Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is performed to get organic traffic. The aim is to drive visitors to your website so that you can convert them into clients, or at least into leads on your email list for future nurturing and interaction. The percentage of users that have been converted from a visitor into a customer is called the conversion rate. As a business owner, your goal should be to optimise your conversion rate as much as possible. This process is called CRO or Conversion Rate Optimisation.
In this guide to organic conversion rate optimisation, I will describe some innovative ways you can help to boost your conversion on your site which will increase sales, and reduce your cost of customer acquisition – the traffic is already coming to the site, your aim is to make more of them decide to become paying customers.
Before getting started with CRO you need to know what your current metrics are. You need to know your conversion rate for organic traffic. One thing you can do is look to industry-standard benchmarks, these change from industry to industry so it’s important you find one relevant to your niche. It’s also good to remember that these benchmarks are averages and by going through this CRO process you are aiming to become better than average!
The 5 Ways to Improve Organic CRO:
- Choose relevant keywords
- Keep users within the conversion funnel
- Convert visitors into subscribers
- Implement remarketing
- Optimize page experience
Choose Relevant Keywords
Keywords themselves don’t convert users into clients, but they will help you target paying audiences relevant to your company. With an excellent keyword strategy, you can attract visitors who are both interested in your product and close to making a purchase. On the flip side, if you don’t pay attention to your keywords, you may waste a lot of resources creating content that doesn’t attract the right crowd, but also doesn’t convert because the visitors are not ‘warm’ enough to your products or services. ‘Focus on the keywords that show the right intent’ A user’s intent depends on which stage of the buyer’s journey they are at.
It’s quite logical that users who just explore your product and users who are ready to buy from you (or convert) will search for your product or service using different keywords. This is because the search intent is different for each user. The content on your website should cover all sorts of search intent, content that can be used to attract users at all stages of the buyer’s journey. This means the website can feature guides, reviews, listicles as well as shop pages with strong images and buying incentives like offers, etc. However, for a new website is most important to get the content with transactional intent created first. Then you can move on to investigation and informational content. The search intent of keywords is often determined by ‘intent markers’ also known as specific words that define the search intent. for example, the words ‘Buy’ or ‘On Sale’ in someone’s search might signify an intent to buy.
Select High-Converting Keywords
CRO is not the same as SEO, and the relevance of a keyword is judged differently depending upon which you are aiming for. For SEO, you’d look for keywords with a higher search volume, because you want your site to appear for a wide customer base bringing in more visits and clicks. However, high volume keywords may not bring the sort of visitors who are ready to purchase. Visits are important if you use advertising to monetise your site, however if you are optimising for CRO and you’re looking to get more on site conversions then you should search for keywords that will bring you the the sort of visitors who are looking to buy. This will result in a narrower audience, and less visits/clicks, but a higher conversion rate. This will often lead you to look for long-tail keywords.Long-tail keywords have proved their use for conversion, as they attract the sort of audience interested in purchasing, are less competitive so easier to rank and already include the short-tail keywords so you get a double benefit.
Keep Users Within the Conversion Funnel
A conversion funnel represents the stage of the buyers journey and is vbroadly: Informational, investigational and transactional. What you need to think about is that the content you create for informational and investigational stages are more functional and are moving users along the funnel to the next stage until they reach the more transactional content. i.e: Guide article (informational > List article (Investigational) > Product specific artilcle (transactional)So you might have an article covering the use of digital cameras, the links in the article and at the end of the article might send users to an article you’ve created called “The 10 best DSLR’s of the year” or “15 affordable DSLR’s for beginners” then within that article you are linking to specific articles for each camera that are more sales focused listing features and benefits and offering a good price.
Convert Visitors into Subscribers
Conversions can be divided into sub categories. Specifically, micro and macro conversions, Macro conversions are normally associated with money, and revenue. Where a micro conversion may be gathering someones email address by asking them to subscribe to a newsletter.
Micro conversions don’t bring in money, but they are actions that bring a user closer to the decision to make a purchase, i.e. they bring them closer to a macro conversion.
A newsletter subscription is something you have to ask your visitors for, because your visitors who come to your website website just for fun will not share their personal information (emails) with you unless you ask for it, and often it is best to offer something in return to make it transactional.
There are several ways to get a user to sign up for newsletters and mailing lists. For example you can use, popups that appear on a page they visit. You could use a content block on the margin or header or even inline in content the user is reading. Another method is to use gated content that requires a user to signup to access. You can use one or more of these options in combination
Once you have the users email address, be sure to use it to send them special promo codes and discounts. Send them valuable content and ask for feedback – start to build a relationship and establish yourself as an authority.
As newsletters often contain informational content it is best to include a signup form for the newsletter on informational pages, i.e. pages that are covering the informational and investigational part of the buyers journey.
Implement Remarketing
Remarketing is the process of tracking a website visitor who has left your website without converting, and then showing them adverts elsewhere on the web to try and bring them back to your website to convert into a customer.
According to different surveys, the percentage of users who were not converted on their first website visit is somewhere between 82-97% depending upon the industry, that’s a massive chunk of your traffic who cone to your virtual store but make no purchase. This makes it imperative that you do everything you can to convert them into customers with remarketing.
Remarketing is so common these days that it is easy to setup in Google and Facebook using pixels and cookies to allow you to create audiences of website visitors who have not converted. Feel free to reach out and ask us for help setting up your remarketing campaign so you can start bringing those lost customers back into your world!
Optimise Page Experience
Page experience is a massive factor in your conversion rate, users will leave sites immediately if they load slowly or if they have a poor user interface that is frustrating to use. Importantly Google has also now made your page experience a ranking factor, meaning you’re never gojing to get to the top of the google search rankings with a slow page load speed or a user experience (UX) that leaves a user frustrated or unable to navigate to the pages for the products and services they are looking for. Googles tests also include mobile performance so responsive design is especially important along side mobile site speed. These Google tests are called ‘Core Web Vitals’ and you can track them in the Google search console for your site. If you need help setting up these tests or want to know how t o improve bad results, get in touch and we will be happy to help you.
Summary
CRO and SEO are inseparable and should be worked on in tandem to get the most from your website and the traffic that arrives there. You can improve SEO to drive more traffic, but what’s the point if you’re not converting it? This is why CRO is so important, small changes to your conversion rate can make massive changes to your companies revenue. Hopefully this article has given you lots to investigate and think about. As always we are happy to help you to improve your site’s CRO and SEO, just reach out and have a free consultation.