How to Use SEO to Improve Conversion Rate Optimization

One of the best parts about search engine optimization is that not only is organic traffic some of the most valuable you can get, you can use the process of SEO to improve your conversion rate as well. For that, your SEO audit tool is your best friend.

That’s because, you need to keep track of your conversions closely to improve your conversion rate. Before we talk about more such strategies to improve your conversion rate, let’s take a closer look at the basics.

Let’s begin by looking at what conversion rate optimization is and then move on to understanding how you can improve your conversion rate.

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Disclosure: Please note that a few of the links in this article are actually affiliate links. This means that if you click on them, I will get a commission, without any extra cost to you. So, feel free to check these out as I only recommend products or services that I personally tested and highly recommend. For more information, please read my affiliate disclosure in my privacy policy.

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What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Since you’re reading an article on this blog, you probably already know what conversion rate optimization is. But I’d like to make sure we’re all on the same page.

Wikipedia defines “conversion rate optimization” as “a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that convert into customers, or more generally, take any desired action on a webpage.”

Boil that down and it’s basically finding out where and why users abandon the conversion and then fixing it. It’s an important insight to know if you want to improve your conversion rate.

The key concept behind CRO is maximizing the value of your traffic, not necessarily getting new visitors to your site. This distinction really matters. Forcing more water through a leaky pipe will fill your bucket, but fixing the pipe will save you time and money doing it.

Now, a short vocab lesson. While some of you might be familiar with these concepts, everyone should know them.

• Conversion: The desired action you want a user to take on your website. This could mean anything from a purchase to an email sign-up. It’s anything that turns a site visitor to a customer or lead.
• Conversion rate: This is the percentage of website visitors who finish the conversion process. You can calculate this mathematically as (Number of conversions/Total number of website visitors) * 100.
• Call-to-Action (CTA): A directive to the user to take an instant action. Usually, CTA buttons (or links) use vocabulary like “buy,” “sign up,” or “order,” but this depends on your website’s goal. CTAs also typically use “now” or some other timely word to create a sense of urgency.
• Conversion/Sales funnel: This is the path visitors take to conversion. This could be, for example, a funnel of home page, category page, product page, and finally, check out.
• Exit rate: The rate of users who leave your site after viewing a page. This isn’t the same as a bounce rate, because it also includes people who land on the page from elsewhere on your site.
• Abandonment rate: The rate of people who leave the conversion funnel before completing the desired action. This is sometimes known as “shopping cart abandonment rate.”

How Does SEO Improve Conversion Rate Optimization?

SEO is an ideal medium to improve your conversion rate. It’s a strategy that is aimed at boosting your website’s visibility on search engines. At the same time, SEO factors can also help make the website more user-friendly. So, it’s a double-win!

Let’s take a look at the most important SEO factors that can improve conversion rate optimization.

Mobile Friendliness

Just like more traditional factors like links, mobile-friendliness is an important SEO ranking signal. Auditing your mobile-friendliness is a great way to find areas that are turning your mobile visitors off from converting.

But hey, you might be thinking, mobile users, don’t convert anyway. Well, hay is for horses.

True, the mobile conversion rate is generally below half of the desktop conversion rate. But when you break that down by device, you see that tablet conversion rate is about even with desktop, and smartphone conversion rate is trending up every year.

So, if you want to improve your conversion rate, you can’t afford to ignore mobile devices.

Audit to gauge your website’s mobile-friendliness will show you where you can improve your mobile user experience to make users more likely to convert:

• Touchscreen readiness
• Mobile page speed
• Content legibility
• Compatibility with mobile browsers

Even if you don’t have an ecommerce site, or use your website to drive conversions, your mobile SEO will still impact your in-store sales. The majority of visitors from local search results result in a store visit within 24 hours.

It’s thus essential to design a responsive website. This will ensure that it’ll fit perfectly on all screen sizes.

As a result, your visitors will have a better experience browsing it. Your goal should be to give them the best experience possible to improve their chances of conversion.

Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites while ranking websites. Hence, when you improve your SEO, you also give a boost to your conversion rates.

Site Speed

Long page load time is the best way to make both humans and crawlers leave your website. In fact, if it takes more than three seconds to load more than half of users will leave your site with 80% of them never coming back.

Additionally, a 100-millisecond delay in your page loading speed can decrease your conversion rates by almost 7%. When your page loads quickly, your customers will find it easier to browse through your website and this could reduce your bounce rate.

A good SEO audit will alert you if your page is too slow, and find the bottlenecks that are slowing it down.

Shaving valuable seconds off of your site’s latency can improve your conversion rate and provide a huge boost to your sales. Just ask Amazon.

To check your page loading speed, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights.

All you need to do is enter your website and the tool will provide a score based on your page loading speed. It will also provide a list of improvements that you can implement on your website to improve your page loading speed.

Alternatively, you can use the mobile speed test tool from Google to check your page loading speed for mobile.

Site Navigation Issues

People move around the web, including your site, by following links. Broken links on your site is like closing the gate to your store’s parking lot. When you’re trying to improve your conversion rate, that’s a big red flag.

If no one can get through, they can’t give you any money. Google also hates broken links because they make their job a lot harder.

An SEO audit will find your website’s broken links, allowing you to open that gate and get traffic flowing back to your store.

Remember, broken links can spoil the browsing experience of your visitors. This, in turn, can harm your conversion rates. Instead, if your website is able to offer a smooth browsing experience, you may notice an improvement in your SEO and conversion rates.

Custom Error Pages

This is related to broken link issues on your site. When someone accidentally links to a URL on your domain that doesn’t exist, they need to have a place to land dedicated to getting them to where they’re trying to go.

404 errors (aka not found errors) are some of the most common errors your users will encounter. And these errors are very, very frustrating, especially if they land on a generic error page.

These generic pages are pretty much blank (save maybe a few lines about the URL not existing), giving them no real options but to give up and close the window. This can cause the visitors to navigate away from your website. And your SEO and conversion rates will take a hit in this case.

Instead, you should create a custom page with helpful text and links to get them off the error page. Include some fun images to ease the blow.

Plus, 404 pages are a great way to build some positive brand awareness. They’re a great way to reinforce your culture and values. You can even get some good press out of them (people love sharing funny 404 pages).

While custom 404 pages will still result in Google recording a crawl error, its crawler will have the ability to find your homepage.

One way of customizing your 404 pages is by adding a menu to them. This can help your visitors move to other pages of your website with ease. Through this method, you can reduce the chances of them navigating away from your website.

HTTPS Security

If you sell products on your website, or even if you just collect emails for newsletter and promotions, your audience needs to feel secure while giving away their information. An SEO audit will verify that your website is truly as secure as it can be.

If you’re using a complete SEO audit tool it will include an SEO crawler feature that finds all instances of non-HTTPS URLs on your website. This step is very, very important, even if you have an SSL certificate.

Secure URLs with non-HTTPS images, scripts or videos will throw up a big scary red warning page in users’ browsers.

That’s a really good way to make sure no one visits your website, much less converts.

Additionally, Google has added HTTPS as a ranking signal for websites. If your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate or has some security loopholes, there are good chances that it will negatively affect your rankings in the search engines.

Increase Duration of Visits with Visuals

One of the important factors for your website’s success is the time spent by each visitor on your website. There is a good chance of improvement in your website’s rankings if a visitor stays longer on your website.

But how much time is good enough for SEO and CRO? If the duration of visit is less than 30 seconds, it’s quite poor. However, if it ranges between 30 seconds and 2 minutes, it’s pretty good. And a duration of more than 2 minutes is commendable.

Using visuals is an easy solution to increase the time spent by visitors on your website. You can create educational videos talking about your products or services and display them on your website. Such videos will help you communicate your brand’s values as well as product benefits. They can also help you increase page engagement.

The Chrome extension, Zest, is a great example of a site that uses visuals effectively. They have been quite creative with their homepage. With every scroll, it changes dynamically to show useful information.

Image Source – Zest

The idea is to keep visitors on your website for longer. When the time on site increases, it improves your SEO as the search engine understands that the visitor found what they were looking for on your website.

Additionally, when people continue browsing your website for a long time, they may end up making a purchase from you.

Quality Content

There is no doubt that when a website has rich content, it helps improve the ranking of the website. And if such content is informative, useful, easy to understand and relevant to visitors, it can encourage them to convert.

Useful content encourages a user to spend more time on your website. It can even motivate and encourage them to make a purchase. Informative content like FAQs can help answer the questions of visitors and equip them with information that can push them to convert.

You can use various types of content to target individuals across all categories and age groups and guide them towards conversions.

Good content is not just filler for your website. It’s an important attribute of SEO and crucial for improving conversion rate. Quality content ensures that people remain on your website for longer. This increases their time on site and reduces your bounce rate. These factors can help improve your website’s SEO.

Additionally, quality content incorporates keywords in the right manner without any stuffing. This can also help search engine crawlers understand what your page is all about with ease.

As a result, your SEO improves. This, in turn, can drive more visitors to your website and improve your conversion rate.

Page Optimization

To improve your search rankings, it is important that you fill your description tags with relevant information and keywords. Description tags include title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and alt text on images. It helps search engines decide whether your website is appropriate and relevant to a user’s search query.

How does this help convert your visitors? The keywords and information in your description tags will help users gain clear information about your webpage.

This can push them to open your website from Google’s SERPs. When your CTR (click-through rate) improves, it can improve your rankings in the search results. This, in turn, can bring in more visitors to your website.

Additionally, the tags will help your visitors get a better understanding of your products and services. Based on this, they can make quicker decisions about your services and products. This can improve your conversion rates.

When you incorporate your keywords well into these tags, it becomes easy for search engine spiders to understand what your page is all about. This, in turn, can help in improving your SEO.

Use Long-Tail Keywords

When identifying keywords, make sure you have a good combination of short as well as long-tail keywords. Generic or short keywords can help generate large quantities of traffic to your website, while long-tail keywords can generate quality traffic. So it is important to have a balanced combination of keywords to achieve your SEO goals.

Make sure you use long-tail keywords related to your products and services. Try to avoid using keywords that are very common. By using long-tail keywords, your website may rank for searches performed by a fewer number of people. However, they generally generate a better quality of traffic to your website, leading to high conversion rates.

If you have recently launched your website, I strongly recommend using long-tail keywords. Use long-tail keywords which have low competition but are capable of generating a decent volume of traffic to your website.

There are many tools available that can help you find relevant long-tail keywords. Tools like Semrush, KeySearch, Moz Keyword Explorer, and Google Keyword Planner can help you minimize the guesswork and find long-tail keywords easily and quickly.

You can also find keywords that your competitors are ranking for and incorporate those keywords into your content strategy. You can create more comprehensive content copy to improve your chances of ranking higher than them for those keywords.

Internal Links

Internal links are crucial for your SEO and can help improve your conversion rate as well. They can help search engine spiders discover new and related content on your website with ease. This, in turn, helps in quicker indexation.

Additionally, internal links can help your visitors find content or products that are relevant for them. This can push them to visit more pages on your website. As a result, your time on site and bounce rate metrics will improve. This will have a positive effect on your SEO.

At the same time, when your visitors will see more content on your website, they may be more likely to convert. This can improve your conversion rate.

Get Those Conversions

The nine things listed above are very important for getting Google to visit your page and to add it to their index. They’re also vital for ranking at the top for your target keywords. And, luckily for the busy marketer, they also cover all the important elements of optimizing a website to improve the conversion rate.

So if you find that you have trouble attracting and converting visitors to your website, run a detailed SEO audit to help unlock the potential of your website.

Do you have any tips to improve conversion rate? Please let us know in the comments below.

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Disclosure: Please note that a few of the links in this article are actually affiliate links. This means that if you click on them, I will get a commission, without any extra cost to you. So, feel free to check these out as I only recommend products or services that I personally tested and highly recommend. For more information, please read my affiliate disclosure in my privacy policy.