CRO vs SEO - Which Should Businesses Be Focussing On?

Are you planning to start an e-commerce business? What you need is the right kind of site for it. Have you collected all the information about the existing e-commerce sites in your industry? You have guessed right. What it means is that you have to assess the level of competition you have to face. It is often said that a website is the face of any business and if your website is not well optimized then you are going to suffer from lack of traffic. Many people are very happy with the initial surge of traffic on their website but often see that although there is traffic it is not converting into good business. This is where Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) can be confused with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Internet marketing is no longer an option but it has become an essential part of business today. The website is an important tool that all business use today to promote their brand and their products among their targeted customers. On one hand CRO experts concentrate on how to increase conversion rate, whereas SEO experts on how to get more traffic to the site. Conversion rate optimization requires time and resources and testing to get the best solution.

There are a number of things you can do to increase your conversion rate of your business, among them are:

• Write strong, easily clicking PPC ads – this is important as for higher conversion you need PPC ads highly relevant to the keyword/search query and your intended audience. It would be still better if you're targeting intensive mid-tail and long tail keywords that show a person who is late in the buying cycle, as these consumers may buy what you are offering.
• Maintain a degree of relevance between your ads and corresponding landing pages - Your landing page should deliver what it promises in the ad meaning it should coax customers into taking action and also make it simple for the visitor to complete that action, whether it is signing up for a newsletter, downloading a white paper or purchasing a good.
• Test the design of your landing page - Conduct A/B testing to find the right layout, copy, and colors that help to increase the number of site visitors to fill out your form, call in, or otherwise convert to a valuable lead or customer.

Conversion Rate Optimization, CRO, is the method of increasing sales and leads you get from a website, without having to increase the traffic for the website. By optimizing or improving your conversion rate you can get more people to take more action/buy without spending money on ways to generate traffic or marketing budget. “Traffic” is only one of the ingredients of success and it helps to get people to your site, but if those people are just getting there and not taking any action or whatever your conversion goal you have for your website, it also goes down to nothing. This is where CRO becomes important.

SEO helps to drive traffic, build your brand, and grow your website but is it enough? Return On Investment (ROI ) calculation from organic traffic is still possible but how can one measure the effectiveness of any one campaign or the expenditure of a given year? In Conversion rate optimization it is much easier to estimate ROI since one only needs to compare new c/r vs. baseline c/r for the site or page being optimized. Thus, in other words you can say that ROI from CRO is much higher than SEO. So, now it becomes very difficult for any business to choose between the two.

 Here we will provide you with a few tips, which will help to make your decision easier and help you to get higher conversion rates, as after all that is what we are seeking:

1.    Increased sales drives up the ROI – If you stop investing in SEO you soon see traffic falling and within some sometime you will have to invest once again to start getting good traffic. But with conversion rate optimization (CRO), your copywriting, web design, and programming problems are fixed. With CRO, you'll get a new conversion rate after testing over a good chunk of sample size enabling you to get a new baseline rate. Now until there is a huge change to the way of doing business or a turnaround of some kind, the increased sales from the higher conversion rate will keep increasing the ROI for the coming years. For SEO, the site may get some rankings but once they drop below the first 5 positions for any important keyword, the traffic keeps going down and eventually the sales dry up. In some cases, a keyword can fall below the top 5 rankings in just a few weeks once it stops getting direct investment and work. But for CRO, you can be still generating a good ROI for long, long after the work is done and there is no need for further investment.

2.    CRO does not need extra marketing cost – the main drawback of SEO to increase sales is that in SEO, you have to keep investing over and over again just to maintain your current sales. Or in other words to increase your sales, you have to invest more which increases your budget by whole lot. That a good amount of every new sale is being eaten away by your SEO budget which is ultimately eroding away your profits. But CRO services do not require any additional investment for marketing to get additional sales. In CRO they do web traffic analysis on the various traffic sources, and learn how to get more conversions out of existing visitors. So every conversion from CRO comes with no added cost to the marketing budget and this amount is the genuine profit for the business. CRO is very profitable for sites whose most of the profit from sales is eaten away by online marketing costs. Sites using PPC, conversion rate optimization are preferred today as their experts can actually help reduce marketing cost by looking for and getting rid of non result giving keywords from ad campaigns. So, in many ways conversion rate optimization is much better compared to SEO as it helps to generate more profit without having to spend too much on the marketing budget for the site.

3.    CRO can make SEO investments profitable – A good and strong SEO is very important for the success of any online business. In these few points we are not trying to show which is better or worse, SEO or CRO but are trying to make you understand, how to get the maximum ROI by investing a limited amount of capital in the business. This is the most important point for us to know today and what we all want is nothing but the best for our business. So, the third reason why you should invest in CRO because it helps you to earn more profit without having to invest too much in marketing strategies. It is also not necessary that all traffic channels will see a great increase in conversions after CRO is done. So if your conversion rate is rising, it means that you have high-quality CRO, you are benefiting and sending good content quality signals and with good content quality, Google gives you a higher ranking which would lead people to believe you are offering better quality stuff. This also helps you to get better user and usage data meaning the more people are taking action and fewer people are bouncing away. It also means that more time people are spending on your site, the more they are engaging with you.

4.    It is free - CRO capitalizes on traffic you already have. This means you don’t have to invest more money getting visitors to your site, but are being able to convert them once they get there. Optimization increases the return on your present investments, and helps to convert a high number of your visitors which is much more profitable than getting new ones.

5.    CRO helps to get more attention from visitors – if you have a good landing page and quality content, visitors are going to stay on the page longer than just visit and leave the page without any necessary action. Thus, CRO helps to get customers to stay on the page longer and take the necessary action required.

The results show that ROI from CRO is higher than the returns from SEO and will continue to increase even after the job is done. By not increasing or even reducing marketing costs, the new sales got from CRO are more profitable to the business than new sales got from SEO. So, to increase the overall conversion rate to make all future investment more profitable, it is evident that CRO services generate more profit. SEO is absolutely necessary for any online success so the best solution is to invest in CRO first and only then begin a new SEO campaign. Get a relevant and high quality landing page with compelling headline, concise and eye catching call to action, attractive overall design and lastly an easy user friendly lead capture form which will provide a valuable boost to the CRO. There will be no need to invest too much on these but you can reap the benefits of these actions for a long time to come.

The goal of CRO is not always to get visitors to convert. It is to make easy the journey of an already interested or engaged visitor through your website until they find what they have been looking for. Conversion’ may not necessarily be a purchase only. It can mean an email sign-up, the creation of an account, the completion of a survey, or even an app download.

So, the actual goal of your website is a conversion, which is the successful completion of some action. Thus, Conversion Rate (CR) is a key figure in ecommerce as it reveals the how much of the total traffic is taking the required action you want them to. The higher the conversion rate the better it is for a website and its future.

Subscribe to my blog here - https://abdullabasha.com