SEO and CRO: A symbiotic relationship for growth

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are two of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s arsenal.

Search Engine Optimization is about understanding how search engines index and rank content. Using this understanding, SEO’s aim to maximize the visibility of website’s or other digital assets in search engines

CRO is the process of testing two or more versions of a webpage against each other to determine which one performs better. This involves changing elements such as design, layout, copy, and images to see which version results in more conversions. This process helps businesses to make data-driven decisions about website design and user experience.

At a high level, how we like to look at it is that SEO is one of the ways to “get attention” driving users to your page and, and CRO happens once you have someone’s attention and want to remove their barriers and increase their motivation to take an action.

As enterprises continue to expand their online presence, they must stay ahead of the competition. This is where CRO, SEO, and UX Research come into play. These practices work hand in hand to improve the online presence of a company, leading to increased traffic, conversions, and ultimately, revenue.

In SEO, efforts are focused on optimizing search results to reflect user intent. User intent refers to the reason behind a search query, and it can be classified into four categories: navigational, informational, commercial, and transactional.

Navigational intent refers to when a user is looking for a specific page or website. In this case, the user already knows what they are looking for and is trying to find it quickly. For example, a user might search for “Apple” if they want to visit the Apple website.

Informational intent refers to when a user is looking to learn more about a particular topic. In this case, the user is trying to gather information and might not have a specific website or page in mind. For example, a user might search for “best restaurants in Seattle” if they are planning a trip and want to find some recommendations.

Commercial intent refers to when a user is researching products or services before making a decision on what to buy. In this case, the user is interested in buying something but wants to compare different options first. For example, a user might search for “best cell phone” if they are looking to upgrade their phone.

Transactional intent refers to when a user wants to complete a specific action, usually a purchase. In this case, the user has already decided to buy something and is looking for a place to do so. For example, a user might search for “buy Adidas shoes online” if they want to purchase a specific brand of shoes.

Often the key when approaching intent for keywords is to understand where a brand wants to be positioned, and how search engines approach presenting the ‘right’ result for a term. For example, do you want to strategically focus on high volume top of the funnel terms for the purpose of brand awareness, or on lower volume bottom of the funnel terms to focus directly on conversions? We can optimize our web pages to provide the information that users are looking for, which can increase click-through rates and ultimately drive more conversions.

Mixed Methods is the intricate process in which different methodologies are combined to generate different types of insights. Some of these techniques are quantitative in nature, like CRO and some are qualitative such as certain User Experience Research (UX Research) methodologies.

Utilizing mixed methods helps teams keep a constant pulse on the visitors of their site, and help:

1. Understanding users and identifying hypotheses: UX Research helps us understand what’s most important, or what causes the biggest friction for prospects and customers. This allows us to prioritize which are likely to be the most impactful testing hypotheses.
2. Avoiding stagnation through constant innovation: By utilizing the synergies created by UX Research and A/B testing, teams can continually be ideating, testing and iterating, supporting the business’ growth and keeping ahead of the curve.

There exists a common misconception that CRO is bad for SEO. While there are several high level risks that we discuss in a later section, there are a multitude of reasons that combining CRO and SEO is not only a winning strategy, but can drive bottom line revenue at your organization.

When CRO and SEO are combined effectively, they result in significant benefits for enterprises.

1. Improved User Experience

CRO and SEO can both improve the user experience of a website. By testing different versions of a webpage, businesses can identify which design elements, layout, or copy works best for an intended audience. Optimizing a website for search intent ensures that users find what they are looking for when they search for relevant keywords, resulting in a positive user experience. With a positive user experience users stay on websites longer and don’t bounce back to Google rankings and send Google negative signals that your website didn’t solve their need.

2. Increased Conversion Rates

CRO leads to increased conversion rates by optimizing a website’s design and user experience. Additionally, SEO ensures that the website ranks for the relevant keywords that users search for, leading to more qualified traffic. Together, these practices can increase conversion rates and ultimately revenue for businesses. Similarly, with increased conversion rates these are signals to search engines that users are finding what they need and this site should rank higher.

3. Improved Search Engine Rankings

Optimizing a website for search intent can lead to improved search engine rankings. By ensuring that a website’s content aligns with user intent, search engines will recognize the website as an authoritative source and rank it higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).

In a similar way, the improvements to user experience, content layout and design informed by CRO data can help to improve on content that is already properly optimized for relevant keywords in organic search. CRO input can therefore often be valuable in further improving the organic ranking potential of content.

4. Cost-Effectiveness

CRO and SEO are both cost-effective practices that can deliver significant return on investment. By identifying the design elements that work best for their audience, businesses can improve their website’s user experience without investing in expensive redesigns. Additionally, SEO ensures that the website ranks for the relevant keywords, resulting in more qualified traffic without the need for expensive advertising campaigns.

CRO and SEO are essential practices that enterprises should integrate into their digital marketing strategy. Combining CRO and SEO can be a powerful strategy for increasing sales. By understanding user intent and testing different versions of our pages, we can optimize to provide the information that users are looking for and encourage them to take action.

CRO and SEO work best together, however there are some nuances and potential pitfalls to look out for and we’ve outlined some of the most relevant and common considerations when applying both.

Potential unintended consequences

Given that both SEO and CRO are based on making alterations to the content of a website–whether from a design standpoint, or a content standpoint, or even both–without proper communication between the stakeholders responsible for these two disciplines, you run the risk of negatively impacting the performance of each one.

Say, for example, the CRO team substantially changes or even removes the content of a page as part of their optimisation efforts. While their data showed that this may have been the right decision in terms of the conversion rate of the page, what they didn’t consider is that this same content had been properly structured and optimized for relevant organic keywords. As a result, removing this content leads to a substantial reduction in organic traffic to the page due to lost visibility in Google’s SERPs.

Of course, this example works in reverse too. For example, if the SEO team adds content to a page or amend its structure in order to better rank for relevant keywords in Google’s SERPs, they could severely impact the conversion rate of that same page. Say that these changes added a substantial amount of content to a URL that converted its users at a high rate precisely because it was short and to the point, the organic traffic to that same URL may well increase, but it may also lead to a drastic reduction in conversions.

In order to avoid the potential for unintended consequences, SEO and CRO need to work together, share data and align on their approaches.

Googlebot’s limitations and the risks of cloaking

One of the core aspects of a harmonious relationship between SEO and CRO is to make use of A/B testing.

However, there are some risks teams should be aware of in order to apply CRO and SEO correctly. Collaboration between SEO and CRO can make or break the efficacy of both.

The other major consideration from an SEO perspective is what’s called ‘cloaking’. This term refers to instances where Google is served different content than an actual user, with the former often being served the ‘SEO ideal’ version of a page whereas a user is served something substantially different – with an emphasis on substantially.

If Google understands that this is happening, it will be much less inclined to return that URL in favorable positions within its SERPs. In some extreme cases, the Web Spam Team at Google can also issue manual penalties to webmasters based on extensive use of cloaking practices.

This could be an issue when it comes to split testing URL designs and content for CRO if you’re making significant enough changes. After all, you need to test different versions of the page in order to understand how best to optimize for engagement and conversion with its content. So if Google is served one version of a page at one time and then another, totally different version another time, it may perceive this as webspam and therefore lose any incentive to rank it competitively for relevant keywords. The best way to minimize the risk is to stay focused on what Google refers to as the “spirit” of the page.

The “Spirit” of the Page: Avoiding the pitfalls of Cloaking

Google actively encourages A/B testing as a means to improve site performance and user experience. They recommend multiple ways to prevent Googlebot from interpreting an A/B test as cloaking content, but the most important is to maintain the “spirit” of the page.

The spirit of the page is the core content and purpose for which the page is designed. If it’s a product page for a t-shirt, make sure its content and layout continue to communicate and focus on the t-shirt’s features, price, images, etc. Don’t all of a sudden swap the page to be talking about pants, or furniture, or an investing scheme. This is the type of “bait and switch” scenario Google is concerned about. Google wants to penalize sites who are intentionally trying to deceive search engines to boost their pagerank performance – not sites that are simply trying to optimize their page layout and content to improve their own sites performance.

Maintaining the ‘spirit’ of the page is critical when conducting CRO and being flagged as a bad actor by Googlebot. To do this, variants should always maintain and give users the general points of the original content, regardless of variation.

If your experimentation does require you to make large changes to the page such as removing significant portions of content there are additional ways to mitigate the risk such as adjusting the targeting of your experiments to specifically exclude Googlebot from qualifying for the experiment. This way you can ensure Googlebot always sees the same control version of your site and reduce the risk they ever crawl or index a variant and incorrectly flag your experiments as deceitful.

Improving your website via A/B testing and experimentation has significant benefits and foregoing the strategy altogether because of a concern about SEO impact is likely more detrimental than simply taking the time to do it right. SEO and CRO experts can help you navigate through the nuances of these considerations to help avoid any pitfalls or unintended consequences of your experimentation program.

SEO is about ensuring that content lives on your website in intentional and functional ways so that users and search engines can find it; CRO is about optimizing that content to ensure it has the right layout, emphasis, priority, usability, etc. to maximize conversion rates.

These two disciplines should be viewed as symbiotic: SEO helps content gain visibility in search engines, while CRO guides that traffic towards specific actions on your website (which in turn could send positive signals to Google about that content’s quality, further improving rankings).

But in order to achieve this symbiosis, one thing is needed above all else: coordination.

From an SEO perspective, any changes to a page that remove substantial content altogether represent a massive risk to organic traffic performance. That means any long form CRO tests that require such changes should be brought to the attention of the SEO team as soon as possible in order to mitigate any unintended negative outcomes.

Likewise, any change that would see substantial amounts of content being added or altered on a page could be detrimental to that page’s conversion rate.

The only way to balance the demands of SEO and CRO is to open the lines of communication between these teams. Make sure that they each have visibility over the strategic roadmap of the other, and that they have an opportunity to provide relevant expertise and consultation prior to any changes being made.

Effective communication will ensure that both teams are pulling in the same direction, and that your business benefits from the synergies arising from the optimal blending of SEO and CRO.

About the Authors

Conversion and Reddico are members of the Sideshow Group, a global challenger in digital experience and marketing services.

James Vatter is an SEO Consultant at Reddico with over eight years of experience in SEO and digital marketing, encompassing technical SEO, content optimization and strategy, and website migrations in the financial services, insurance, medical and pharmaceutical sectors. Reddico works with leading brands such as BlackRock, Love Holidays, Auto Trader, Compare the Market and the Cotswold Company.

James Flory is the VP of Delivery at Conversion with over seven years of experience in experimentation, CRO, and client service. He is widely considered a subject matter expert in experimentation among some of the world’s leading companies like Microsoft, HP, and Whirlpool. He is also an Instructor of Digital Analytics at Simon Fraser University, one of Canada’s top Universities.