4 ways to improve conversion with SEO
One of the biggest SEO mistakes that website owners make is forgetting to optimize their content for conversion.
Think about it …
Your SEO could be generating 1,000s of organic visitors every month. But if those visitors aren’t taking any action, then what’s the point?
Every piece of content on your site – whether created for SEO, PPC or even just branding – should be optimized to increase conversion.
Here are 4 ways to improve it, based on insight from Marketing Land.
1) Optimize entry page ‘scent’
Page ‘scent’ are the clues that give users an idea of what they’ll find on a page before they enter. For SEO traffic, that’s usually the snippet of text in search engine results pages (SERPS).
If the text on that snippet doesn’t match up with the landing page, they’ll drop off in a second. So it’s critical to optimize your meta descriptions and page titles to make the messaging consistent.
2) Use A/B testing
Treat your SEO content like any other landing page. That means split-testing various content to see which performs best.
Follow Google’s best practices for doing A/B testing properly. Running multivariate tests will not harm your ranking as long as you’re not dramatically changing the content from the original version. (If you do, Google bots may view this as “cloaking,” which is a no-no.)
3) Improve page load time
We can’t stress this enough: faster pages come with higher conversion rates – and that absolutely applies to your SEO too.
Eliminate excess code and images from pages. Use caching, minification and CDN (content delivery network) to speed up load time as much as possible.
4) Incorporate videos
Videos can help to reduce drop-off rates. And the longer people stay on your page, the more likely they are to convert.
Salesforce found that adding explainer videos to its pages increased conversion rates by 20%.
Not all videos will automatically boost conversions, so be sure to continue testing, monitoring and optimizing accordingly.
