Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is where SEO ends and CRO begins. In the prior video, we've talked about what CRO is and I want to discuss SEO and CRO and how they match. But before we begin, I'm going to introduce the tea we had and because of the CRO video I had we talked with chrysanthemum tea, I'm just going to do a consistency thing and have chrysanthemum tea again. Chrysanthemum tea, again, is a dried flower that you can steep with hot water and it has a sweet and floral taste. It does not have any caffeine but it's very soothing. A lot of people have it when they are kids, especially if you grew up in an Asian culture you'll have probably have had chrysanthemum flower juice when you were a kid. It is something that I have some nostalgia with.
But let's go ahead and get brewing, talk about SEO and CRO. Let's start with SEO first. SEO's entire job is to make sure that we're getting your site ranked on a high value keywords. And what we mean by that is we want to rank your site for keywords that have lots of searches so that when people Google search that keyword you'll be on the top of Google. That's what SEO is all about. This way we can drive more traffic and more views to your site. That's cool. CRO is a little bit different. CRO is involved with making sure that once people have entered the doorway into your site, are people converting? That's a major differential point that you need to understand is that SEO is 100% about making sure that your site is ranking on high volume of keywords and that we're driving traffic to your website. And that's important because you're just trying to make sure that your site right now is getting as much traffic from relevant keywords as possible.
However, that's where SEO ends. Once people have come through that door of your website, it's not really SEO tactics anymore. It's all now about CRO. SEO's job is to ensure your site is optimized; the headings, the content, the link building all try to make your site ranked on Google. Once more traffic has entered into your site, the rules of the game have changed. Now it's about CRO. Now that people have clicked into your site from the Google searches, it doesn't matter about optimizing for SEO. They're there already. What CRO is involved with is how do we make sure that when people get onto your site, they're converting? Where are they clicking? Are they getting stuck anywhere? Is the site confusing? That's where CRO comes into play.
It kind of sounds like a natural baton pass. Oh yeah, once they get onto the site, that's where CRO begins. But I want to talk a little bit about where CRO and SEO also have conflicts. SEO has very specific needs in order to rank. For example, if you want to rank for a keyword, oftentimes you must put that keyword in the title tag of the site, headings of the site, titles of the site and so on and so forth. But for CRO, what a CRO person might be thinking is ... And this is just hypothetical so this may not be what they're thinking, but I'm just using an example ... A CRO individual who's worried about the conversion rate optimization might say, "You know, using that keyword in the title isn't good enough. We should change into Buy Now or Hey there, what are you doing?" And so, they think that through their tests they found that headline is much more conducive to converting someone when they get into the site.
The problem is the SEO person needs that keyword in the headline for it to rank but the CRO person is saying once that person enters, though, and they get on that page, that headline is not helping with the conversion rate optimization. And that's where, yes, there's a baton pass but there is also a marriage of you need to figure out the give and take. SEO's are ... my philosophy with my clients is saying, "Let's get you traffic first and then we can worry about your conversion rate optimization. Because if you're worried about your conversion rate optimization first, what does it matter if we're not bringing in any traffic?" That's not to say that's not important. There is a natural point where you are ranking and you are driving traffic to your website. Are they converting? And that's where SEO ends and CRO meets but that doesn't mean that CRO should just take over SEO because you need to maintain your ranking by insuring that your SEO is optimized on your website.
Therefore, I would say when it comes to SEO and CRO there needs to be some happy marriage where CRO is able to make some suggestions, SEO must be willing to take those suggestions and test them, themselves, and monitor the rankings. And there has to be a happy medium so the SEO's can ensure they maintain their rankings and CRO's ensure that they're doing their job, which is to improve their conversion rate on the sites. That's kind of how SEO and CRO work together. They are not perfectly matched but they do need each other. However, they can also get in each other's way. I would make sure that when you're working with CRO you make sure that you understand the stipulations both on the SEO side but also on the CRO side.
If you guys found the video valuable ... I hope it informed the difference between SEO, CRO and how they work together. If you guys liked what you saw, please like and subscribe. I'm going to go ahead and pour my tea out. And if you guys liked what you saw, I would hope to see you guys again soon in future videos. Thanks, everybody.