How Does CRO Work with SEO and PPC?

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the way to make the most out of your users’ experience when they visit your website, guiding them to complete whatever action aligns with your business goals.

CRO is important as a standalone concept, but also works very closely with search engine optimisation (SEO) and PPC pay per click (PPC).

Today, we’ll show you how.

Being discoverable

When customers know how to find you, you are setting yourself up for success.

PPC and SEO are key players in this space – and they work together in many ways.

How to be discoverable with SEO

SEO is entirely focused around one goal: getting your website to show on Google’s search engine result page (along with other search engines) organically.

How you go about doing this will vary depending on your current website, audience, and marketing strategy.

At QueryClick, we help big brands like Sally Salon Services, Tesco Mobile and QUIZ Clothing to target their unique opportunities for growth and develop a data driven strategy to increase performance – helping our clients become more discoverable across the search landscape.

How to be discoverable with PPC

PPC allows businesses to put their ads in front of their target audience through bidding and paying for clicks. There are two key components that determine what you will actually pay for a click – your maximum CPC bid and your Quality Score.

By building a great strategy with constant testing, you can be visible to the right people at the right time, driving them to your site.

What being discoverable means for CRO

Optimising the content on your website to increase conversions will have very little impact if no one is visiting you. PPC and SEO can work together to maximise the traffic to your site – this in turn supercharges your CRO strategy by providing a whole lot more traffic to actually convert!

Beyond just the immediate need for quality traffic to drive conversions, there’s another way in which increased discoverability drives and shapes CRO – by providing enough user data to make good decisions.

The cornerstone of good CRO is understanding how your users interact with your site, often measured through user testing and analytics.

To have any sort of confidence in these measurements, you need enough data for them to be statistically significant. So, the more users you’re bringing on site via different channels, the more data you’re getting to help further refine your CRO strategy. It’s a win-win.

Increased traffic isn’t enough

How many times have you landed on a website that you simply couldn’t navigate?

Chances are, you left quickly.

Even if you have the perfect social media posts and your CTAs down to a science, if your website is confusing, slow or unresponsive you’re going to lose potential customers.

SEO, PPC and CRO go hand-in-hand

SEO, PPC and CRO – they need each other. Your approach to each must consider what the other is doing.

On the one hand, there’s no point in having a perfectly optimised website if you don’t have any new visitors. Gaining traffic through different stages of the customer lifecycle can happen with a fool proof PPC and SEO strategy.

On the other hand, you can drive all the traffic in the world to your site, but if it’s not user-friendly then that traffic is not going to convert.

So, all that effort (and money) on PPC and SEO is going to waste without effective CRO.

Understanding how customer’s expectations differ

Each visitor, depending on where they are at in their conversion journey, will have different goals.

Ensuring that the page they land on is optimised for that goal is a must.

Let’s pretend you’re a sustainable soap company:

• You have a blog where you target questions that people ask around your product, and a wider look at the sustainable lifestyle based on keyword research. Accompanying that, you have a PPC strategy that targets short-tail transactional keywords that you’re not ranking for yet.
  
• The on-page experience a user receives should differ based on where they are in this customer journey.
  
• If someone clicks on a blog about sustainability, perhaps we will offer “a 10% discount when you sign up for our newsletter”, specifically for first time buyers.
  
• If a customer who already knows your brand, clicks through a PPC ad, we should take them directly to purchase the product they are looking for with no messy pop ups or buttons to distract.

In this way, we personalise and optimise content for the user’s intent; and crucially we tie this back to our SEO and PPC work to ensure that messaging is consistent from the first time they see our brand, right through to them converting onsite.

Formatting the content around the conversion you would like that user to make depending on the stage they are in is key.

Saving money with cross channel strategies

With PPC there’s an added bonus to considering CRO on landing pages. Not only will it help you convert more of the traffic you win, it can also actually save you money…

With PPC you pay for each click. The cost of these clicks is based on two main things, your maximum bid and your Quality Score.

The Quality score is measured on a scale of 1 to 10. Three main components of Quality Score are:

• expected CTR,
• ad relevance
• and landing page experience.

A quality CRO strategy will help optimise for this third point – landing page experience. Improving this helps raise the quality score of the page, which in turn brings down the cost you pay for each click you win.

CRO is great for your users and your wallet.

Time to put your SEO, PPC and CRO strategies together

There is simply no one size fits all, however our blog has some resources to get you started.

If you are ready to take your strategy to the next level, get in touch with our team of CRO experts below!