Think SEO’s not cool? Think again

We all know about SEO and what it can do you as well as what social media can do and I don’t deny how important they both are to your business but they aren’t the bees knees to be frank. Conversions or leads are what keeps your business going! Conversion rate optimisation is actually the cool kid in the room.

What is conversion optimisation?

CRO is the process of improving the amount of leads a site obtains through various methods such as A/B testing, Heat Map analysis & User Surveys. If you type into Google “what is conversion optimisation” this answer is returned below:

In simple terms it is the process of squeezing more juice out of the same Orange. The focus isn’t on how much more traffic we can get by deploying this tactic.

Isn’t CRO a form of SEO?

In a recent article I wrote I stated that anything and everything that has an impact on your site is SEO(read the article here). So from that point I would say yes. But, what happens if your client doesn’t engage in SEO but only PPC, yes they may rank organically from a natural perspective but we could still deploy conversion optimisation because it is isn’t a traffic acquisition service. It’s a traffic conversion service. Lets break it down.

Why do we need CRO?

It is simple really, the point of having a website is to make money, get more people to sign up for your newsletter (blog perspective). We want to maximize the leads from the current traffic flow.

But there is a lot more that CRO can answer. For example, lets say you want to add a field or change wording but you aren’t sure if it is the right thing to do. Rightly so, you could potentially damage the conversion rate. So this is where conversion rate optimisation comes in. It gives you the ability to test items before deploying it. It won’t harm conversions but rather give a clearer understanding as to how your users would react to the change.

With CRO we are able to understand, by collecting data, how our user interact or engage with a site but also see how a minor change such a word order or colour changes would impact the total sales or signups we get on a monthly basis. Essentially you are arming yourself with validated data with which you can make quality decisions that impact your bottom line.

Oh but if I get more traffic I get more leads right?

Yes, that is correct technically you will get more leads but it doesn’t actually mean that your conversion rate went up. You may increase traffic by 20% and the leads go up by 10% but in fact the ratio of traffic to leads may have decreased.

If you are in business and follow the basic concept of maximizing profits you actually cannot ignore CRO. You are simply removing the opportunity to maximize profits because in the long run you are going to spend more to get more but with a targeted approach you can improve ROI dramatically.

Think about it from an offsite perspective and in a shopping store. Companies spend loads of money to get people into the store then they spend a bit more to ensure that the store is set up in the best possible fashion to get more sales. Why is it any different online?

Will it impact SEO?

Of course it will! Google and other Search Engines want you to build a site that is geared towards the user. You need to provide the best experience and being able to test the following items you are doing just that:

• Content layouts
• Heading tags
• Site Layouts
• Form designs
• Colours
• Title Tags and Descriptions
• Just about everything

As I said, anything and everything that has an impact on your site influences SEO and I meant it. This will help your organic efforts but it is aimed solely at helping you make bigger profits or get more leads or even get people to actually read and share more of your content.