Most of the marketers have come across this challenge; their website SEO and conversion rate optimization strategy are at conflict with each other. Efforts, where marketers put in to drive more traffic to the website, many times, do not result in conversions. But with user experience becoming crucial criteria for the search engines, both conversion rate and SEO website optimization are becoming an inter-related process for generating the best revenue.
You have to here understand some basic scenarios, for planning the right optimization strategy. While both Google and you have the same goal, which is providing the best content to the audience, you both follow different approaches to achieve the same!
Let’s understand in-depth:
- Google analyzes around millions of websites, while you as a marketer, analyze the behavior of a specific audience.
- Google uses more than 200 ranking signals for concluding which one of them should appear on the first page of the search results, while you develop the content which people will love to read and provide Meta information to help Google for a better understanding.
The different approaches make it difficult to increase the conversion rate, which is the ultimate goal of any organization, but by implementing an effective strategy, you can resolve this challenge. We have some of the crucial ones here:
Analyzing the Website Data
One piece of data on your website will not tell anything as to why your visitors are not getting converted as customers. You have to analyze the complete website content for understanding the pattern. Start analyzing all the content to check whether it aligns with the need of your potential customer, motivating them for CTAs.
As stated before, Google follows a different approach in ranking the website, so you should also ensure that, along with writing the content as per the needs of the user, the title should be optimized. Using popular titles as per the user search can help your website rank higher in the Google search engine results.
Conducting Proper Keyword Research
Keywords are very much necessary if you want to optimize your website content. As per a finding, 80% of the marketers and SEOs do not execute proper keyword research.
Without that, marketers waste their time pulling the wrong traffic, which does not result in conversions. So, carry out precise research and insert the right keywords in your website content.
Session Recordings
Session recordings help to understand the behavior of the customer in-depth. With this, as the customer visits the site, you can see every movement of the mouse, such as click, scroll, and pressing of the key on the site.
Session recording helps to find and fix the errors. There could be some errors on the website, which might lead to the drop in the conversions, proving costly for your organization if not fixed on time.
The below example is of the Audiense Limited, where the head of the product noticed a huge drop on the sign-up page. For which they checked the session recordings to understand what’s wrong with the process.
After a handful of sessions, it was found that the password validator feature has been broken in the sign-up form, which did not allow people to complete the sign-up process. The Audience team fixed the error within hours, thus bringing the conversions rate on the right path.
Clickbaits Text
Click baits text on the website motivates the readers to take the required action. Any person would like to save their time and money when they are purchasing a new product or service.
You can see here how, in the first image, it is mentioned schedule a demo today and in another Free 5min demo video, where the company is offering their instant demo service for free. This motivates the visitor for CTA as the message conveyed on the website shows that the time and money of the visitor would be saved. Speaking in terms of dollars works in many cases, but many users also look to save time.
There were 231 conversions, with 1814 visitors who clicked on the content.
Live Chat
Chat can be a game-changer to increase the conversion rate for your business, but many organizations are using it poorly.
As chat has the power to interact with the customers on the landing page directly, salespeople should utilize it appropriately. They can build a personal connection with the customer, which further helps to increase the conversion rate. A study by emarketer.com found that almost 60% of the customers would love to return to the business that offers the option of live chat.
You must have also observed that when you visit the website, many times you will get a pop-up message, “Hello, how can I help you?” The message might appear after 10, 30, or even 60 seconds. Through this chat option, you can interact directly with the sales representative, and ask your queries. This helps to increase the number of conversions, as direct interaction helps in a better understanding of the service, and motivating the prospect to purchase the service or product.
And as the age of AI approaches, chatbots are becoming a popular choice among many organizations. Chatbots, which are the form of conversational AI, and are designed to simplify the interactions between human and computers, can interact with a different conversational style. Chatbots can also be used as conversational AI for customer service.
Chatbots are more engaging and interactive. Just as you have different methods for pitching a product to your customer the same way you have multiple means of communicating with the audience, and you never know which would work for which customer. Automated chat bots are optimizing the process via meaningful conversations and at the time when the customer needs it.
Marketing Pop-up Messages
Marketing pop-up messages decrease the bounce rate and increase sales for your organization. It has been seen as one of the powerful lead generation tools. AWeber experiments have shown pop-ups, which helps in converting 1375% better than the traditional forms of marketing.
The top pop-ups give around a 9.28% conversion rate. Some of the effective pop-ups have seen the conversion rates up to 50.2%. It has been found that if a website gets 150 visitors per day, then it will have 418 signups in that month.
Sales/Lead Funnel
You have to optimize your sales funnel, be it middle, top, or at the bottom-line. Just check the below image where you can see the number of visitors who visited a specific website (21,609) and the number of final conversions (240). There is a huge difference, so what happened in between?
You should fix the leaky sales funnel immediately, otherwise, you are bound to lose much of the revenue and sales.
From the home page to the successful registration, you can see at each stage, there is a drop in number. You have to first understand why the customer did not move on from the home page to why join, and further to the next stage. Analysis at each stage of the funnel will ultimately put an end to the leakage.
Improving User Experience
User experience hugely matters, when it comes to website conversions. Most of the visitors who run through the website look for the right experience. For example, how easy they find it to navigate through all the pages, and finding what they need. Having a good user experience would leave the visitor completely satisfied, thus leading to conversions.
You can even ask the survey questions on the pages where the prospect visited. This will help to understand why a specific visitor did not get converted. Most of the time, a landing page is a great place for asking the survey questions. You can ask genuine questions about the performance of the website for collecting the overall experience as a whole.
For example, the question can be:
- How clear are you of what this page is offering?
- Can you explain what the product is?
- Does this page has the information which you were looking for?
- Which search term you used and found our website?
- How much likely are you going to recommend our product?
After acquiring all the answers, you can know why you didn’t get conversions. This will help to optimize the conversion rate shortly.
Speed Up Pages
This can be seen as the deal-maker or deal-breaker. Imagine yourself as a user when you fill-up the form, and the page takes it sweet time for getting submitted. Will you ever again fill the form of that website?
Most probably not!!!!
The same thing a user feels, they would leave the submission form halfway. It has been found that 47% of the consumers expect the website for loading in two seconds or less than that. 40% of them will abandon the page in three seconds or more than that.
This means you lose the customer before they even land into the page. A one-second delay decreases customer satisfaction by 16%.
In such cases, as a marketer, you have to make sure that all the pages of your site do get loaded fast.
You can also check the speed of your website on the Google page speed test, where you can check the speed in both the mobile and desktop. As the majority of the users check the website on these two, it will guide to increase the website speed for better user experience.
The top websites on the Google search engine results have one common thing. They had their sites optimized with the help of developers and designers, who had designed the site for speed.
Do you know that adding more images to your website can decrease the speed of your site?
Yes, very often, we add too many images to the website that decreases the speed of the site. In such cases, make sure that you download mainly the smaller versions of the image, and add that to your site.
You can compress the images to get it loaded faster on the website. Here there is not much noticeable difference in the quality of the image. The images can be compressed manually with the software such as ImageOptim, Adobe Photoshop, Squoosh, among others.
Producing Value-Rich Content
Producing value-rich content is highly essential in the current scenario. This is because if the user spends much time reading the content of that page, then Google automatically rates it as rich content, and ranks it higher on the search engine results.
You should develop unique, and interactive content to hold the attention of the reader and differentiate themselves from your competitors. As per the Snap App, almost 88% of the marketers agreed that interactive content differentiates themselves from the competition.
Interactive content can even lead to about 4-5 times more page views than static content.
Some of the benefits of interactive content are:
- Wider reach to the audience
- Release of creativity
- Better ranking of SEO
There are several effective ways to develop interactive content, including responsive charts, infographics, interactive video materials, quizzes, polls, surveys, and multiformat content types such as a HTML5 flipbook.
Having Explainer Videos And Visual Content
As per research was undertaken by marketing company Straight North, it was found that 84% of the website conversions occurred on the first visit itself, proving first impressions work!!!!
So, what creates the first impression?
To sum up, anything that is visually attractive, easily comprehendible, and hit the right chord with the customer can help in creating a positive impression about your organization.
Bright North, one of the providers of data feed technology, stated that high-quality images of the product help to convert three times higher than the low-quality images.
The majority of the customers are first attracted visually to any product or service, which you can say as the first impression. That might not always lead to conversion but can significantly increase the conversion rate.
You should not only design a great website but convey the information about your service precisely so that the potential customer can understand the various benefits of your service. Putting explainer videos on the website is one of the ways of creating interactive content which makes the right connection with the customer, and further increases the conversion rate. Videos increase the engagement rate with the user. It was found that an average explainer video is watched for about 2.7 minutes.
Salesforce, a leading American software company, increased the conversion rate by 20% just by adding one explainer video in the year 2012.
Most of the explainer videos which are from 60 seconds to 3 minutes of duration help to add the right proficiency to the company’s website. An explainer video on the website makes the visitor see your company as a reliable and dedicated one. It adds the visual learning factor making your service appealing to the customer as the creative scenarios and stories can mold the emotion of the audience.
Reviews On The Website
The customers are 63% more likely to purchase the product or service if they come up with a visual client review.
It is a common phenomenon nowadays, to check the reviews about a specific service or product before purchasing the same. In such cases, the best practice is to include some positive authenticated reviews from your existing customer on your website page to win the trust of your prospect.
A study even found that 88% of the consumers trust the reviews available online, as much as they trust personal recommendations. Almost 72% of the customers stated that positive reviews make them trust the business more.
Reviews act as proof for showcasing to your customer. Customers are more likely to buy from a company that’s recommended by others and have good reviews. American Trucks takes advantage of this by embedding its customer reviews directly in its truck parts product pages.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO), which has become the main focus of the SEO experts, has compelled many of them to add reviews on their site to increase the rate of conversions. Although, most of the time, you should include positive reviews, but never shy away to include few negative ones as well.
This will make the customer trust your set of reviews on the page as they would feel all the reviews are original. By creating the best image of your brand into their minds, you win the trust of your customer.
Wrap Up
Website conversions can be very complex, but as a marketer, if you know the basics, then it can help in generating more revenue, sales, and ROI for your organization.
Just focus by collecting enough data to conduct deep research on the keywords for the content.
Writing the content for your audience, but better than the competitors could also help in more conversions. The most crucial thing is that you have to make sure that the site loads fast on both the mobile and desktop. With users having less patience, close to eight seconds, which is one second less than a goldfish, you have to put your best in optimizing the website for more conversions.
