Quick Synopsis
To make the most out of your SEO, use Conversion Rate Optimization and On-Site Optimization. If you only do SEO, you could find yourself falling short of the bottom line. Skip to the bottom to find some charts to help. To hear how I figured this out the hard way (!), please read on. Maybe the story sounds familiar.
Using SEO Tactics
Does SEO help in sales? Traffic to your site means more customers, and more traffic means more sales, right? But what happens when you did everything right in SEO and you didn't get the sales? It's tempting to adopt a misconception of SEO, and abandon SEO all together.
And that's what almost happened to me.
Being new to SEO at the time, I was an avid student. I'd read any article I could get my hands on. I'd attend any webinar possible. I'd follow the instructions to add more content to my site. I'd streamline my targeted keywords, slim my PPC campaigns, and be active with social media. Traffic was going up and we were moving up in the SERPs. Looks good, right?
After SEO Tactics
For my 6 month-evaluation, I was ready with shining colors. But the owners of the business had other concerns: our sales have been going down for the past few months. I thought to myself, "No, how can this be? I brought in more traffic to our site. Doesn't that mean more sales?"
After taking a deeper look into Google analytics (with even Dr. Pete helping me), we came to a startling conclusion: my company didn't do anything SEO that triggered the downward sales. SEO-wise, we did everything right.
Not Using SEO Tactics
That's when I threw SEO out the window for a few months. I resorted to good 'ol fashioned marketing. My company is a web-based time and billing software. So being online, we encourage shoppers to sign up for a free trial of the software. But even though we increased traffic, we weren't getting enough trial users and actual buyers. I needed to bridge the gap, so my team and I did the following:
- Beefed up the KnowledgeBase and updated it on a regular basis based on the questions recorded in the Tech Support department.
- Introduced weekly webinars that demonstrated specific aspects of the software.
- Promoted the KnowledgeBase and webinars by our site, emails, and sales and tech support departments.
- Called back people who called but didn't leave a message.
- Reduced the automatic emails. Made the remaining emails more up to-date, concise, and easier on the eye.
I figured only “educated buyers” make purchases. If they know what they're buying, they'll buy it. Once they become trial users, they want to know how easy it is for them to use the software. And that's where we were falling short. We needed to educate them on how to use the software.
Within months of just good ‘ol fashioned marketing, our sales grew! The rate was so rapid, we now need to grow our tech support staff!
Questioning SEO Tactics
So what does this all mean? Is SEO useless when it comes to the bottom line? Does it increase sales? Should businesses ignore it all together?
I was seriously asking myself these questions. I finally gathered enough courage to ask SEOMoz and it wasn't what I was expecting. Jamie writes:
"Well, SEO and other online marketing initiatives are certainly complementary. But I'll be honest with you: you will see more sales from focusing on conversion rate optimization and site optimization alone than from SEO alone. That said, I'd never recommend you do only one...
...So if your resources are constrained, and you can only focus well on one thing, you would be smart to continue focusing on conversion optimization until you feel like you're hitting diminishing returns with on-site optimization, then it's time to start focusing much more on getting more people to your well-optimized site. Also, it's possible to be doing things that help your SEO while also focusing primarily on conversion optimization.
So CRO and SEO really do need to be related, but like I said, if you can truly only do one thing, start with optimizing your site first. Just make sure the optimization is for both humans (who you want to buy your wares) and the search engines that will be crawling and indexing your pages for search queries.”
Hello CRO & On-Site Optimization
So Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and On-Site Optimization is really good 'ol fashioned marketing! Jamie helped me put things into perspective. It makes sense. SEO is part of the puzzle.
But here's the thing. These aren't necessarily different things you do in a sequential way. It should all be integrated in each other. I would keep CRO & On-Site Optimization in mind during the entire time you're doing SEO. There are many ways of approaching this. Below is a suggested approach:
Click on this chart to get a larger view. It's a general idea of applying On-Site Optimization and SEO to the various areas of the Conversion Funnel.
So yes, SEO does indeed affect your bottom line. It may not directly affect your bottom line as CRO & On-Site Optimization, but it would be double the work if you had to redo your CRO & On-Site Optimization efforts because Google didn't see your website clearly.
Using a CRO Mindset with SEO
Going in the other direction, if you are looking at a site from an SEO perspective, it's essential that you don't loose sight of the CRO. Don't get lost in all the numbers. Make sure that it ties back to the bottom line.To give yourself a good idea where it falls in your priorities, this flowchart should help:
These two charts aren't all-encompassing. There's so much more (Check out a recent YOUmoz post about it - it got bumped up to the main blog!). But if you maintain the right approach to SEO, you're on the right track. Feel free to add other suggestions in applying this concept.
Very nice post...
I lived a similar experience when working as SEO for an Hosting Company.
Everything was perfectly optimized, links were growing as the traffic, but the Conversion Rate didn't grow a 0,1%
I came up through a process like yours, engaging the Customer Care and Commercial Team in order to discover what was missing. And it worked, like in your case.
That case was what made me move from strict SEO to a larger vision and approach. Call it Inbound Marketing, even though it relies also to some classic offline marketing tactics... And that is why, when it comes to clients, I always try to have a round-up with all its departments in order to know the reality of their businesses, how they actually work, produce, sell and do retention.
And I found out that, finally, that is the right thing to do also when it comes to SEO: knowing their processes I can better visualize where the site architecture fail and the funnels are wrong.
Great post and useful charts.
Thanks for sharing your story, gfiorelli1!
I remember Avinash said that the best source to know your market is the direct voice of your customer. We have clicks, event tracking, etc and they're useful too, but it's also important to hear what our customers are saying to us. This gives us insight on the INTENTION behind their clicks, searches, and on-page behavior.
Here here! You've taken a brief anecdote and created something much more compelling and actionable. It really does make sense to focus first on on-site optimization-- and there's no reason why one shouldn't be optimizing a site for better usability, conversion performance and search engine accessibility all at the same time. It may be more difficult than focusing on one alone, but the I'd argue the rewards are more are greater than 1+1+1.
Yes, I totally agree! It's harder the work, but at least there's less need to redo the work. This is where marketers/sales/SEOers/webdesigners converge. Thank you again for your help. It made an impact. :)
Conversion Rate Optimization should, in my opinion, be the end goal of any SEO campaign. The days of measuring a campaign's success by increased rankings and increased number of unique visitors are over. I definitely agree that on page optimization with an emphasis on user experience and conversion optimization should be the precursor to a heavy off page optimization campaign. Once you've got your site primed to connect with visitors and convert visitors, then I think it's time to start ramping up more quality traffic. Increased rankings and an increase in the number of visitors to your site IS important, IF you've got it optimized to convert first. Otherwise, you've got a lot of visitors coming to your site...and then going somewhere else to find what they are looking for.
Cheers!
And with more engaged visitors, you can gather precious marketing and on-page analytics data to have a better idea of what *kind* of visitors (target market) you need to focus on with your off page optimization campaigns! (ok, now I'm getting excited.)
Glad to hear you finally got it turned around a bit. It's not just SEO - I worked with a big company once who was pouring money into marketing for their tradeshow, only to find out that it could take them 4-6 weeks to send a brochure out to people who requested it. By that time, most people had forgotten they made the requested or stop caring. Sometimes, they even thought the brochure that they specifically asked for was junk mail and got upset about it.
We found a way to fully automate the process, but they ultimately weren't interested, because it would've added about $0.25-0.50 to each mailing. Meanwhile, they'd pour money into mailing lists and send dupes (4-5 copies) to people. These were multi-page, full-color brochures, so one re-send cost more than $0.50.
They missed the broader point, ultimately. "Visitors", whether they're names on a mailing list or clicks from the SERPs, are useless if you throw them away. They're worst then useless if abuse them. More visitors could actually harm your reputation and business if they feel mistreated. An obsession over MORE damages many businesses, IMO.
That story has a familiar ring :P How do we get these terrible decision makers out of the way?
How do we overthrow the establishment of old school marketers and transform SEOs from bottom up advisors to top down management?
I didn't even tell the worst part. The leads came in from a web form, which someone printed out and faxed to another office, where it was manually re-entered by low-level data entry. Not only was this completely unnecessary, but the errors on the re-enters were off the charts, meaning a ton of brochures got returned.
Hahaha now THAT'S not even a brick & mortar company going online anymore, it's a dinosaur who so happened to be stampeding right over a few computer with an internet connection!BTW: I see you're into cognitive psychology? I'm a psychology enthusiast myself. Good to encounter like-minded people :-) in my opinion, marketing IS psychology for a plethora of reasons. And don't even get me started on guys like Cialdini and how his insights can improve one's internet marketing. Hehe.
Thanks again for your help Dr. Pete! I think with all the work put into getting traffic, it's shooting yourself in the foot when you don't have something of value for them when they get to your site. And "value" is subjective to what YOUR traffic wants, not what you necessarily want. Now THAT opens up a can of worms: design team vs SEO team.
You know, if you consider business success than I consider SEO to be a gas station: you need it because you can't sell (drive) anything with 0 visitors (gas), but you don't want to spend the rest of your life at a gas station either, right?I found out about SEO in the opposite way: I first optimized a whole bunch of stuff, while my landing pages only got 50 visits a month each, at best. I spent 2,5 years optimizing with very little traffic! Then I cranked up the SEO and, as a result, traffic to landing pages skyrocketed and sales did too.Back in January I finished setting up a whole bunch of split tests and now I'm off to the gas station again. It's a one two punch: get enough traffic to make a split test statistically significant, then start testing, and when you see a good conversion %? Get more traffic, which makes split tests statistically significant faster so you can optimize for sales faster, and so on.In short: SEO-sales-SEO-sales. It's a killer combo. Never forget SEO when aiming for sales, but don't forget sales when busy with SEO either because Google ain't the be-all end-all.
Right. We're dealing with both humans and machines. But what amount of traffic would make a/b test results statistically significant? I'm curious.
That all depends on how big the difference is between the resuts on the two pages - if they're small then you will need a few thousand pageviews, but if they're high a couple of hundered will do.
For example, all those beauty ads you see where "84% of women agree" have to show in their ad that their results are statistically significant (at least in the UK), so at the bottom of the screen or page you will see "84% of 154 women agree". Of course, your minimum thresholds will all depend on what kind of test you use.
Great post here. Here's my question: isn't onsite optimization, maybe including CRO, all a part of SEO? Seems to me that SEO is a broad category now that encompasses on-page, linkbuilding, conversion rates, a bit of design and testing, and marketing.
I think we'll see more specialists coming around in the next few years. Some will be linkbuilders, others will be on-site optimization specialists, others will deal with social media. It's all SEO, but we can't all be good at everything.
Good question, dohertyjf! I think with the broad term "SEO" stands for, it's easy to miss the aspects beyond optimizing search engine results. Maybe that's why we have the other terms such as CRO, PPC, SMO, etc. I remember Rand talking about the SEO industry, and how it's still in it's infancy. And how industries before also had a time where things had yet to be defined, and specialized positions surfaced (I think https://www.seomoz.org/blog/if-i-could-change-one-thing-about-the-seo-industry-it-would-be is the article). I often hear how web designers and programmers who enter the SEO world find it an adjustment to think like a marketer, and visa versa. These are dynamic and exciting times.
That topic was discussed a lot also in this old YOUmoz of mine: https://www.seomoz.org/ugc/what-role-model-for-the-seo-of-tomorrow
A nice post on a very important topic. Well done.
The need for continuous testing is so critical to success in online marketing, it cannot be overstated.
I agree with your position that CRO / OSO is the starting point. It doesn't do much good to drive more customers if you can't get them to buy anything. As Brian stated above, "measuring a campaign's success by increased rankings and increased number of unique visitors are over." So true.
Furthermore, driving loads of traffic to a poor site only leads to a diminished brand. We're all quick to pass judgement these days - especially online. We should all be focused on cleaning up our homes before we invite potential friends over. ;)
As Gianluca has pointed out, we're all inbound marketers and in many cases that encompasses SEO, CRO, OSO, etc. In other cases (like mine), we're attached to the customer acquisition team but work very closely with the customer conversion and customer retention teams.
Thanks RyanOD for the kind words and the insight! :)
I always like to use the Mona Lisa in the basement analogy. Don't worry, I'll explain. If your goal is to increase your painting reputation (sales) and you paint the most wonderful painting like the Mona Lisa (Website) but it's in your basement (no traffic or SEO) what does this do for your painting reputation? (sales) Nothing! Great Read. I like success stories that can be applied broadly across disciplines. Thanks.
Right! I like to joke that if a tree fell in the middle of an abandoned forest and Google didn't hear it, it didn't fall. haha
Hi
Great post - and really got me thinking.
I am currently working with a few start-ups and although I can see the sense in running seo and cro at the same time, I feel that I would be better off getting the on-site up and running - to get traffic to the site and then begin the cro. This way would also mean that I have figures that I can compare going forward and have visitors to the site so that the experiments are worthwhile.
Does that sound logical or am I missing the point
Thanks again for a great article.
I think it's a great starting point, Keane! Once all three are up and going, you'd be tweeking one as the others perform and provide greater insight. The traffic behavior & CRO results would tell you where you need to tighten your on-site efforts. As your CRO results flatline, you have some indication to increase your traffic generating efforts. And your CRO results will guide your future on-site and traffic generating projects.
With SEO becoming such a buzz word and everybody feeling all giddy about optimization, CRO often gets forgotten or paid little attention to. I like this example because it shows how much work is usually required for a website to reach its full potential. I never trust SEO firms that promise ridiculous amounts of traffic and never mention anything about converting that traffic. I've even turned clients completely away from SEO (I'm an SEO) because I felt like their site had plenty of traffic but simply needed to be optimized to better convert the existing traffic to paying customers.
Great post. My recent experience is this:
We lost Organic Traffic YOY (Year on Year) over a period of 3 months, but revenue from Organic Traffic increased YOY as well as Conversion Rates.
Why? Because Organic brand Search strengthened YOY due to our inbound marketing and trad digital marketing.
Brand = revenue
Brand = higher conversion rates.
Great post and something I always spend a lot of time on - SEO can only do so much and without CRO, usability testing (heuristics) and sexy content, you will be only ever get so far.
We need to do something to appease the army of Google raters :)
Regards,
Andy
A brilliant post on a subject most people completely forget about. CRO is the hardest bit of the process, getting people there is the easy bit.
SEO will only go so far which is why it is important to really look at everything that is going on. All the SEO in the world won't help a website convert if the conversion aspects are not positioned correctly.
Huge thumb up for that statement!
I think our roles as SEO's are continually taking on a more complex skill set. In order to fully understand SEO, you can't focus on just one element. We need to think about the user from discovery to point of sale, whether in reality we are compensated for it or not. The reason being is because as a professional SEO we need to be one ahead or as close as we can be to the next trend to be successful. The only way to do this is to have your feet wet in all areas of SEM, Design and Social Media.
It's like having multiple personalities :) lol.
Really useful point
Yep, spot on.
SEO needs to feature as part of the overall marketing Mix.
"you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink".
Super post! Great sharing experience!
Great post, I am definetely going to focus more on CRO. I can see where it is so easy to focus on one thing that you tend to forget about the big picture. Thanks for the help.
SEO is important, but one reason we put so much value on it is that we all want more traffic to our websites.
Since it is difficult to get conversions on our websites, we just keep dumping more money and effort into what are essentially leaky buckets. We connect more traffic via improved SEO with more sales or more leads, etc.
If you improve the user experience on your site and practice CRO, you can also do more with the traffic you get. Fortunately there are tools such as Overstat for conversion rate optimization without having to be a programmer or designer. Overstat is one of a few platforms that offer free trials. You really can't afford to not optimize your site if you are investing in SEO!
The end goal should always be conversions! That's why I think on-site optimization is the first thing any site should do when beginning their SEO. All the link building in the world isn't going to make much of a difference if the site doesn't convert well.
Good post - it's always handy to remember that SEO is a great starting point for driving visitors, but if your landing pages aren't compelling to visitors and getting your message across then you aren't going to make any money - which was the whole point of driving the visitors in the first place.
As an example, I'm currently driving highly targeted visitors to a site of mine, but the majority of them bounce and don't stay on site more than a couple of seconds. My working hypothesis is that my site is loading far too slowly and putting people off...
Nice Post...very nice post. Congrats!
I am also a SEO enthusiast, so this article is really helpful to me - i will reexamine my web site again.
I take most time do seo,but the buyer is a little.the article is very useful to me.
In past 5 months, we also do less SEO and do more on conversion visitors to buyers:https://bit.ly/gnlBr6
We increase monthly revenue about 30%
Here here! You've taken a brief anecdote and created something much more compelling and actionable. It really does make sense to focus first on on-site optimization-- and there's no reason why one shouldn't be optimizing a site for better usability, conversion performance and search engine accessibility all at the same time. It may be more difficult than focusing on one alone, but the I'd argue the rewards are more are greater than 1+1+1
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