Assessing The Trident of Conversion Success: SEO, UX and CRO

Understanding SEO

SEO is the name given to the set of practices that are designed to help websites become more visible on search engines like Google. On average, as the graph below shows, Google’s first position gets a CTR of 31.73%.

Search engines send crawlers to investigate your website and categorize its content, so it’s vital that you make it easy for them to understand what you’re trying to convey in your pages.

Significantly, crawlers can investigate the quality and quantity of the links you build and the type of keywords you use before figuring out where to position your pages within the results pages of specific search engines.

Google is, of course, the most popular search engine in the world, and by a large margin. So let’s focus on how SEO helps websites to rank within Google’s SERPs. Essentially, Google’s job is to provide accurate results to each and every one of the high-volumes of queries it receives each day. To supply users with accurate results, it instantly studies the query being made and then reads the pages of a website in order to display the right results. Content accuracy and website reputation come into the mix to help provide added relevance.

By determining the type of query, whether it’s informational, navigational or transactional, Google displays the results based on the relevance of the content.

Transactional Queries

Transactional queries indicate the user’s intent to complete a transaction (i.e. make a purchase).

So, if a user types in “buy iPhone case”, Google will show “Transactional” results (i.e. places that sell cases).

Even though these may have fewer links pointing to them than informational articles like “10 Best iPhone Cases”, transaction oriented results will normally appear higher in search results.

Informational Queries

When the user is searching for information and/or answers, these queries are categorized as “Informational”.

These types of queries are generally content-heavy.

Example above illustrates popular questions related to “iPhone”.

Navigational Queries

These queries are brand-based – users type in the brand name (e.g. “Amazon”) with the ultimate goal of visiting Amazon’s website.

Apart from the type of search query, there is an innumerable number of factors that Google considers when coming up with its results pages. So much so that SEO is extremely tricky to master for even the most experiences of practitioners. An SEO’s job primarily involves identifying relevant keywords and phrases to create quality content to generate traffic.

However, the real challenge is to identify and produce content that’s capable of bringing in traffic and conversions.

This is where some of BuzzSumo’s features come in:

Content Analyzer – enables you to identify and research top-performing content for the given key phrase.

The analysis tab shows additional metrics like engagement by network and engagement by content length.

Keyword Discovery – this feature enables users to dig into the ins and outs of a specific keyword.

When it comes to digital marketing, SEO brings businesses the traffic that they need to function online. If audiences are unable to locate your site, you’re going to find it extremely difficult to create conversions.

According to a recent study from BrightEdge, it was found that, on average, over half of all visitors navigate onto websites via an organic search query. Such figures dwarf the roles of PPC advertising and social – illustrating just how essential it is for businesses to invest in some form of Search Engine Optimization strategies if they’re serious about securing conversions.

The Essential Role of UX

The true value of utilizing a strong UX model for a website is supported by the chart above – showing how unresponsive pages can lead to significant drops in conversion rates.

Free website performance analysis tools like Pingdom and Finteza can give you a valuable “waterfall” inspection of various assets that may be slowing down your website.

Another feature which is quite unique is a map of your website’s loading time in other countries without having to analyze each one separately – pretty handy when your website attracts visitors from other countries, too.

SEO may lead users to your website, but it’s a site’s user experience that will help to develop their interest to an extent where making a purchase or signing up to a mailing list, or submitting an enquiry.

Designing a website that’s unappealing to your target audience, that has little in the way of usability and doesn’t help visitors to accomplish what they’ve set out to do on-site will cause more users to navigate away rather than complete a purchase. What’s more, is that a poor on-site experience can lead to negative brand perceptions due to the inconvenience suffered by users.

Creating a positive UX strategy means designing a digital interface that works just like your arriving traffic would expect. Interactions with your pages will be convenient, informative and unintrusive. One of the most effective ways of creating a great UX involves setting up a site so that users don’t even need to put any effort into navigation while they embark on their journey towards a conversion.

To effectively design your website with UX in mind, it’s important to consider each visitor as a customer waiting to make a purchase. This means that your messages, displays and plugins all need to complement your brand and lure people towards your sales funnels. Valuable user experiences will always keep visitors coming back to your website – enabling a recurring flurry of engagement.

Finding Value in CRO

The final part of the trident features Conversion Rate Optimization. As the above table of popular CRO practices illustrates, there are some similarities between CRO practices and that of SEO and UX.

Essentially, CRO relates to the act of optimizing your SEO and UX with the primary intention of facilitating conversions.

CRO can involve all sorts of different factors, like fine-tuned Call-to-Action laden landing pages, multivariate A/B testing to see which one encourages more sales, optimizing content strategies for conversions, and using visual assets more effectively throughout a sales funnel.