SEO can help improve conversions on your website by reinforcing the importance of optimal website performance and helpful, engaging content. SEO also aims to bring more users to your site from various stages of the marketing funnel, which can indirectly lead to conversions through other channels. At their core, SEO algorithms are based on UX & CRO best practices.
1. SEO Content Optimization Improves Engagement Rate
Is your title tag engaging? Can the users grasp the gist of your content from the first paragraph, or from looking at the subheadings in your table of contents? Does the text provide enough visual relief for the user – bolded or italicized key phrases, contextual anchor text, broken up paragraphs, bullet lists…? Where do internal links point users to? Is your top navigation bar useful? Are the checkout process or contact form easy to locate?
Keyword targeting and internal linking are the foundation of on-site SEO optimization, but they are rooted in Google’s aim to only promote content that’s actually readable & useful for users, so optimizing your content for SEO also means optimizing your conversion paths.
2. SEO Brings More Users to Your Site
When done correctly, SEO will give your website more visibility to users in different stages of the conversion funnel. SEO will both help you reach users in the decision stage through targeting purchase-intent keywords, but it will also help you reach users in the consideration or research stages through targeting top-funnel, informational queries.
In summary, following SEO-best practices for content marketing & site performance optimization are, at their core, based on UX best practices. Investing in SEO means optimizing all of your content for users and sparking on-site engagement. More site engagement and more users will naturally amount to more conversions in the long-run.
3. Page Loading & Page Speed are Ranking Factors
As part of Google’s Core Web Vitals report, page loading & page speed are confirmed ranking factors. In short, the three Core Web Vitals’ metrics (First Input Delay, Largest Contentful Paint, & Cumulative Layout Shift) measure how fast your site’s biggest assets load, how quickly your site responds to user input, and whether or not layout changes happen for the user as the site is rendering on-screen.
Page load times are not just important for SEO – they’re important for conversions, as well. Users are more likely to click away from a site if the load times are slow. For those who stay, the page performance impacts their willingness to make a purchase. Studies on page load times show that every added second of load time lowers conversion rates considerably.
Achieving optimal results on Core Web Vitals’ assessments, in turn, also means you’re providing an optimal user experience.
Contact Fire&Spark to learn more about how SEO fits into your overall marketing strategy.
