May 18, 2020

If you are remotely involved in running a business, you are familiar with the term ROI. Attend just one meeting about your company’s website and you’ll know about SEO.  One relatively newer marketing acronym you might not be familiar with is CRO. What does this stand for? How is it relevant to your business activity?

It stands for Conversion Rate Optimization, and one might accurately describe it as the bridge that connects your SEO efforts to improving your ROI.

Behind the Door

What is the connection to SEO? Like traditional advertising, SEO has a goal of delivering strangers to your virtual front door.  At that point, it’s up to you to turn those strangers into customers.  Good CRO means that the content and design of your website entices and encourages your visitors to convert into customers… or at least into leads, volunteering their email address or otherwise registering to receive more information from you in the future.  In this sense, CRO is applicable to your social media content, optimized to maximize your likes and followers that may soon turn into sales.

Conversations Create Conversions

Why is CRO important? Visitors look for the same things in web content that they like about personal conversations. Interesting, useful information that’s somewhat personalized and clearly presented. CRO is usually targeted mainly at your home page or landing page, but opportunity for conversion (via thoughtful, conversational content) should be found throughout your site. Functions for user feedback will not only give you valuable direction for your CRO direction, but will make the visit interactive and feel more like a literal conversation.

Optimization Overlap

Your SEO and CRO aren’t just connected elements in the sales process.  They overlap, in the sense that your efforts to improve one will also affect the other. SEO (properly executed) will drive more visitors to your site, giving you more experience with how users interact with your site. This experience will guide your CRO as you discover what your visitors respond to.  Then, as the content of your site improves via your CRO efforts, the search engines will index this new content and improve your results when your most highly-potential customers perform searches. And of course as SEO and CRO are both personalized to your most optimal customers’ tastes, the increase of your ROI will swiftly follow.

Keys to Quality Content

How do you optimize content? Every business has a different audience, and your content must be tailored as personally as you can to what you know about your best customers. That being said, some cornerstones of good content are largely universal. This topic deserves its own post to itself (stay tuned!), but a good guideline to follow for all of your content is to keep your message simple, but explain it thoroughly. That may feel like contradictory advice, but as in most areas of life, there’s a balance to be found. Be clear and concise, but be as comprehensive as you can.

Conclusion

To summarize and return to the analogy of the virtual storefront, successful business owners must drive traffic to their front door while maintaining a positive and useful experience behind the door.  Bringing someone to your site or your social media feed, only to disappoint them, is worse than never reaching them at all.  Proper SEO combined with thoughtful CRO will bring strangers through your door, make them glad they came, and eager to return. There are numerous factors to take into account and Mosaic Media is always available if you need us.