Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an art and science to getting organic traffic to your site. As you’re probably aware, Google drive visitors to your website and expects to convert them into clients, or, the very least, into leads.
The percent of users that have been converted into action is called the conversion rate. And your goal is to make the conversion rate as high as possible. This could be reached with CRO — Conversion Rate Optimization.
In this guide, you may discover 6 ways to help you boost your conversions and drive sales:
1. Choose Relevant Keywords
Keywords themselves don’t convert users into actions, but they do help you target relevant paying audiences. With a sharp keyword strategy, you can attract visitors that are interested in your product and are very close to making a purchase. Whereas, if you don’t pay attention to your keywords, you may waste a lot of resources creating content that neither attracts the right kind of crowd nor converts.
Here are some tips on what keywords would help your conversion rate grow.
1a.) Rank for Keywords with Buying Intent
A user’s intent depends on which stage of the buyer’s journey a user is.
It’s quite logical that users who just explore your product and users who are ready to complete an action (i.e. to buy) will search for your product with different keywords. This is because the search intent of these users is different.
Ideally, the content of your website has to cover all types of search intent to attract users at any stage of the buyer’s journey. This means your website has to feature various guides, reviews, and listicles in addition to homepage and product pages. But if your website is new, and you only start filling it up with content, you should move backwards, i.e. cover transactional intent first, then move to commercial investigation, then to informational intent.
1b.) Select Keywords That Convert
CRO is not the same as SEO, and keywords’ relevance is evaluated differently for these two optimizations. In SEO, you usually take keywords with high search volume, as they make your website seen by wider audiences and bring more impressions and visits. The truth is that these high-volume keywords bring broad audiences who are not necessarily interested in a purchase. So what you get is tonnes of visits and too few conversions.
Visits are what you need if you monetize your website via advertising. But when it comes to CRO, your keywords have to bring not just plain visits but actions. So this means you need to use keywords that target narrower but more relevant audiences. These keywords have to be more specific and less competitive — so I suggest trying long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords have proved their use for conversion, as they:
- attract the relevant audience, which is already interested in a purchase;
- are less competitive, so it’s easier to rank with them;
- already include short-tail keywords, so you kill two birds with one stone;
- have 2.5 times the conversion rate of short-tail keywords — no comments needed here.
2. Keep Users Within the Conversion Funnel
A conversion funnel is made up of three stages briefly mentioned above. These stages are Informational, Investigational, and Transactional.
What you should mind here is that the content that you create for the Informational and Investigational stages has to be functional, i.e. be a part of your conversion funnel and move users to the next funnel stage to reach transactional content:
- guide (informational) > listicle (investigational) > product (transactional)
- guide (informational) > review (investigational) > product (transactional)
- homepage (informational) > product page (investigational) > buy page (transactional)
3. Convert Web Visitors into Subscribers
Conversions can be divided into two types, micro conversions and macro conversions. Previously, we spoke mostly about macro conversions, i.e. conversions into money. In this section, let’s say a few words about micro conversions.
Micro conversions are the actions that don’t bring you money but move a user closer to the decision about a purchase, to a macro conversion. Micro conversions are, for example, sign-ups, or subscriptions to a newsletter.
A newsletter subscription is something you have to remind your visitors of, as those who visit your website just for fun will not share their information (emails) unless you kindly ask for it and offer something back.
There are different ways you can ask for users’ emails and sign them up to your newsletter:
- Pop-ups. Pop-ups appear “above” the page while scrolling or leaving it and offer users to leave their emails to get more information about your latest updates, special offers, discounts, news, etc. A pop-up should be easy to close if the user is not interested. Otherwise, it will become an intrusive interstitial and those are against Google guidelines.
- Subscription blocks. These forms are integrated into the content of the page. Subscription blocks should be visible, but not too repetitive.
- Gated content. Gated content is the content you give out only to those who subscribe to your newsletter. This is a great way to offer value to your users by letting them access exclusive content.
Pop-ups and subscription blocks can be used in combination. Say your page has a pop-up appearing on the top of the page and a subscription block at the bottom. Will this irritate users? No, as if a user shares an email via the pop-up, the block will just be ignored. Will this give you one more chance to micro convert users? Yes, as if a user did not share the email via a pop-up, they may do it later via the block.
As for the pages that are visited via transactional queries, you should consider removing subscription pop-ups out of there. As users who got there are ready to macro convert and leave you both money and an email without any further reminders. Don’t irritate them or slow the page down with unnecessary components.
4. Implement remarketing
Remarketing is the process of tracking visitors who have left your website without a conversion and showing them ads on other websites to drive these visitors back to your website and convert.
According to different surveys, the percentage of these non-converted first-time website visitors may vary from 84% to 96% depending on the industry. So it’s quite clear that this segment is huge, and you can try to convert them with remarketing.
To set up remarketing, you first need to add Google Ads Tag (tracking pixel) to your website to collect the data about your visitors. In your Google Ads admin, go to Tools & Settings > Shared Library > Audience Manager.
5. Optimize page experience
Page experience determines the success of your conversion rate, as users will immediately leave if your pages are slow and irritating. Moreover, as Google made page experience a ranking factor, you’re not likely to succeed in SEO and rank high if the UX of your pages leaves much to be desired.
Page experience is made up of Core Web Vitals and mobile optimization, so you have to track all the issues related to these two factors and fix them ASAP.
5a.) Check and fix Core Web Vitals issues
There are several ways to check your website for page experience issues. One of them is the good old Google Search Console. To check Core Web Vitals, go to Experience > Core Web Vitals and click on either Mobile or Desktop report (you’ll have to check both anyway) to investigate and fix the detected issues.
5b.)Optimize pages for mobile devices
To check if your pages are properly optimized for mobile devices, in Google Search Console go to Experience > Mobile Usability report. Scroll down to the Details section to see the list of affected problems.
As you can see, the issues are clearly described so you will not have to guess what is hidden between any abbreviation. Click on the error to see the list of the affected pages, and do the fixing.
To examine a page’s mobile-friendliness with WebSite Auditor, go to Page audit > Technical audit, enter the URL you want to check, and click on the Mobile friendly factor. If there are any issues detected on a page, the tool will label it with an error or a warning, and suggest what you should fix to make the page mobile-friendly.
6. Find what prevents users from conversion
You may find your users wandering through pages and dropping off the website not even reaching the target converting page. This behavior pattern shows that users are interested in what you offer, but cannot find the information they need for some reason — it may be because of poor user experience, actual absence of the info they need, or anything else. What you have to do is to carefully track your users’ behavior to see what they were looking for and why they failed.
The best way to track users’ behavior is Google Analytics. In your GA account, go to Reports > Behaviour > Behaviour flow and choose Landing page in the green drop-down menu upper-left in the workspace.
Track where exactly your users drop off and investigate why. Maybe the page is slow, non-informative, doesn’t respond properly, or there’s a redirect that points users to the wrong place.
If you have the search feature on your website, there’s another way to decrease the drop-off rate. You can check what your users search for on your website and on what pages and add the searched content to the pages. To do that, go to Behaviour > Site Search > Overview.
Here you can see what queries your users searched for most often. In the Site Content column, switch to Start Page to see what pages your users started searching from. These pages are to be investigated first.
After you figure out what your users miss, add this content to the relevant pages so that people get what they came for.
To sum it up
SEO and CRO are inseparable. You can drive traffic with SEO but what’s the use of it if your users don’t convert? That’s where the CRO comes. May this guide help you boost your conversions and profit.
Contact Frasca Digital today if you need help with SEO or CRO.
