Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) are two very important factors that every business owner and marketing team needs to understand. In fact, you cannot have one without the other.

If you wish to improve traffic and business success, these two aspects of your marketing must be complementary. Here are four reasons why.

1. It All Starts With a Search Engine

A whopping 93 percent of online experiences begin with a search engine. To even get people to your website, you need high-quality SEO and Web content to rank high on Google. Then, once prospects are on your site, you need a great CRO strategy to get those visitors to complete a desired action, like signing up for a trial. So, clearly, the two need each other. SEO should be setting up CRO for the win.

2. SEO Can Be Used for CRO

As CRO focuses on conversion as the key metric, CRO should not be in opposition to SEO. As you do testing on your website pages to see just how well your CRO is, you want to take notes for your SEO strategy, because the insights you gather from CRO testing can be used to optimize your SEO. This way, when users arrive at your site, they’ll get information that’s in line with what they want, which equals greater chance of conversion.

3. Great CRO Improves SEO

A lot of things affect SEO rankings, including keywords, content quality, domain and page authority, and user and usage data. It’s rare to see an instance where tweaking pages for better CRO will cause issues with SEO, even with keywords. After all, Google places high value on quality and authority, and both SEO and CRO experts have taken notice.

Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz, has some great insights into how CRO benefits SEO. He states that changes made to improve CRO actually enhance some of the aspects of SEO, particularly keywords, content quality and usage. So, if your CRO is stellar, your search ranking will naturally rise.

4. Holistic Marketing Is Here to Stay

There should be no disconnect across your marketing campaigns. All the strategies you employ should be interconnected. Holistic marketing is what ensures customers’ experience of your brand remains enjoyably consistent across all channels.

This philosophy is what should be driving SEO and CRO strategies. The two must support each other. If they don’t, it’s easy for the pieces to fall, but if they do, the whole business can function much better. So, for sustainable success, always be thinking about how your SEO is helping CRO — and vice versa.

 

For more information about how Sprout Media Lab can help you with your SEO and your CRO, contact us here or feel free to call us at (800) 617-6975 for a free, no obligation consultation.  We look forward to hearing from you!