracting organic traffic to more pages on your site.
The performance of these pages or blog articles in search results is also influenced by the value of the content shared.
A key way to create high-converting content is to keep the customer at the centre of your writing.
When creating new content, never forget that you’re not writing for search engines, you’re writing for real people.
Including both short and long-tail keywords is a surefire way to please the search engine results page, but overload your blog post with keywords and you run the risk of driving your customer away.
When optimizing content to bring in more traffic, focus on a particular keyword that is well-researched and you know is going to result in visitors more likely to convert.
Part of your online marketing efforts should be to discover keywords that encompass your potential customer’s search intent. These keywords will not only bring in more traffic, that traffic will be of a higher quality.
3. Improve Website Visuals
The visuals of your site are also one of the most important factors in the user experience and improving your customer’s journey. Encouraging more visitors to your site through your SEO is worthless if they are immediately turned away from your content, when faced with unreadable text or poor quality images.
Appearing in an organic search is not as valuable for your website if your bounce rate is high.
Putting effort in to make your website content and pages clear, attractive, and inspiring can be the difference between your customer bouncing, or choosing to engage with your site and ultimately converting.
Each image and visual on your website should also serve a purpose. They should be relevant to your brand’s mission and goal for the customer.
You can take a look at your existing web pages to make yourself aware of those that are performing well, and those that aren’t. Adjust your site visuals if they aren’t performing well. Improve their quality or re-align them with your brand values.
Images can also help the SEO performance of your website. They can engage your visitors more and improve your conversion rates by providing SEO value.
Optimize all SEO aspects of your images with a specific keyword, included in the file name to the captions and alt text.
4. Perform Regular Analytics Testing
In order to evaluate the effectiveness of your website’s conversions and how your site performs throughout your customer’s journey, you can carry out routine analytics testing.
Evaluating your site’s performance will help you to adjust your marketing strategies in the future and assess the most effective methods of improving your customer’s journey, and thus, conversion rates.
Different types of testing you can carry out include split testing and multivariate testing. Using Google Analytics can help you to get an idea of your website’s overall performance when it comes to SEO and CRO.
In order to determine a baseline for your site’s performance, you can use tools like Google Analytics.
This tool can identify your top-performing pages and allow you to see the areas of your site that cause your visitors to exit.
From here, you can evaluate what is harming the user experience for each specific page. What do your top-performing pages have that is working for your marketing strategy?
Google Analytics also allows you to track goals. These goals can help you to identify any areas of your conversion funnel that are not operating as well as they could be to meet your SEO and conversion objectives. You can use this analytics data to improve your pages and keep an eye on traffic fluctuations to your site.
Combining SEO and CRO to Increase Conversion
Both SEO and CRO have elements that work in tandem together, helping them to function effectively and to their maximum potential.
To combine the benefits of both, it is important to understand where their functions cross over and where they can help one another to improve your conversion rate.
This can help you to develop digital marketing strategies, putting in place a marketing automation or two, to help your conversion rate thrive.
You can gather data from both strategies to understand which aspects of them work for your site. This is a great help when it comes to retaining your existing customers and generating new, valuable leads.
Having both CRO and SEO strategies in place also helps you to grow your business, scaling your resources and customers simultaneously.
It also helps you to cut out the marketing strategies that are not working for you, redirecting your resources to more valuable techniques.
Read on to find out how to combine SEO and CRO in a valuable way, improving your customer’s journey and increasing your conversion rate:
1. Use your analytics data to define your goals
When you implement an SEO digital marketing strategy, you should gain valuable insights into the behaviour of visitors to your website. You can learn about their search intent and where they are in their journey as a customer.
This will help you to gain information about your target audience, guiding you as to the next steps you need to take to improve conversions on your e-commerce site.
Analytics will also help you to determine the objectives your business should be meeting in the short- and long term.
For example, you can gain insight into the landing pages that are performing best on your website and create other pages that will perform similarly.
These pages can represent different stages in your customer’s journey.
For example, are they searching for more information on a product? Are they looking for similar product recommendations? Are they ready to make their purchase?
Analyze the data available to you and make changes to your CRO and SEO strategies that will actually improve your business growth.
2. Create targeted landing pages
Each page on your website should be focused on a goal that meets your potential customer’s expectations. By creating a high-quality website that answers your visitor’s queries, you immediately make a positive impression on them.
A landing page is usually the first place a customer will interact with your brand. They may have performed a Google search for a product you sell, or found your product through social media sites.
Either way, a targeted landing page that implements SEO keywords and answers their question is the best way to engage their attention and encourage them to interact with your brand.
Once you have set up landing pages that match the search intent of each visitor, you can monitor these over time and adjust them as needed.
Your digital marketing strategy should be consistently monitored and edited as needed in order to improve your conversion rate.
3. Create a compelling call to action for site visitors
Finally, a call to action is one of the most effective ways you can guide a customer to carry out an action you want them to take. Naturally, this will have a positive effect on your conversion rate.
A call to action can be implemented on various web pages throughout your site, depending on where your visitor is in their journey as a customer.
Think about the goals you have in mind for your website visitors. This will help you to determine the right ‘call to action’ to implement.
- Do you want the visitor to sign-up to a contact form, listing their personal information so they can be contacted about future launches or products?
- Do you want the visitor to subscribe to your newsletter?
- Do you want the visitor to further browse your website pages or product offerings?
- Do you want the visitor to book an appointment for a consultation or meeting?
- Do you want the visitor to download free guides or courses from you?
Each of these actions would be considered a conversion. You can choose to implement a CTA that is right for your business goals.
Ultimately, the CTA should be clear and direct. Otherwise, you run the risk of the site visitors leaving your site before carrying out any further actions. This is a waste of your SEO and CRO resources and will impact your conversion rate negatively.
Tips to Improve Your Customer's Journey
Finally, we’ll go over some tips to help you improve your customer’s journey, and ultimately your conversion rate.
Each potential customer should be treated as an individual. Their behavior will be different and the level of interaction they have with your brand will be different.
Mapping your customer’s journey will help you to understand their state of mind when they engage with your site. Improving your SEO strategies will help more customers to discover your brand.
Conversion optimization allows you to improve the journey of your customer, making their interactions with your brand more valuable, no matter their intention.
Read on to discover three ways of improving your customer’s journey and maximizing the potential of both your SEO strategy and your conversion rate optimization strategy.
Prevent customer journey hijacking
A common mistake made by web newbies is implementing elements within your website that take your customer away from your site. You may end up doing this inadvertently but it will nevertheless harm your customer’s experience.
If your customer logs on to your site only to be bombarded with paid ads and pop-ups, you are increasing their chances of being led away from your site.
Different browser extensions or apps can sometimes be the culprit for planting these elements on your website. Be aware of the consequences of implementing third-party plug-ins.
If a visitor is lured away from your site, it is unlikely you will win them back. The customer experience has been interrupted and the potential to convert this visitor to a paying customer has been scuppered.
You should encourage the natural flow of your customer’s journey, rather than interrupt it.
Design interactive and compelling product pages
Many visitors on your site will eventually come into contact with your product pages. It may be the first page they land on from an organic search, or your SEO tactics may have guided them there.
Either way, this is a valuable opportunity for you to increase the chances of conversion.
When a customer is interested in a product, it is your job to inform them with the knowledge they need to take the plunge and spend their money.
If they feel confident in your product enough to do this, you have succeeded in your product page descriptions. It is important to reassure the customer that purchasing your product is the smart choice.
An online store can rarely offer the same level of personalization and attention as a brick-and-mortar store.
However, get creative with your product pages to combat this. You could offer videos of your products, virtual try-ons, or 3D images.
All of these elements will help the customer to feel more immersed in your product. This is more likely to result in a successful conversion.
Be helpful!
An important part of providing a top-notch customer experience is providing your customers with the help and advice they need to result in a successful conversion.
In a physical store, sales representatives have the chance to interact with customers one-to-one, answering their individual questions and remedying any concerns there and then. This helps the consumer to make an informed purchase and trust your brand.
You can mimic this type of service online by offering a live chat on your website. This means there is a sales representative available to answer the queries of your potential customers.
This may just help them to make a decision and result in a conversion.
This can personalize the shopping experience for a customer and encourage visitors to not only make an initial purchase, but encourage them to come back time and time again.
