When implemented effectively, CRO strategies have the potential to significantly boost revenue by converting a higher percentage of visitors. This not only increases your income but also creates a competitive edge by enhancing your site’s user experience and reducing customer acquisition costs.
The strategic alignment of CRO with SEO practices is a powerful tool. It ensures that the increased traffic generated through SEO results in a higher conversion rate, thereby maximizing the value of your website visitors. This control over your digital marketing efforts is why using CRO tactics correctly is crucial so they won’t interfere with your SEO efforts.
While anyone can achieve a one-off increase in conversion rate, the key to sustained success lies in avoiding these eight common mistakes. Doing so ensures that your CRO tactics align with your SEO efforts, paving the way for maximum, long-term success.
1. Not Conducting Proper Keyword Research
Keyword research is fundamental to SEO and CRO because it provides insight into what potential customers are searching for and how to effectively meet their needs.
High-intent keywords indicate a user's strong interest in a particular product or service, making them more likely to convert. Understanding and targeting these keywords is vital for SEO and CRO, as they can help you attract the right traffic that is more likely to convert.
Sites often try to target overly broad keywords to generate more traffic. Yes, this common mistake may bring more people to your site. However, these visitors are likely not interested in your offerings, leading to low engagement and poor conversions because the keywords do not align with the specific intent of your target audience.
To avoid this pitfall, you can:
- Use practical tools and techniques for keyword research to identify high-intent keywords that signal a substantial likelihood of conversion.
- Refine your keyword strategy based on the insights gained from these tools.
- Analyze competitors’ keywords to identify gaps and opportunities.
- Understand your target audience's needs and pain points to select the most relevant keywords.
- Focus on high-intent keywords that align with user intent and are more likely to lead to conversions.
- Integrate these keywords into your content and calls to action to attract genuinely interested visitors.
- Enhance SEO and CRO by driving relevant traffic that is more likely to engage and convert.
By focusing on high-intent keywords and integrating them into your content and calls to action, you can attract interested visitors more likely to engage and convert, enhancing your SEO and CRO efforts.
2. Poorly Optimized Landing Pages
Optimized landing pages can help attract visitors to your page and serve as an entryway to the rest of your site (like a first impression). When designed to convert, landing pages can quickly turn visitors into customers. Landing pages optimized for search but cannot convert are missed opportunities.
Slow loading times are a common mistake when optimizing landing pages and can harm the user experience. Google values pages that create a good experience, meaning the better your page experience, the higher the chance of ranking.
Another common issue with landing pages is unoptimized content. When a page doesn’t align with a user’s intent at that moment, it can deter users from taking action.
To overcome these challenges, create SEO-friendly landing pages designed with conversions in mind. Start by:
- Optimizing page speed through techniques like image compression, minimizing code, and leveraging browser caching;
- Ensuring that the content on your landing page is relevant, easy to read, and directly addresses the visitor’s needs or pain points;
- Placing clear, compelling CTAs in prominent positions to guide users toward taking the desired action;
- Using A/B testing to experiment with different elements of your landing page, such as headlines, images, and CTA placement, to determine what works best for driving conversions.
Optimizing landing pages for SEO and CRO can help you create an effective “catch and convert” system that attracts visitors and converts them into customers.
3. Neglecting Mobile Optimization
Mobile optimization is a critical component of SEO. Users are increasingly using their mobile devices to search the internet, and as of July 5, 2024, Google no longer indexes inaccessible sites.
Poorly optimized mobile sites can frustrate visitors, who will likely leave the site quickly. This leads to higher bounce rates, lower conversion rates, and decreased rankings. You risk losing traffic and conversions, ultimately harming your SEO performance.
To avoid neglecting mobile optimization, you can:
- Implement a responsive design so your website automatically adjusts to different screen sizes;
- Optimize page load speed to fix issues that slow down the mobile version of your site;
- Simplify mobile navigation with easy-to-tap buttons;
- Create mobile-friendly content by breaking up larger paragraphs and using larger font;
- Test regularly on mobile devices to address any formatting issues;
- Prioritize mobile-first indexing by optimizing your mobile site as the primary version to ensure better SEO performance;
- Use accelerated mobile pages (AMP) to create fast-loading mobile pages.
Following these steps can help improve your site’s mobile experience, which leads to better CRO and SEO performance.
4. Overlooking User Intent
User intent refers to the underlying purpose behind a user’s search query. For example, when someone searches for “best running shoes,” they are most likely looking for articles comparing different shoe brands to make a more educated purchase. Search engines determine the intent of a page and then serve the ones that best match the search intent in the results pages.
A common mistake businesses make is misaligning their content with what users are actually searching for. Content that doesn’t match intent can lead to low engagement, high bounce rates, and poor conversion rates. It also signals to search engines that your content shouldn’t be ranked with that specific query, ultimately affecting your visibility in the results pages.
Creating buyer personas can help you better understand your audience’s needs. By developing detailed profiles of your target audience, including their goals, pain points, and the type of content they seek at different stages, you can craft content that resonates with their needs.
Understanding and aligning your content with user intent helps improve user engagement and conversion rates and enhance your SEO performance. This ensures that your site ranks well for the queries that matter most to your business.
5. Inadequate Internal Linking
When internal links are well-placed and strategically planned, they guide visitors through a logical flow, encouraging them to explore more of your site and increasing the likelihood of conversions.
However, neglecting this aspect can result in a disjointed user experience, where visitors struggle to find the information they need, leading to higher bounce rates and lower engagement.
From an SEO perspective, internal linking helps search engines understand your site's structure and the relationship between different pages. A weak internal linking strategy can make it difficult for search engines to crawl and index your content effectively, hurting your rankings.
To avoid these pitfalls, developing a comprehensive internal linking strategy is essential. Start by:
- Identify key site pages, such as cornerstone content or high-converting landing pages.
- Ensure these pages are well-linked throughout your site, both from within relevant blog posts and from other high-traffic pages.
- Use keyword-rich anchor text for your internal links to provide context for users and search engines.
- Implement breadcrumb navigation to provide users with a clear path to higher-level pages.
- Regularly audit your internal links to ensure they are still functioning correctly and leading to relevant content.
By prioritizing a well-structured internal linking strategy, you create a more navigable and user-friendly website, improve your SEO performance, and ultimately drive better conversion rates.
6. Failing to Optimize Meta Tags
Meta tags are often ignored but should be part of every SEO strategy. Optimized correctly, they can directly impact how your pages appear in search results, leading to more clicks.
Leaving them unoptimized may lead to misunderstandings about your page from users and search engines. Users may not understand what your pages are about and might not click on the link, leading to missed conversion opportunities. Low engagement could lower a site's visibility in the SERPs.
To avoid this, make sure to optimize meta tags with these best practices from Google:
- Give every page a meta description;
- Make every page’s meta description unique;
- Make meta descriptions relevant to the page;
- Use quality descriptions;
- Automate meta descriptions using page data by scraping the content (optional).
Regularly reviewing and updating your meta tags and descriptions is also important as your content evolves and search trends change. What worked a few months ago may no longer be effective, so staying on top of these elements ensures that your pages remain competitive in search rankings and continue to drive conversions.
7. Ignoring Analytics and Data
Data drives CRO and SEO. Data must support every decision to achieve optimal results. It’s not business-savvy to keep throwing money at random strategies that may not work. Instead, focusing on analytics can help drive a deep understanding of the best strategies.
CRO hinges on understanding user behavior, identifying patterns, and making informed adjustments to improve performance. Similarly, SEO relies on data to refine strategies, ensuring your site ranks well and attracts the right audience. When analytics are overlooked, you miss valuable insights that could help enhance your site’s effectiveness, leading to missed opportunities for higher rankings and improved conversion rates.
To avoid this mistake, you must regularly review and analyze your website’s data using tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other CRO platforms. Start by:
- Setting up clear goals and tracking relevant metrics;
- A/B test to experiment with different elements of your site;
- Establishing a regular audit to ensure your site is meeting your goals;
By prioritizing your website’s data, you empower your CRO and SEO strategies to be more effective. This approach enables you to promptly identify and address issues, optimize your site’s performance, and ultimately achieve better outcomes in search engine rankings and conversion rates.
8. Not Testing and Iterating
SEO can change drastically due to algorithm changes or user preferences. These changes can affect everything from your website visibility to compliance, and if you’re not testing different variations of your pages, you won’t understand what works and what doesn’t.
CRO helps you test your pages to make informed decisions on what’s working. Without testing and iterating, you miss opportunities to optimize your site for conversions and search engine rankings. Testing and continuous optimization ensure your site performs well in CRO and SEO, driving better results overall.
A/B testing is an effective way to test webpages to see which elements perform better regarding user experience. You can test different web page elements, such as headlines, images, CTAs, page layout, etc.
Without A/B testing, you rely on assumptions rather than data to decide about your website. This mistake can cost you conversions as well as your hard-won visibility in the SERPs.
Some best practices to keep in mind when A/B testing include:
- Avoid testing multiple elements simultaneously;
- Create the test using typical sales cycles;
- Ensure the test length is long enough;
These best practices can help ensure the data you collect is accurate. Another common mistake people make is stopping after the first test. A/B tests build upon each other, making them dynamic. You may have found the correct headline, but what about the font color or size? Iterating tests can help you determine the best possible elements for your site.
These eight common mistakes not only undermine your website’s ability to convert visitors to customers but can also harm your visibility in the SERPs, making your site more challenging to find. Understanding the connections between CRO and SEO can help you build a more holistic approach to your digital marketing strategy that supports both user experience and search engine rankings.
