Rising organic traffic from your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts feel pretty darn good to see–but have you ever asked yourself how many of those visitors actually contribute to the bottom line of your business?

If you’re seeing a surge in traffic, but continue seeing near-zero conversions, you have a big problem on your hands. The good news is that it’s easily solvable by supplementing your SEO efforts with Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) practices. 

Let’s get into how to start using both SEO and CRO for your website.

CRO and SEO: What Are They? 

SEO and CRO are two significant pillars of digital marketing, each with a distinct focus and objective.

SEO is the process of increasing a website’s visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) by optimizing different elements of a website, including its content, design, and technical aspects. This is all done to draw in more organic traffic in your website’s chosen niche or market.

CRO, on the other hand, is similar in that it’s all about testing and optimizing the elements on your website. However, its goal is not to improve your rankings or draw in more people. Rather, it’s all about converting visitors into customers.

The misconception that many people have is that they have to focus on one or the other. However, I consider both to be crucial for a successful online strategy. When done right, these two practices work in tandem to enhance your overall digital marketing effectiveness.

How is CRO Different from SEO? 

SEO – Casting the Net

Think of SEO as the engine behind your brand’s visibility in the vast ocean of the internet. Using SEO, you can improve your pages’ look, performance, and rankings in the SERPs. The more these improve, the wider net you can cast on organic traffic. 

Think about it: when you search for something on Google, don’t you take a look at the results on the first page at the very least? If you’re ranking at #1 for some pretty good keywords, then you’re going to be getting more traffic than if your website stayed on the 2nd page or lower in Google’s search results. 

Take the search results for “seo rates philippines,” for example. If I were looking for a SEO service with good rates, I wouldn’t look past the first page since they’re already giving me the information I need. 

CRO – Making the Catch

While SEO casts the net wide to increase traffic, CRO is how you persuade these new visitors that have just opened your pages to do something for your business. That might be to make a purchase, fill out a form, or sign up for a newsletter. Here’s some of the things we do for CRO on our other website:

Through techniques like improving user experience, optimizing landing pages, and using compelling call-to-actions (CTAs), CRO is the attempt to answer your user’s intent (i.e., why they even clicked on your page in the first place) and speak to their interests and needs. This influences them to buy your products, message you, or otherwise engage with your website.

What Happens When You Combine CRO and SEO?

When SEO and CRO are approached separately, their impact is limited. Sure, you might be gaining tons of traffic from your SEO, but if the pages they’re seeing aren’t using the best CRO practices, then you might not see any value from these visitors. On the flip side, a site optimized for conversion is pretty meaningless if it’s not found by potential customers on Google. 

Merging SEO and CRO effectively forms a formidable digital marketing powerhouse. SEO strategies become more targeted and purposeful when combined with conversion data, while conversion strategies are much more effective when they build on the strengths of a strong SEO foundation. 

It’s all about ensuring your website isn’t just found, but is also compelling enough to convert those who find it, ensuring that your digital marketing strategy is truly a force to be reckoned with.

How Do You Make SEO and CRO Work Together?

So, how do you make sure your website not only ranks well–but also converts your visitors? 

Here are some key steps to make your SEO and CRO strategies work together effectively:

1. Prioritize User Experience: Always put user experience first in both SEO and CRO. Ease of navigation, site aesthetics, informative content, and site speed are all factors you need to consider for your SEO and CRO strategy. 
2. Be Thorough With Your Keyword Analysis: Make sure to understand the search intent behind the keywords you’re targeting. This information should influence not only the content you create (for SEO) but also the language you use on landing pages, calls to action, and product descriptions (for CRO).
3. Test & Optimize: Regularly run A/B tests on different site elements like headlines, CTAs, content, etc. Use these insights to improve both search ranking (SEO) and user engagement (CRO).
4. Write High-Quality Content: Ensure your content is useful, relevant, and valuable to your users. Good content increases the odds of higher search engine ranking (SEO) and encourages users to stay on your site and convert (CRO).
5. Don’t Forget Mobile Optimization: Since most searches happen on mobile devices, ensure your website is mobile-friendly. Remember this is also an SEO ranking factor, too, so putting this as a priority can improve both your ranking and conversion rates.
6. Create Enticing Meta Descriptions: Although meta descriptions may not directly impact SEO rankings, a well-crafted one can increase click-through rates from the SERP, providing an opportunity to win conversions.
7. Landing Page Optimization: Use your SEO data to understand what users are looking for and tailor your landing pages (CRO) to meet those needs. The congruency between the user’s search intent and your landing page offering can significantly boost conversions.
8. Use Clear, Persuasive Call-to-Actions (CTAs): A great CTA can guide users and encourage them to take desirable actions. This helps in achieving your CRO goals.
9. Avoid Common Mistakes with CRO and SEO: the A/B testing you need to do for these two practices can lead to some pretty costly mistakes if you’re not careful. I covered what to avoid in my guide on how to do CRO without damaging your SEO. 

Key Takeaway

When you pour your resources into just SEO, the organic traffic you gain might not convert into sales or leads, ultimately leading to an inefficient use of resources. If you focus on just CRO, then you might have a site that too few people visit because it’s lost in the depths of the SERPs–wasting your CRO efforts.

One thing is crystal clear–for your business to profit, it’s not enough to merely have an online presence; you need to make that presence work for you. 

That’s why SEO and CRO need to go hand-in-hand. By combining these two strategies, you can make your website all that more visible and engaging for your online audience.

The post How to Maximize Your Online Presence With SEO and CRO appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

Ever lost at least $1,000 in an SEM campaign? You probably have but you may not have realized it until today. Here you will learn how much money you’re leaving at the table – unrealized – and what you can do about it.

Add Negative Keywords

One of the things that will ultimately help make sure you are not spending your hard-earned money needlessly is using negative keywords in your SEM campaign. Negative keywords are a list of keywords that you do not want your ad to appear in.

For example, let’s say that you’re doing SEM for a mobile phone brand such as Samsung. However, you find out through the Search Terms that your ads are appearing in keywords related to your competitor’s brands such as “apple mobile phone price” or “huawei mobile phone price”.

The problem with this is that those people searching for your competitor’s brands likely won’t click on your ad at all. Or if they do, it’s probably by mistake because they are not interested in you but in the other brand – because they literally searched for the specific brand!

If that’s the case, you may want to set up the following negative keywords:

• [apple mobile phone price] – as an exact match
• [huawei mobile phone price] – as an exact match
• “Apple” – as a phrase match
• “Huawei” – as a phrase match

Besides excluding the keywords found above, you can also set the brand name as a phrase that matches the negative keyword. This will help ensure that your ads will never appear in any keywords that contain these terms.

Make Your Ad Copy Engaging

One of the first things searchers will see is your ad copy. It should be able to reflect on their pain points and provide them with a solution. The more that they feel that you understand what they’re going through, the higher the chances of them clicking on your ad versus your competitors.

In order to do just that, first, you have to understand who your target market is. Who are they? What do they look like? How much is their spending power? Are they the decision makers or simply the purchasing agent? Where are they from? How old are they? And what type of tone would they best react to?

Take a look at some of the headlines I created for a supplier of walk-in tubs. I chose to highlight their ADA certification, residential services, and their installation services. Based on my research, I found that these are terms that customers would use when searching for accessibility solutions.

Then, research your keyword’s intent. What are people there to look for? Do they want discounts or maybe free installation? Make sure you showcase these benefits in your headlines and descriptions. Take a look at the features I highlighted in the descriptions below.

Optimize Your SEM Landing Pages

Next, let’s discuss how to optimize your SEM Landing Pages. Similar to what was mentioned above, it’s crucial that your landing page contains content that can help solve your customer’s pain points. Ideally, it should be a separate page that includes a “noindex” tag so that its content does not compete with organic traffic.

The landing page should also contain a Call-To-Action mentioned multiple times throughout the page. This can be in the form of brochure downloads, contact forms, or even newsletter signups. Ensure that these Call-to-Actions lead to another page such as the brochure page or a Thank You page so you can set up Google Analytics to track those conversions as goals.

Set Ads To Appear Only To Relevant Locations

Besides your content matching your customer’s needs, it’s also important that you optimize your Google Ads campaign to target the right people. One of the first ways that you can do this is through the Locations feature.

Do you service certain provinces or areas? Ensure that these are featured in your Locations so that your ads appear to the right people in the right places. If you cater nationwide, it would help to save your spending budget if you specify which cities you’d want to focus on instead of targeting the entire country at the get-go.

Revisit Your Ad Schedule

You can also set your ads to appear on certain days of the week and on certain hours. For example, if you’re a B2B company, you may only want to show your ads during the country’s business hours. Or if your customers are seniors aged 60 and above, you can set your ads to appear from the morning until their estimated sleeping hours, such as the one set below.

Get to know WHEN your target market is most active online, and adjust your ad schedule accordingly.

Exclude Irrelevant Age Groups

If you’re a business that targets specific age groups, then ensure that you make use of the exclusion tool on Google Ads. Here are age groupings you can choose from:

Exclude age groups that are not relevant to your business. This is also done per ad group, so make sure to take note of it.

Key Takeaway

These are just a few tips and tricks on how to optimize your SEM campaign. By improving these factors, you will be able to more accurately target your customers, saving you loads of money, increasing your Click-Through-Rate, and increasing your leads and sales.

Do you have any other go-to ways to optimize your SEM campaign? Let me know in the comments below.

We can check your current SEM campaign and analyze how you can improve it. Simply click here.

The post Tactical Ways To Optimize Your SEM Campaign That You Might Have Missed appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

Data, data, data. As digital marketers, we can’t have too much data right? We use data to solve problems, create new strategies, and optimize further. Have you ever felt a time where there is so much data lying around that you just can’t use them anymore?

I sure have. That’s why I’ve always been looking for tools that could help us organize data that we gather better and easier. And in my journey in looking for tools, I found AnyTrack.io. 

AnyTrack helped us collect all of our conversion data so that we could easily use it for our campaigns. This is a platform that any digital marketer can benefit from and I’ll show you why in my full review of AnyTrack.

If you’re excited to check out AnyTrack, you could register right away for a free account by going to this link.

What is AnyTrack?

AnyTrack is a conversion tracking platform that consolidates all of your conversion data from your website, whether it’s organic, paid, or direct, and sends it over to the marketing and analytics platform that you use. All of these using a single line of code only.

Yup that’s right, a single line of code. This makes the process a lot easy instead of having to install tracking codes manually all over your website. Upon starting your account, AnyTrack will give you a tracking code that you can place in the <head> section of your website. You could also add it via Google Tag Manager.

What this tracking code does is simple. Each time someone visits your website, AnyTrack automatically records the user’s engagement on your website. Every time they click a CTA button, submit a form, complete a purchase, etc., AnyTrack will take note of these actions and send the data across the various marketing platforms that you are using. 

Connect with Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and more

You can connect AnyTrack with various analytics and ad platforms such as Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Taboola, Outbrain, Google Ads, and Bing Ads. As soon as you add AnyTrack’s tracking code to your website, all of your conversion data will be sent immediately to these tools with little to no delays. You could leverage the conversion data that you get with your ad networks which work best for PPC marketers. For SEOs, you could use these data to study your audience and create more compelling content that will sell more.

Affiliate Network Tracking

If you are an affiliate marketer, you are going to love AnyTrack. AnyTrack automatically takes note of the affiliate links on your website. They call this AutoTag. All you have to do is to integrate your affiliate network to AnyTrack. Once a user clicks on an affiliate link and converts, AnyTrack will still be able to gather conversion data even they are off-site anymore and send it back to your analytics account.

Google Analytics Goals

All engagements that are recorded by AnyTrack is recorded under Events in Google Analytics. This means you don’t have to do any more setups if you want to track outbound link clicks, form submissions, registrations, purchases, and more. You can then easily set up Google Analytics Goals and do more with your conversion data.

Audience Building

With the data that you receive from all the conversion on your website, you can now use these data to build custom audiences for your ad campaigns. This makes retargeting campaigns much easier and efficient.

Webhooks

Webhooks is one of AnyTrack’s newest features. This allows you to send conversion data to other third-party tools like Zapier and Integromat. Some fun ideas would be hooking it up with Slack so your team gets a notification every time a conversion happens. 

What I Love About AnyTrack

What I’ve mentioned above is just the basics of what AnyTrack can do. There are more features to explore. Here are more reasons why I like using AnyTrack.

Easy Set-Up

As I’ve mentioned earlier, all it takes is a single line of code for you to set up AnyTrack.io on your website. If you’re a marketer, you’ll need little to no help from a developer setting this up.

Aside from the easy set-up, AnyTrack.io is lightweight as well. It won’t eat up anything from your website server so you don’t have to worry about it slowing down your website and negatively affecting your conversion rate.

Good UI/UX

When you have a huge amount of data in front of you, it can be quite hard to digest sometimes. I love the Dashboard of AnyTrack.io because it gives me a full view of the data that I need to see in one glance. 

Great Customer Support

The folks over at AnyTrack are friendly. Although they don’t have live chat support, contacting them via email is easy and you don’t have to wait for days for a reply. They are very helpful and they will assist you in everything to make sure that your account is set up perfectly.

Complete Documentation

If you’re finding a hard time finding your way around the tool, AnyTrack.io has full documentation on how to use the platform the right way so you won’t get lost. 

AnyTrack.io Pricing

AnyTrack.io has 3 paid plans but the good news is, you can actually use the tool for free. Of course, it has limitations but it is great for testing the tool without having any time limit. If you want to try it out, you can click here to sign up for a free account.

The three basic plans have their own perks. The Basic Plan is great for individual SEOs and Bloggers, the Personal Plan is great for PPC marketers and Affiliate marketers, and the Advanced plan is perfect for agencies. If you’re interested in their paid plans, you can try each three of them for 14-days free. Here’s the full list of prices and features.

Free:

• 1 Website
• 1 Affiliate network
• Up to 5,000 sessions per month
• Google Analytics Integration
• Facebook Pixel Integration

Basic Plan (50$ Monthly):

• 1 Website
• 3 Integrations
• 12 Months of Data Retention
• 50,000 Sessions Included
• Google Analytics Integration
• Facebook Pixel Integration

Personal Plan (150$ Monthly):

• 3 Websites
• Unlimited Integrations
• 12 Months of Data Retention
• 500,00 Sessions Included
• Google Analytics Integration
• Facebook Pixel Integration
• Google Ads Integration
• Facebook Conversion API
• Ad Networks Support
• Webhooks

Advanced (300$ Monthly)

• 10 Websites
• Unlimited Integrations
• 12 Months of Data Retention
• 3,000,000 Sessions Included
• Google Analytics Integration
• Google Ads Integration
• Facebook Pixel Integration
• Facebook Conversion API
• Ad Networks Support
• Webhooks
• Premium Affiliate Networks

The post AnyTrack as a Complete Conversion Tracking Platform: A Detailed Platform Analysis appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

Having 1st-page rankings for numerous, decent keywords isn’t the end of the line for us SEOs. Attracting the users that see your search listings (improving CTR), providing easy navigation for them to find more valuable, relevant resources inside your website, and cultivating their loyalty to your brand and website. All of these are still challenges that SEOs need to face. But the biggest challenge of them all is converting your hard-earned traffic to paying customers. So, what exactly do you need to ensure a steady flow of conversions?

Problems with Converting Traffic

It’s well known in the industry that even if you have thousands of visitors every day, there’s still a possibility of you having low conversion rates. Why? Well, there hundreds of reasons why your visitors are not converting to paying customers but the factors included here are the primary and foundational ones that should be a part of your conversion checklist:

Content

Your content should speak directly to the user. Your tone of voice, message, and intent should be communicated clearly in your content. It slightly differs when you’re a B2B or B2C because based on my experience, content for B2C business websites is about telling them that you have the solution to their problems. While for B2B business websites, you still have to convince them that you have the solution, but they also need to feel that your expertise can help them improve or grow their business.

You have to know who your users are and the important details about them. Are they male or female? What age bracket are they in? Etc. Questions like these can help you refine and perfect your page content to help with improving converting your traffic. Here’s an example:

The content of our services site can be seen at once when the user enters the page and it immediately tells them of our credentials. The sub-copy below is more for convincing them that we are who we say we are and we have the capability to solve their problem. 

If we were a B2C company, then the content might have changed to stating the user’s problem then us telling them how we can help so it could have gone like “Is your website gaining enough traffic? Check out your website’s SEO score below and let us help you!”. 

Tell your users that you know the problem they have and you have the solution they’re looking for. Communicate clearly how they can find the solution (by clicking a button or contacting you) because they may not know what to do next if you don’t tell them.

Buttons, Videos, Sign Up and Contact Forms

Your content should work hand-in-hand with CTA factors inside your page. Adding a simple “Click Here” button then using the content to explain where the button will lead can work wonders. 

By reassuring the user what happens when they click the button, you remove the fear of uncertainty within them. If you need to get personal information from them, use the content to tell them. Communicate how the button will lead them to find the solution they’re looking for, content and CTAs should complement each other. Here’s the same example:

The content inside our page directly explains how the button below saying “Get My Website’s SEO Score” works, so there’s no mystery on what happens when they click on the CTA. Conversely, the video beside the content does not have anything saying what’s contained inside it, but it does have a piece of content telling the user to “Watch the Video”. Does this work? It does. Even though we don’t need the user to watch the video, natural curiosity and a simple command that tells them to watch the video makes them press the play button. 

Page Speed

All the work you’ve put in for your page’s content and CTA won’t matter if your users bounce even before they see the page. Slow loading speed affects SEO and it also affects traffic conversion. 

Work with your developer to see how your page’s speed can be improved. If it’s already loading fast, that’s great, but still, check to see if it can be loaded even faster. Is there anything on the page that isn’t being used or is not needed? You can remove those as well. 

Aside from giving your users a better experience inside your website which is important for SEO, having a fast page load speed also helps with conversions. This is especially true for the users that are already willing to convert – you only need to give them what they want in the shortest amount of time. 

Key Takeaway

The three factors I’ve mentioned above are the most important and foundational aspects of having your traffic convert to paying customers. There are other factors as well, but none as important as the three I’ve highlighted. Again, those three are:

• Content
• CTAs
• Page Speed

If you’re confident that you’ve sufficiently optimized your page for these three, then its time for you to innovate and experiment on other factors you believe can affect the user’s decision to convert. Conversion Rate Optimization is closely related to SEO in terms of having to understand the user, their behavior, and serving them exactly what they want/need to see to hit your goal. What do you do to increase your website’s conversions? Comment them down below and let’s talk about it!

The post The Complete Website Traffic Conversion Optimization Checklist appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

Conversion Rate Optimization is one of the areas that businesses should look into if they want to continue empowering growth in their respective industries. A winning strategy starts with a well-formed audit from the CRO specialist that targets contingencies and issues that can come up in the pursuit of astounding conversions. An online presence will only be treated as a nice-to-have for your business if it does not serve any revenue-generating benefit.

With this, we have to look at the overall climate in business today. While it is unfortunate that some of the brands we have come to know and love have decided to close their doors because of the drastic effect that the pandemic enforced on their business, there is still hope in coping up with the new normal.

With most people staying home, retail stores can be seen at their twilight and e-commerce continues to drive the consumer industries as online payments have been proven to be the safest alternative to normal shopping trips. If you are planning on upgrading your site to reap the benefits that e-commerce can give for your business, it is imperative that you know the flow of CRO and its impressive effect on revenue.

Starting a Solid CRO Strategy

A CRO audit would require you to know your business to a tee. You need to be able to illustrate what your business can offer and come up with materials that will allow users to see that you are easily accessible to provide something of value to them. Usually, this can come in the form of one or more of the following:

• Catalogs
• Brochures
• E-Books
• Brand Bible
• Other Downloadable Materials for Products/Services

Depending on the overall structure of your site and your direction with e-commerce, you can explore different options on offering these materials. You can create a pop-up that will allow a user to connect with you through promotions or other offers. The key to this is to make it worthy of attention but non-imposing so you have to insert an option for the user to opt-out of viewing the pop-up.

Take a closer look at your buttons as well. This a subtle but essential part of User Experience (UX) that not a lot of CRO specialists take advantage of.

Aside from a pop-up, you can also create a sticky header on your site that offers information or a promotion that a user would surely not miss. At the end of the day, research will do you good. Research more about what your business can offer, what potential leads can use to close a deal with you, and know more about design principles that will make your CRO stand out.

CRO and SEO: Your Tools for E-Commerce Success

Conversion Rate Optimization and Search Engine Optimization go hand in hand. They may be alike in terms of the goal of making a positive impact on a website, but they serve separate purposes for it as well. With CRO, you should also look at your efforts the same way you scrutinize a site for SEO. Look at your site’s assets and its weak points as well. Illustrate its missing elements and plan how you can design your strategy from there.

With tools at your disposal, you can get to the root of your problem with leads and conversions right away. Qeryz is one of the most reliable tools that I use for CRO. With this, I can see what customers are saying about a business and what they expect out of it. You can also target semantic elements here since it can help you see the queries that they are looking for in relation to your site. With a customer survey tool, you can hear it straight from the customer what exactly they are looking for which saves you a lot of time in doing guessing games for market research.

If you are interested to explore Qeryz, you can look at its benefits here.

Another CRO tool that I can recommend is Inspectlet. For heatmaps or other movement indicators on the site, you can rely on this tool to detect user behavior as accurately as possible. With this, you can see session recordings of users; what pages they visited, those that increased their on-page time. You can see in real-time what products or services the users are looking at which can give way to more opportunities for your business to leverage the visibility that these products are gaining.

Having tools to help you with your CRO is a great help in determining what areas of UI and UX need more work. On top of the previously mentioned benefit, you can also see how user behavior plays in maintaining an e-commerce site. Coming up with a strategy for CRO will be an advantage for long-term returns.

Key Takeaway

The key to coming up with a powerful CRO audit is to know your site well. Study what its strengths are and what it can bring to the table. Your online visibility will be put to good use if you explore CRO as a viable strategy for digital marketing. In this age of resilience, this is an option that you shouldn’t dare miss. What are the tools you use for your own Conversion Rate Optimization practice? Comment them down below.

The post The CRO Audit and How to Build a Winning CRO Strategy For E-Commerce appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

So you’re finally ranking on Google and you have a decent amount of traffic going to your site, now what? Well, let me tell you that all the efforts leading to those results would all be wasted if you do not follow it up with a robust strategy that will increase your site’s value to your business.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is more than just a digital marketing effort, it’s more like the art and science that goes beyond the charts that show an increase in numbers. It primarily deals with user behavior and experience, areas that are difficult to quantify but don’t worry because results are displayed in the form of statistics, which is CRO’s primary foundation.

Growth Through Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Rate Optimization is simply defined as the process involved in converting your website visitors into customers.

CRO is one of the most underrated digital marketing techniques in the industry today. You wouldn’t see a lot of businesses investing in CRO but I think that they should. I have been in the digital marketing field for a decade now and I have seen impressive results stemming from powerful CRO strategies and execution.

I believe that this is the answer to the ultimate goal of websites who aim to generate ROI for their business. If you are thinking about converting your traffic to sales then CRO is the way to go. We have seen how CRO does its wonders as evidenced by this case study which helped us go from 0.7% to 729% increase in conversion rate just from implementing CRO techniques. What an astounding return on investment, right?

For most businesses that are active in the digital space, that is the dream. Converting your site visits to sales is a cherry on top of a fantastic effort to increase your online visibility.

SEO or CRO?

There has been a long-standing debate between SEO and CRO enthusiasts about which package is more capable of generating revenue. These digital marketing services both do their job of magnifying a website’s potential for growth but still, there are people that argue one is better than the other.

Personally, there’s no need to pit them against each other because each stands on a league of its own and the results of these services still boil down to what your business objectives are. It’s even better if you train SEO and CRO to go hand-in-hand in giving you the best online visibility that you can have for your target market.

What I like most about CRO and SEO is that these are disciplines that are flexible with experiments which allows me and my team to stay sharp to get ahead of the curve and gain results along the way. However, we stay away from relying too much on “tactics” because CRO is supposed to be approached with a process.

However, you would not feel its results if your business objectives are vague from the get-go. Digital marketing can only do so much for you if your business model is in disarray.

Design Your Goals: What Winning Looks Like in CRO

Which brings me to my next discussion, determining your purpose for CRO. As a brand with an online presence, it’s only natural that you would want to stand out from among the crowd.

As a system, CRO gives a monumental value to websites by reaching towards a method that naturally brings in maximum conversions for businesses. This is why it is important to determine your purpose in doing CRO. Here are a few tips to keep in mind if you have finally decided to start doing CRO for your site:

Making a Plan

Know what changes you are going to implement, what you aim to achieve and your projected rate of effectiveness. Always remember that CRO is a complex process so you should know how you’re going to go about its execution. A linear plan with an actionable hypothesis will be your best bet in winning in CRO. Organize accordingly and you will not encounter a problem with your project. Follow CRO best practices like maintaining a powerful web design, having only one CTA so you would not confuse users, having a clean UI and UX, optimizing your design for site speed, and more.

Document Everything

This will ensure that you never miss an element of your project. You should also properly document your research and experimentation so you would know what works and what doesn’t. Check your most viewed pages, which of those gain the most sessions and the channels that your users are coming from. It is also important that you properly document your brand’s strengths and weaknesses so you can align this with your CRO objectives.

Make Sure that You Properly Analyze Data

One common mistake that CROs are sometimes guilty of is that they do not know how to interpret the statistical data that their project has presented to them. Brush up on your statistics and always aim for the best probability for your conversion rates. This will be the best weapon you can have for CRO.

Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment

Try new stuff until you maximize your conversion rates up to the roof. It’s okay if an experiment does not work for you because you are bound to find one that does if you do not stop experimenting. Do A/B tests, measure success through data, or you can even experiment with a process that already works for you. When it comes to innovation, let yourself go nuts if it means that you will achieve the result you are looking for.

Using Google Optimize Data for Experiments

If you are a beginner in CRO, you might want to check out Google Optimize. It is the free version of its counterpart, Optimize 360, given that it has limited features but still does the job nonetheless. I highly recommend this because you can easily navigate their dashboard. The tool’s visual editor is nothing special because you can also see many other CRO tools who have that but I find it easier to change things because of it.

More and more CRO specialists see the value that Optimize can bring to their projects. I also use it because of its clear cut data and clean user interface, not to mention their reports feature is great also. The perks of being a Google product is that you can connect it to other tools so having it integrated with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager makes for a more organized reporting task. Their data is very concise as you can see here:

This is an example of what you will see from the report from Optimize. We have seen a slight increase in sessions and conversions. I enacted a button change on the site and you can see how CRO affects the data. The increase, albeit small, is a great improvement since this is a report for my client who sells an expensive product so if you look at it, 14 conversions is definitely a win already.

This section in reporting helps us see how the CRO experiment can perform for us long-term. Optimize simulates statistical data which can help you compare your previous performance to the current one. Having a projected conversion rate would be significant for your project since it will help you maintain traction in finding out what works for your CRO.

Optimize is also a generous playground for those who would like to test changes on their site. Testing is very important when it comes to experiments because it can help you know how to encourage the users to fill out a form or buy a product.

Final thoughts

CRO can bring out the best in your website, especially if you are chasing after leads. What’s great about it is that even beginners can start implementing this to your site if you have the right strategies and devices to complement it. Start a CRO project once you have reached the first page and you will be unstoppable.

Comment down below when you first knew about CRO and let’s discuss how far we’ve come with optimizing conversion rates.

The post A Beginner’s Guide on What to Expect from CRO appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

Much like your link building campaign or the process of your keyword research, CRO should also be on the top list of your priorities. Without the proper enactment of CRO into your SEO, your rate of converting visitors into customers would be mediocre – to say the least. So, this only highlights the importance of CRO for every business or brand that has an online presence.

It is common knowledge that Conversion Rate Optimization is a system that most – if not all – webmasters of business websites use to increase the percentage of visitors converted into a customer. However, this process is still susceptible to errors and mistakes that can damage your SEO campaign. Today, I’ll be giving out some tips which have always worked for me whenever I encountered some problems in my CRO endeavors.

Here’s a scenario: You test a redesign through A/B testing – which would mean that half of your visitors could see the original design of your page, and the other half would see the new redesign that you worked on.

Then, after a month or so, you notice that the demo requests increased from 4% to 15%. This means good news for you and your company. So, you immediately report to the boss that your new redesign works, and they give you the go sign.

However, after you have introduced the new redesign, the requests suddenly decrease. So, you assume that it is about the seasonal changes in the consumer’s tastes, and you wait a few months to see if it would go improve.  Then, your monthly recurring revenue is also decreasing, so what’s wrong?

The Mistake

It so happens that the length of time of your test was not long enough for the results to be significant. The page you used in the test only received an average of 60 views per day, but the optimal number would have been over a hundred thousand for it to have an over 90% confidence level. So, because of the mistake, the company is losing important business.

This is just one of the mistakes you can make in your CRO. It is actually understandable because numerous marketers THINK that they are leading their company to something great, but in reality, they are just walking down a path that could break their company.

Always remember that the primary goal of CRO is to find out the truth and use it to improve a specific business. So, making assumptions and basing decisions on incomplete data will be detrimental instead of being helpful.

Here are some mistakes that most marketers commit, and how you could fix them.

CRO Mistakes and How to Fix Them

#1. CRO is NOT A/B Testing

Treating CRO the same as A/B testing is a huge mistake. Undoubtedly, A/B testing is a TYPE of CRO, and it is just one tool you could use – out of many others. This tool can only test a single variable against another for the tester to know which of the two performs better. Meanwhile, the scope of CRO covers the totality of all manners of testing, which points to the same end: to make your visitors take a certain action.

If you think that using A/B testing is the same as doing CRO, then you are making a huge mistake. Also, there are instances wherein A/B testing is not helpful. Here’s an example: If you are using A/B testing and the sample size is not large enough, then it could take a long time before you get your desired statistical significance.

And, if you want to stop using A/B testing after a long time of not garnering the sufficient results, then you will be basing some decisions without scientific backing.

I won’t deny that knowing how to do A/B testing is a great starting point for your CRO campaign. However, it is still important for you to know other methodologies in order to not restrict yourself to just one type of tool. So, when you are already knowledgeable about different CRO methodologies, you can try using multiple changes in variables at a time, instead of only change a single variable.

#2. Context for Your Conversion Rates

The term “conversion” could mean a lot of things. Some meanings could be about purchases, leads, prospects, and subscribers – it all just depends on the goal of your page. Instead of talking about you having a massive increase in conversion, be specific about it. Talking about having an increase in conversion while not specifying what kind it just makes your point meaningless.

However, specifying what kind of conversion you had is just one part of the whole picture. A question such as “when did you conduct the test?” will most likely be raised whenever you claim something about your conversion rate. This is likely the case because the dates in which you conducted the test can effectively yield to varying results. This necessitates that even if your tests yield a 90+% significance after only five days, you would still need to conduct the test for the entirety of a week because the results you achieve would vary for each day of the week. It is also important to remember that conducting a test during holiday seasons will yield very different results as compared to conducting tests during ordinary months such as March. Seasonality will ALWAYS affect your conversion rate.

Many factors can have a major impact on your conversion rate. One of which is the platform the users are on. They might be willing to fill out your forms while on a desktop or laptop, but they are not willing to fill that out while on their mobile device. So, make sure that the mobile users are converting at the same rate.

Lastly, always remember that conversion rate is not your business’ most important metric. The most important metric is whether the conversions lead to profit for the company or not. For example, you make your products free, then obviously, your conversion rate would increase to extreme heights, but the company would not be making any profit, would they? The conversion rate would not always tell you if the company is doing much better or not.

#3. Not Understanding the Statistics

One of the biggest mistakes you could make is to rely on your insufficient knowledge regarding statistics. If you did not know, statistics is the foundation of CRO, if you do not understand it completely, then you would not be able to run your tests properly – which could lead to disastrous results.

Making a habit of stopping your tests when you have reached 90% statistical significance is not something a seasoned marketer would do. If you are thinking that 90% is good enough, then you are making a big mistake. Why? Think of it as going all-in in a bet. Would you risk all your hard-earned cash because you are 90% sure that you are going to win? Of course not! 90% is not good enough – it will never be good enough.

So, study on your statistics. You will need some discipline and time, but it will surely make you much better in doing your job. To start, you can read Moz’s article regarding CRO statistics.

#4. Not Experimenting on Something That Is Already Doing Well

A page that does well should not be ignored. More often than not, these assets have the highest potential to perform better when you optimize it. The best example I could give you is a project conducted by Hubspot’s Pamela Vaughan called historical optimization. It basically involved updating and re-publishing their old articles in order to generate more traffic and leads.

This meant that they updated their blog posts that ALREADY had the most influence on traffic and lead generation. In the article, Pamela made two discoveries:

• 76% of their monthly blog view came from blog posts that were posted prior to the month of their project.
• 92% of their monthly blog leads came from these blog posts.

The performance of these blog posts could be attributed to the fact that these articles slowly obtained search authority and were now steadily ranking on search engines. This meant that they were generating a bulk of the organic traffic after numerous months.

Essentially, the objective of their project was to figure out:

• How to obtain more leads from their high-traffic but low-converting articles.
• How to have more traffic in high-converting posts.

By optimizing these high-performing posts for more traffic and conversion, they already doubled the number of their monthly generated leads.

The most important thing to remember is that don’t ever solely focus on optimizing your assets that are underperforming. More often than not, the high-performing posts could already lead to much better results.

#5. You Prefer Tactics over Research

Process is everything when you do your CRO. You should stop depending on tactics to optimize your marketing. Make it a habit of approaching your CRO systematically and as organized as possible.

Every successful CRO should always start with thorough research. It should be the step where you spend most of your time on. This is because everything you do in the research process stays for the totality of your CRO. Through proper research, you will be able to foresee some problems that might arise in the future, and effectively make you more ready for any problems. Also, if you know where the problem will come from, you can already hypothesize what steps you should take to avoid or fix the problem.

If you haven’t noticed, I keep stressing the point that research should be your main focus while doing CRO. Oftentimes, the lack of proper research leads to failures or disastrous results. However, while I do advocate that you should focus on research, your attention and efforts should not only be limited to this process. Remember that it is only the first step of your CRO while having a complete and proper research process is great, it will be meaningless if you do not follow through to the succeeding steps. So, here’s an overview of what the process of your CRO should look like:

1. Do your research properly.
2. Create and verify your corresponding hypothesis.
3. Establish control and generate a treatment.
4. Conduct the test/experiment.
5. Analyze the data that you have gathered.
6. Initiate a follow-up test/experiment.

Note that this is just an oversimplified form of the whole CRO process. Also, remember that recording your hypothesis, methodology, success scale, and analysis in a way that you could easily replicate everything. Finally, regarding the follow-up test/experiment, make sure that it is a way to refine your next step, and to make some major improvements.

#6. Giving Up After A Test Fails

Having a test fail is never a cause for giving up. The best approach you could do is to continuously conduct tests even if they fail numerous times. Approach every single test systematically and as objectively as you can. Disregard your assumptions that failed, and eventually, your desired results shall be obtained.

Key Takeaway

CRO is never an easy process, failure will always happen, and to be successful means learning from every test that you have conducted. This article will help you improve your overall CRO, and will make you take a more systematic approach to every experiment or test that you conduct.

You will save a huge amount of time and money by avoiding the mistakes that I have highlighted above. Of course, these are not the only mistakes that people make while doing CRO, but these are the most common. So, be wary of everything you do in your CRO.

Do you know any other CRO mistakes that I was not able to mention? Tell me in the comments below and let’s talk about it.

The post 5 CRO Mistakes That Need to Be Fixed! appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

$1,500 per month. That’s the minimum of how much our Conversion Rate Optimization services costs. And yes clients from all over the globe do get them. Recently, however, we are giving parts of it away for free and it has already landed us over $32,000 in sales – just for 1 client.

“It’s an extremely competitive set of keywords.”

I was pacing the short hallway of our office back and forth. I do that whenever I’m thinking – and extremely stressed out.

“How are we going to get through this?”

I asked myself that question over a hundred times in 15 minutes. It felt like an hour.

We bought the domain name, designed the website and published it on June. It looked beautiful. It looks like no one will get the navigation wrong. The contact form was working perfectly. What the hell was missing?

Conversions. That’s what we needed. And for this client, it meant leads.

The thing is, we’ve already made the site so good that we couldn’t seem to make it any better. Our SEO is coming in quite slow since it’s a very, very crowded and competitive industry – so SEO would creep in but we needed things to happen – and fast.

The client was getting impatient because there were few leads coming in and the way we do SEO doesn’t exactly work like an on and off switch.

So I finally decided to give them our Conversion Rate Optimization services for free.

A Depressing Conversion Rate Problem

First thing we did was benchmark where we were. Even with a beautiful website, our sessions to leads numbers were extremely depressing.

From June to December 2015, we received 6,735 sessions according to Google Analytics but we were only ever able to convert 49 subscribers.

In short, we were converting at a dismal 0.7%.

I was on my way to depression.

Even if we were going to increase our traffic by 10x, if we had a 0.7% conversion rate, the client won’t be happy. More than that, I know I myself won’t be happy.

I communicated it to my Web Development and User Experience team and we made it our mission to improve the conversion rate to at least 5% as the SEO team was working to improve the rankings.

Here’s what we did:

1. Checked most visited pages and improved it
2. Checked what browsers people were using and made sure our website worked nicely on all those browsers
3. Improved site speed significantly
4. Asked for all their catalogs, price lists – scanned it and uploaded it to be given away in exchange for emails
5. Figured out problems people were experiencing in terms of usability

Our conversion rate since implementing these 5 things on January improved by a colossal 729%.

From January to March, we were able to gather 166 subscribers with 4,529 sessions according to Google Analytics. That’s a staggering 3.6% – a long way off from our previous rate of 0.7%.

March alone had a 5.8% conversion rate – hitting our 5% mark.

So for your benefit, I’ll try to go ahead and elaborate a bit on those 5 things that we did:

Checked Most Visited Pages and Improved it

Take a look at this screenshot. This came from the client’s Google Analytics data under Behavior -> All Pages

From this picture, we took 3 pages as an example.

As you can see, the first 2 pages have lots of sessions and can retain people well due to the low exit rates on those pages. These pages are the product page and the catalog page. They have high intent and they have a call to action to turn visitors into leads.

The third page, however has a huge number of unique hits and a huge number of people entering through that page. It’s a page in the blog so naturally, a lot of people would exit the page after reading the article.

But we don’t want them to ‘just exit’. We want them to turn into a lead.

So we checked each page and found out how we can funnel the visitors from page 3 to pages 1 and 2.

Next thing we did was to check the browsers our visitors were using to check out our site.

Checked what Browsers People were Using

We uncovered that Internet Explorer – which is a browser we very much took for granted, was actually bringing us visitors with good numbers. So we proceeded to fix that.

We also discovered that our most valuable traffic came from Firefox which is leagues away in terms of user behavior than all other browsers.

As expected, Chrome brought in the most volume of traffic but also had a considerably high bounce rate. In any case, that’s the first browser we optimized for.

Improved Site Speed Significantly

The website loaded slowly – slower than perhaps 90% of all other sites in the web. And that’s because the images were many and we didn’t have site speed in mind when we developed the site.

It wasn’t a long hurdle though as I simply used this site speed optimization guide. Long story short, we implemented:

• Browser caching
• Object caching
• Database caching
• Minify
• An extremely fast and reliable CDN (we use MaxCDN for ourselves and our clients)

That took our site from slower than 90% of all websites out there to faster than 77% of all tested websites. We used Pingdom’s tool to get this data.

Gave Away their Products and Prices

Well we didn’t really give the products itself away. We simply asked for all their product catalogs, price lists, etc.

We scanned it and uploaded it to be given away in exchange for emails. As it happened, their site visitors were very much inclined to download them because that increased our leads conversion rate significantly.

What we learned: Even if the traffic we were getting through SEO for our client wasn’t huge, it was very targeted. People were interested enough to give away their email addresses and download the product catalogs and price lists to know what our client has in stock.

Takeaway: If your client has catalogs, price lists or other collateral that their users may want at the get-go, ask for it, scan it, redesign it if necessary then upload it for your site’s visitors.

Plugged Usability Issues

The site was beautiful. That’s my opinion.

But you know what? Opinions don’t matter. Take it from Richard Pryor,

So we finally got our hands dirty and tried to find out what usability issues people were experiencing in our site. For this, we ran a Qeryz survey that asked a very simple question:

We ran this survey on all the pages of the website. We wanted to know if people were actually getting to where they want to be. If they were getting the information they really wanted from our website.

If they said ‘Yes‘ we gave them this message with a clickable link in it that encourages them to send us a message.

If they said ‘No’ we asked them what exactly they were looking for.

At first, we were getting a lot of No’s – which was alarming. How can a beautiful website be so bad in getting people to where they want to be?

So we looked into what people were really looking for and here’s what we found out:

People were looking for the same product which I recall was already up in the site.

At the back of my head, I was wondering “How come people were still asking for this when it’s in the categories section of our main menu?”

I was quite perplexed. Until I found out that this same product was showing in the homepage – BUT what was in the homepage was the 2015 version of the product.

That’s why people couldn’t find it!

With this insight, we changed the homepage to reflect the 2016 version of the product. After that, we got a lot more ‘Yes’ responses than ‘No’.

Consequently, we got a lot more leads too.

After we improved our sessions to leads conversion rate, the client renewed our contract with them which amounted to a hefty $32,000. It’s not much, but for a startup company like ours, that means a lot.

Conversion Rate Optimization Practices that we did not do

I think it’s also important to note that there are CRO best practices that we did not do and not because we couldn’t do them but because we did not see the need to run them. Plus we already hit our goal of at least a 5% conversion rate.

Here are the things that we did not do:

1. A/B testing – didn’t see the need for it as conversions already skyrocketed
2. Activity capture – Inspectlet is an expensive tool and we use it for premium clients only. I couldn’t afford to give it for free this time. It’s an extremely awesome tool though.
3. Heuristic changes – We didn’t see the need for this since our initial design has an almost perfect feel to it already. We stuck more on data.
4. Heatmap/clickmap/scrollmap – We wanted to go deeper than just clicks and scrolls so we used Qeryz surveys to uncover them instead.

One of the reasons why we didn’t do these things anymore is because it’s also a lot more expensive to run from our end. Plus it takes more time to implement and create action points from these.

SEO is awesome but if we focused on SEO and traffic and did not do the things we did for CRO, we’d still be converting at 0.7%

We would also probably be $32,000 short.

The post Why we Gave our Conversion Rate Optimization Services Away and how it Landed us $32,000 in Sales appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

The two most important things to a website that wants to make money: Conversion Rate Optimization and SEO. In a perfect world, these two should be the powerhouse – the quarterback – to online success.

The thing is, it’s not a perfect world. And the two may have some intersecting problems along the way that may hinder your success instead.

This post is about where those intersects happen and how to overcome them.

The cost of doing SEO is ever increasing especially with our economy going global. Competition is getting perpetually tighter. It’s no longer enough just to rank – it’s a must to actually convert as much traffic as you can.

Here are the 5 most common mistakes that CRO specialists make when it comes to SEO.

Content Duplication

Probably the most common mistake in A/B testing webpages or websites is that the variation or challenger page is not set-up properly when it comes to the rel=”canonical” tag.

This mistake is especially hurtful when you are A/B testing an entire site or an entire experience.

One test that we’re running is a full-site experience for Qeryz. What that means is that we’re testing multiple pages in the user’s journey. These pages include the:

Homepage

Pricing page

Testimonials page

Features page

If you noticed, the variation pages provide a whole new different kind of feel. The design and copy is different. The reason behind that is our A/B test is for the entire experience and not just elements of the site.

Still, the content of the pages are not completely different – there are elements that can be considered to be almost a duplicate of the original and so if you check the source code, you’ll see that we did our due diligence and put canonical tags for each page.

This ensures that Google understands that those pages have a canonical version and that the canonical version should be credited for the content.

Wrong Kind of Redirect

There are two main kinds of redirects that we use especially as SEO specialists and that’s 301 and 302.

301 redirects pass on link juice and all other properties that Google is mindful about. So it’s the more commonly used redirect out of the two.

This is usually used for pages that are ‘under construction’ or in A/B tests. The original page retains all the properties that Google cares about and the variation page (which is where usually 50% of the traffic is redirected to) won’t get any of that.

And that’s a good thing because usually the variation page has a lot of similar elements to the original page and you’re not so sure if the variation page will win so you shouldn’t channel all the properties of the original to the variation via a 301 redirect.

Bottom line: If you use a 301 redirect for your A/B test, you will rank down.

Bonus: If you’re wondering how to run an A/B test, you can check out: How to Run your First A/B Experiment for Free Using Google Content Experiments

Site Speed

One common concern with A/B testing or multivariate testing is site speed. Often, the 302 redirects, extra jquery scripts loading, and multiple element tracking just bog the site down.

That sucks because often the variation version is already at a loss because of this – imagine the original page having no necessary redirects so it loads faster but the variation version is redirected so it loads a lot slower.

So how do you solve this?

The post How to do CRO without Damaging SEO appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

You land your site on the top. Traffic is coming in. Things are going “silky smooth”. You feel like you’re on top of the world. You’ve made it. You “got there”. What’s next?

Webmaster’s Note: This is my Powerpoint deck on the SEO Summit 2015 conference. SEO Summit 2016 is still being finalized as of today but the date will be mid-June.

The next thing after perpetual search traffic is achieved is user engagement. Your site has to be able to deliver the promises you made in the search engine results page.

Website user engagement has a lot to do with the behavior and psychology of the individual. And if we’re going to be honest with ourselves, one of the best ways to engage users in a serious way is through Conversion Rate Optimization.

In this Powerpoint deck, I’ll take you through the process of CRO from pinpointing important pages in your site, recording existing data, identifying the leaks, formulating a hypothesis, validating your hypothesis, all the way to A/B testing.

It’s a very interesting process and I gave a case study about how we did CRO for Qeryz which is ironically a CRO SaaS tool – increasing signups by a huge margin.

The most interesting thing is we didn’t really do SEO for Qeryz. We just did CRO. And yet our keywords climbed higher and higher as time went by.

Check out the Powerpoint deck. It’s around 78 slides. Enjoy!

The post How To Keep Your Rankings When You “Get There” appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.