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Without CRO & On-Site Optimization, It's Tempting to Abandon SEO Posted: 06 Apr 2011 04:20 AM PDT Posted by Bill4Time This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Quick Synopsis To make the most out of your SEO, use Conversion Rate Optimization and On-Site Optimization. If you only do SEO, you could find yourself falling short of the bottom line. Skip to the bottom to find some charts to help. To hear how I figured this out the hard way (!), please read on. Maybe the story sounds familiar. Using SEO Tactics Does SEO help in sales? Traffic to your site means more customers, and more traffic means more sales, right? But what happens when you did everything right in SEO and you didn't get the sales? It's tempting to adopt a misconception of SEO, and abandon SEO all together. And that's what almost happened to me. Being new to SEO at the time, I was an avid student. I'd read any article I could get my hands on. I'd attend any webinar possible. I'd follow the instructions to add more content to my site. I'd streamline my targeted keywords, slim my PPC campaigns, and be active with social media. Traffic was going up and we were moving up in the SERPs. Looks good, right? After SEO Tactics For my 6 month-evaluation, I was ready with shining colors. But the owners of the business had other concerns: our sales have been going down for the past few months. I thought to myself, "No, how can this be? I brought in more traffic to our site. Doesn't that mean more sales?" After taking a deeper look into Google analytics (with even Dr. Pete helping me), we came to a startling conclusion: my company didn't do anything SEO that triggered the downward sales. SEO-wise, we did everything right. Not Using SEO Tactics That's when I threw SEO out the window for a few months. I resorted to good 'ol fashioned marketing. My company is a web-based time and billing software. So being online, we encourage shoppers to sign up for a free trial of the software. But even though we increased traffic, we weren't getting enough trial users and actual buyers. I needed to bridge the gap, so my team and I did the following:
I figured only “educated buyers” make purchases. If they know what they're buying, they'll buy it. Once they become trial users, they want to know how easy it is for them to use the software. And that's where we were falling short. We needed to educate them on how to use the software. Within months of just good ‘ol fashioned marketing, our sales grew! The rate was so rapid, we now need to grow our tech support staff! So what does this all mean? Is SEO useless when it comes to the bottom line? Does it increase sales? Should businesses ignore it all together? I was seriously asking myself these questions. I finally gathered enough courage to ask SEOMoz and it wasn't what I was expecting. Jamie writes: "Well, SEO and other online marketing initiatives are certainly complementary. But I'll be honest with you: you will see more sales from focusing on conversion rate optimization and site optimization alone than from SEO alone. That said, I'd never recommend you do only one... ...So if your resources are constrained, and you can only focus well on one thing, you would be smart to continue focusing on conversion optimization until you feel like you're hitting diminishing returns with on-site optimization, then it's time to start focusing much more on getting more people to your well-optimized site. Also, it's possible to be doing things that help your SEO while also focusing primarily on conversion optimization. So CRO and SEO really do need to be related, but like I said, if you can truly only do one thing, start with optimizing your site first. Just make sure the optimization is for both humans (who you want to buy your wares) and the search engines that will be crawling and indexing your pages for search queries.” Hello CRO & On-Site Optimization So Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and On-Site Optimization is really good 'ol fashioned marketing! Jamie helped me put things into perspective. It makes sense. SEO is part of the puzzle. But here's the thing. These aren't necessarily different things you do in a sequential way. It should all be integrated in each other. I would keep CRO & On-Site Optimization in mind during the entire time you're doing SEO. There are many ways of approaching this. Below is a suggested approach: Click on this chart to get a larger view. It's a general idea of applying On-Site Optimization and SEO to the various areas of the Conversion Funnel. So yes, SEO does indeed affect your bottom line. It may not directly affect your bottom line as CRO & On-Site Optimization, but it would be double the work if you had to redo your CRO & On-Site Optimization efforts because Google didn't see your website clearly. Using a CRO Mindset with SEO Going in the other direction, if you are looking at a site from an SEO perspective, it's essential that you don't loose sight of the CRO. Don't get lost in all the numbers. Make sure that it ties back to the bottom line.To give yourself a good idea where it falls in your priorities, this flowchart should help: These two charts aren't all-encompassing. There's so much more (Check out a recent YOUmoz post about it - it got bumped up to the main blog!). But if you maintain the right approach to SEO, you're on the right track. Feel free to add other suggestions in applying this concept. |
Retargeting: What It Is & How to Use It Posted: 05 Apr 2011 01:18 PM PDT Posted by JoannaLord I've wanted to write this post for a couple weeks now, knowing that the topic of retargeting is hot, hot, hot. I noticed that as more marketers hear of retargeting there still seems to be quite a bit of confusion around what it actually is, and how it is different from regular display media buys. This post is meant to help with that confusion and hopefully leave everyone with a solid understanding of retargeting basics as well as some actionable ways you can utilize it. Let's start with some common questions... How is it tracked?
Wait, so what is remarketing?
#1 Retargeting is a channel all its own Those are the biggest challenges we have faced here at SEOmoz. When we first started testing retargeting we were starry eyed with the initial results, and since then we have continued to be impressed by its performance. However, we have also made a whole lot of mistakes along the way. Our latest mistake was actually firing the conversion pixel on the wrong page (resulting in about 8x more conversions being recorded)-- yeah that really happened. So just keep in mind, this channel isn't a "set it and forget it" answer to your marketing prayers. So take it or leave it, but the marketing team over at SEOmoz is definitely excited to play around with retargeting and see how creative we can get with the sequences of our ad buys and landing pages (I hope to get some follow-up posts with case studies for all of you soon enough). The results make it worth the time, and in my opinion, it's like the Wild West in there right now. You don't have to worry about competition like with many other channels, you control every piece of this channel, and you have unlimited options on how to utilize it. Unleashing the Power of Retargeting View more presentations from Joanna Lord. |
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