“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning” – Bill Gates
This notion is also true for the booming online market, where every individual is striving to become the best. However, that is a distant dream without thinking about your customers.
Without a robust conversion strategy, driving organic traffic can be a resource-draining practice.
It is like having hundreds of people visiting your store every day keeping it the busiest. As a result, your store maintenance cost rises but by the end of the day – you do not record enough sales, producing negative ROI. That means people are just visiting, roaming around and then leaving without buying anything.
Why?
The simple answer is, that your visitors are not motivated enough to buy. Sure, they are curious about your brand – that is why they are visiting. But that’s it, your store does not have enough exciting offers that may convert them.
This is a common phenomenon for many businesses. They attract only the top-of-the-funnel audience without guiding the customers’ journey through the marketing funnel. An opposing perception like CRO vs. SEO is often the root of all problems.
To better understand the problems and create an effective solution, let us discuss what the two terms stand for.
What is SEO?
Every individual who has an online presence has come across the term SEO or Search Engine Optimisation.
The idea is simple; SEO is implementing certain techniques and practices to the website or web page to help your website gain organic traffic by ranking higher on the search results.
This brings potential customers to your page, and among them, a particular group eventually avail what you offer.
What is CRO?
The role of CRO begins when the traffic has already reached your website. CRO or Conversion Rate Optimisation ensures that the majority of website visitors opt for your product or service.
This is important as massive traffic does not always translate to a high amount of customers.
Understand that CRO, in itself, is also useless because there will be no traffic to convert without proper SEO tools.
Now the question is how to use CRO and SEO to get the most out of your business.
CRO vs. SEO: Steps to Streamline SEO for Conversion
As we discussed before, doing just SEO is not enough if you are not also thinking about your conversions at the same time. In case you are interested in learning about organic marketing and SEO alone, check out our blog on organic marketing.
The following steps are a general guide for streamlining your business per what the people want. To do so, you will have to start from,
1. Research on Consumer Persona
Every project or new venture requires proper research on consumers. Knowing your target audience is the foremost thing you need to do. This will also help you in keyword research and understand what your audience prefers and what they don’t.
Learn more about consumer persona and how to create them from our blog on branding. Here is a rough example of how a detailed consumer persona should look like.
Your blogs and articles should answer queries, and you should frame your content accordingly. Add every element the present top websites have done and include something extra for your readers and write it to guide them forward in their journey.
2. Produce and Display Content to Guide Buyers’ Decisions
Once proper research has been done, what is left is using the right content strategy to generate your desired results. A set of mixed categories of content like authoritative content, reviews, and testimonials with proper CTAs is vital to guide them further down the marketing funnel.
With the help of research on consumers, you can decide the length of your content, what kind of title would suit it the best, if pictures are required, etc.
By showcasing authority and expertise in the field through authoritative content you start to earn the trust of the visitors.
And here is where the other half of CRO vs. SEO comes into action. Having convinced them about your authority and expertise, now all the visitors need is a little push!
3. Convert Them Into Paying Customers
After garnering substantial traffic attention, the next part is to direct them towards availing, subscribing, and purchasing your products and services.
High-quality Landing page content and pop-up forms are useful in this case to capture the audience’s attention with memorable copies and exciting offers and convert them.
This is only possible when you have in-depth knowledge about your buyers and their preferences. Sure, all your traffic will not convert, and learning to accept it is the key.
Because in a desperate attempt to convert as many visitors as possible, we tend to generalise the conversion rate optimisation strategies. It does more damage than good.
Not only does it fail to pique the interest of many since they are not the target audience, but also dilutes the message making it less effective for the actual target group.
So, sticking to your core target group is always the key to ensuring effective conversions.
Takeaway
It will be after several trials and errors that you will find the right way to incorporate CRO vs. SEO. But you can make it a little easier by researching more about the kind of mass search for your choice of keywords.
Understand that your audience is your best friend, as they will help you earn. So, spend more time learning about your target audience and their preferences.
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