When running a website for your business you are constantly looking for ways to optimize it. With all of the varying optimization strategies it can become very confusing. When it comes to a local digital marketing company, KC looks to the professionals Salt Manage for web optimization advice.
Which strategy should you choose?
What is going to give you the most bang for your buck? At times, all of the differing strategies may seem to conflict with one another. When done correctly, the strategies all work together to give you a site that ranks highly with search engines and produces excellent customer conversion rates. Your SEO efforts will help to boost your CRO (conversion rate optimization), and your CRO strategies will help to boost your SEO.
SEO focuses on qualities that help you to rank better in search engine results. Link building, internal linking, keyword placement, website structure, and more are considered. A CRO program will complement the increase in traffic generated by an SEO program. CRO focuses on strategies that optimize your conversion rates by focusing on user experience and encouraging those users to take a specific action. This includes using qualitative and quantitative research, competitive analysis, testing of on-site elements, post-test analysis, etc.
SEO strategies focus on algorithms
As Google continues to update its algorithms to provide the best search experience for the user, other factors have been growing in importance. Optimizing your site for better page speed not only improves your users’ experience, but it also helps your search ranking.
Both SEO and CRO depend on a strong data pool. Decisions made by CRO strategies are also based on data from SEO results. So let’s take a look at four specific strategies that you can use to help with combining both SEO and CRO. For help with navigating this, consider contacting your local digital marketing company in KC.
1. Maintain entry page “scent”
Maintaining a strong connection between a source ad or search result and a specific landing page is crucial for conversion. We have all completed a search for something specific only to click on a result that seems relevant. Eventually you are directed to a site with a completely different product line or topic. This is a big problem for site conversion rates as well as SEO. How can you ensure you are optimizing your page for scent?
- Match title tag and H1 heading.
- Design a clear site structure.
- Be careful with dynamic search ads for category pages.
- Be sure to exclude out-of-stock products from search results.
- Adjust your site layout based on keywords.
2. Combine A/B testing with SEO
When done correctly, split testing will help capture more leads, get more visitors, and increase sales. Your local Kansas City digital marketing firm can help you with setting this up. With A/B testing each user sees different variations of the same page. The page which converts the higher percentage of users is the winner. To do this properly there are a few things to consider to avoid harming your website’s search rank.
- Avoid cloaking errors – Using an A/B testing platform to change the spirit of the page is a huge mistake. Design, scope, and content of your variations should not be significantly different from your original page. Google bots may recognize major changes as cloaking. Be careful as some split-testing tools may inadvertently cause such cloaking errors by showing different pages to Google bots and humans.
- Use the rel=canonical tag – If an A/B test has more than one URL, put the rel=canonical link pointing to your original page on all of your alternate links. This will direct bots indexing your site to the original page.
3. Improve your page load time
Loading time is a major contributor to abandonment of a page. Up to one-second delays are bearable for users, but a 10-second delay in loading time can make users leave a site immediately. Even if a user does stay, it is usually unlikely that they will complete any call to action and even less likely that they will return to your site to buy again. Ensure that you are doing what you can to optimize your page’s loading time.
- Use a website speed test tool – Test your website’s page load time across multiple device platforms.
- Evaluate reports – Website speed tools allow you to see the front-end elements like page size, load time, and download speed. They also emphasize the back-end elements like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
- Optimize images – Images can slow down your website considerably. Resizing your images using a picture editor can compress your images, helping them to load much faster.
- Get rid of bulky code – Bulky code can create major roadblocks for your site. Remove line breaks and excess spacing.
- Avoid external embedded media – Host all content on your own server.
- Install Google PageSpeed
- Improve perceived web performance.
4. Leverage videos
Explainer videos can play an important role in increasing your conversion rates. These videos provide businesses an opportunity to clearly convey their value proposition. They can also help to increase your page engagement and the time spent on site. Remember that a visitor’s attention span is short. The average duration of a watched video is about 2.7 minutes. Make sure your hosting is fast enough to support the video. You need strong and captivating content to gain a visitor’s attention in a short amount of time. You will find that by using these tools will help to achieve better SEO optimization with your videos.
- Use keywords – Use the AdWords keyword tool to help you identify the best keywords to use.
- Upload videos to your own domain – Opening a video channel for your company website on YouTube or Vimeo can be a good way of increasing subscribers, however using your own domain is crucial. Create a sitemap with important information such as title and category to let Google capture the info.
- Ensure you are tracking and viewing your SEO results.
- Interact with your viewers – Add prompts that enable interaction with your visitors.
Conclusion
When used correctly, SEO and CRO work together beautifully. Your site should be easy to find (SEO) and it should provide value to the user by offering useful content that addresses the users’ needs (CRO). Consider consulting with your local digital marketing company in KC to better utilize these strategies with your website.
