CRO And SEO Strategies To Maximize Performance

CRO and SEO are two powerful marketing strategies often pitted against each other. As a business owner, marketer, or IT person, deciding between the two can get confusing. You may have questions like these:

• Which is better: SEO, CRO, or both?
• Will your SEO be affected if you start optimizing for conversions?
• Is SEO part of CRO?
• How do they work together?

Here’s the direct answer: no, SEO is not part of CRO. They’re two separate but complementary disciplines that share the same end goal of a better user experience, and they perform best when you run them together. In our client work, the two only conflict when they’re managed in isolation, so coordinating them is where the real gains come from.

SEO focuses on improving your website’s visibility and rankings in search results to drive organic traffic.

CRO helps increase the percentage of people who take a desired action on your website, such as sign-ups, email newsletter opt-ins, and similar goals. Both strategies can work in tandem to improve your conversions, drive quality traffic to your site, and make data-backed decisions on marketing campaigns.

What Does CRO Do In Marketing

The role of CRO in marketing goes beyond optimizing your website for conversions. While that’s a significant part of it, CRO encompasses a broader strategy to improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

It’s a fine blend of user experience, analytics, feedback, and psychological principles to understand:

• customer behavior,
• purchase patterns, and
• how you can encourage them to take a desired action on your website.

This action can be signing up for a newsletter, downloading a resource, buying a product, or paying for a service.

Like SEO, every step of the marketing funnel can be optimized for conversions. For example, at the awareness stage, CRO strategies optimize ad content and placements to increase click-through rates. In the decision phase, you can change the color of the CTA (call-to-action) button or add testimonials to streamline purchase decisions.

What Does SEO Do In Marketing

SEO caters to user search intent to enhance organic visibility on search engines. The goal is to top the search engine result pages, attract relevant traffic, boost organic visibility, and build site-wide authority. While this may not directly drive business goals, it’s the foundation other marketing efforts (including CRO) can leverage to achieve them. If you want a primer on the fundamentals, see our guide on what is SEO.

For example, if your goal is to increase sales by 20%, implementing an SEO strategy focusing on low-volume but high-intent keywords can help you attract the specific market for your business.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s discuss the symbiotic relationship between CRO and SEO.

Why Is CRO Important For SEO

Implementing CRO strategies into your SEO campaigns leads to:

Deeper customer insights. CRO audits show user behaviors on your website to inform how you can optimize for conversion. For example, heat maps show where users interacted with your web page and where they didn’t, and you can use this knowledge to move your CTA to where your users can see it.

In our own client work, these audits often surface a mismatch between rankings and results. These insights help you deliver personalized experiences that maximize your marketing spend and ROI (return on investment).

Increased conversion rate. SEO and CRO strategies also work together to boost your website conversion rate. For instance, on-page optimization (keywords in the title tag, meta description, headings, and content) improves ranking in the search results. A complementary CRO strategy would be to optimize page speed or strategically place CTAs in the content for faster and higher conversions.

Improved user experience. CRO and SEO have one thing in common: improving user experience. For SEO, Google already pointed out that to rank high on the search results, you need to create people-first content. The same applies to CRO. To improve your conversion rates, you need to pay more attention to what your audience wants, including their behavior, pain points, interest in the product or service, and purchase patterns. This information informs every element used on your website and the overall user interface design.

How To Combine SEO And CRO To Maximize Performance

Here’s how to balance your SEO and CRO efforts.

Step 1. Think Long-Term

Here, you need to look at the big picture. What are you trying to achieve with your website? Sales? Signups? More email subscribers? A systemic approach to CRO and SEO helps you save time and resources in the long run. Here’s how:

• Define what success means to you. Your business goals primarily influence your marketing activities and KPIs (key performance indicators). They also keep you from steering off course and tracking vanity metrics that don’t contribute to bottom-line success. For example, if your goal is to increase the number of users who opt in for your email list, you can achieve this by publishing more valuable content on your website, optimizing for the right keywords, using a clear CTA, and simplifying the signup process.
• Conduct a site-wide CRO audit to uncover how people interact with your site. An audit provides real-time insights into customer behavior, actions, most frequented pages, and how they interact with your site. Use Google Analytics to understand where the majority of your traffic comes from, their most frequent pages, and average session duration. Heat maps and session recordings can also show a visual representation of user interactions on your website. This data helps you understand your web page’s performance and see what’s working (and what’s not) on a granular level.
• Map out the user conversion flow. Parse out how your potential customers move from one stage of your marketing funnel to another. For instance, if you’re in ecommerce, you’ll need to consider your homepage, product pages, checkout pages, order confirmation pages, and help center pages. This makes it easy to track your typical customer journey and optimize for new customers.

There are five stages in the user conversion flow: awareness, engagement, conversion, retention, and referral. In the awareness stage, for instance, your primary objective is to capture relevant (quality) traffic. Activities here include targeting informational keywords, using straightforward value propositions and CTAs, and publishing high-quality content that caters to user search intent. Understand what your customer journey looks like to identify where you need to optimize for increased performance.

Step 2. Align Your CRO And SEO Goals

Instead of optimizing for one without the other, align your SEO and CRO goals in your overall marketing strategy. This helps you avoid conflicts between the two strategies, drive quality organic traffic to your site, and improve conversion rates at the same time.

For example, your product page ranks first on Google search results but has a low conversion rate. To find out why, you analyzed heat map reports and discovered that users bounce when they reach your product image. It wasn’t clear enough. To fix this, you decide to optimize for conversions by adding a video testimonial. Even though it increases conversion (CRO), the video can reduce page speed, which may hurt your rankings on the search results pages (SEO). So the two have to work symbiotically for optimal results.

Start With Site Speed And Core Web Vitals

Site speed is the clearest example of a shared CRO and SEO lever. A faster page ranks better and converts better, so you win on both fronts with a single fix. Core Web Vitals have been a Google ranking factor since 2021, and slow pages lose visitors before they ever see your offer. Aim for a load time under three seconds, compress heavy images, and cut render-blocking scripts. When you speed up a page, you’re improving SEO and CRO in the same move, which is why it’s the first place we look.

Here’s how to keep both strategies aligned:

• Break down the silos between your SEO and CRO owners. When those teams work in isolation, one team’s fix quietly cancels out the other’s, like the video testimonial that lifts conversions but slows the page. Both teams should know what they’re optimizing and understand whether it will affect website performance in any way. Our Targeted Growth System® folds CRO into your SEO work on the same account for exactly this reason, so changes support each other instead of working against them.
• Weave both strategies into your larger marketing goals. For instance, if your goal is to increase sign-ups for your service, SEO can focus on attracting potential customers, while CRO focuses on streamlining the sign-up process.

Step 3. Understand Your Market

It’s hard to cater to user intent if you don’t know who your customers are in the first place. Effective CRO and SEO strategies are user-centric, so you need to know all the types of users that visit your site and:

• what interests them,
• their pain points,
• what makes them click, and
• what’s stopping them from taking action on your site.

You also need to consider their intentions. This tells you why they’re visiting your page and what they’re looking for when they do. For example, some visitors might be looking for information to make educated purchase choices, and others might be looking to buy a product.

Here are some tips that help:

• Create customer archetypes (or personas) representing each segment of your website visitors. You can create fictional characters using a template or conduct real-life user tests to gather data on their demographics and psychographics.
• Speak to your sales team. They interact with your customers daily and are aware of the common problems they face.
• Use tools like Google Forms, Hotjar, or SurveyMonkey to create on-site surveys and polls to gather information about your customers. For example, if a user tries to leave your page quickly, you can have a poll pop up asking questions like, “What was the purpose of your visit?” or “Did you find what you were looking for?”
• Use website analytics software such as Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and Semrush to study how people interact with your site. You can track how many visitors landed on a particular page, the time spent, the devices used, and more.
• Use session recording and heatmap tools like Hotjar to get a feel for how people use your website, see how far they scroll, and see which parts of your page get the most attention.
• Read reviews on online stores (e.g., Amazon), forums (e.g., Reddit), and app stores (e.g., Google Play). Pay attention to the words used in the reviews, including their likes and dislikes, for your content development.

Pro tip: Always pay attention to what your customers want. Don’t assume you know them. If possible, conduct one-on-one interviews to ask about their needs and the type of experience they prefer.

Read more: How to define your target audience for SEO.

Step 4. Target The Right Keywords

Effective keyword research is the key to your website’s success. Without it, you’ll attract the wrong people to your site who aren’t looking for your products or services. It doesn’t matter if you have the best CTAs or landing page design. If your website isn’t targeting the right keywords, all your CRO efforts will go down the drain.

So how do you target the right keywords? Focus on user search intent. There are four different types of keywords in this category:

• Informational keywords: the user is searching for more information, e.g., best time tracking app for remote workers.
• Transactional keywords: these keywords indicate that users are ready to make a purchase, e.g., Vera Wang dresses for sale.
• Commercial keywords: people use these keywords to research specific brands, products, or services, e.g., Starbucks coffee vs espresso.
• Navigational keywords: searchers use these to find a specific brand, product, or service, e.g., HubSpot CRM.

SEO tools like Semrush help you discover and analyze keywords based on their user intent, search volume, and keyword difficulty.

Pro tip: During your search, you’ll discover broad, short-tail keywords with high volume and high intent, as well as long-tail keywords with low search volume. Since these keywords influence your rankings and visibility in the search results, it’s better to find a balance between search volume (traffic) and keyword length (traffic quality).

Read more:

• How to choose the right keywords for SEO.
• Why keyword research matters for SEO.

Step 5. Optimize Content For User Intent

Once you’ve identified the right keywords for each user journey stage, you need to optimize your web pages accordingly. This is where creating high-quality content comes in.

User-centric, high-quality content opens up more opportunities for traffic (SEO) and conversions (CRO). This type of content has a higher chance of topping the SERPs, leading to more visibility, clicks, and conversion opportunities.

Google’s guidance on creating helpful content, now part of its core ranking systems, is clear that low-quality, unhelpful pages with poor user experience get de-ranked, while helpful, people-first content ranks higher.

What to do:

• Create and publish content that’s mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. This type of content answers most (or all) of your customers’ questions and prioritizes information gain. There’s no perfect content length, so provide as much valuable information as you can.
• Use simple words. Avoid ambiguous terms or nuances that may confuse your readers.
• Use bullet points, bold text, and italics to keep the content scannable. Highlight the important words in your content.
• Add quality visuals (videos or images) to demonstrate your content to your readers. Show, don’t just tell.
• Write vital headlines, since they directly influence your click-through rates. Keep them concise, compelling, and optimized with the right keywords. Your readers should be able to answer “What’s in it for me?” after reading your headline. A good example is “6 natural supplements that may help you manage ADHD.”
• Use the Google People Also Ask section to find related search queries for your target keyword. This is a good strategy for a FAQ page.

Step 6. Leverage User-Generated Content (UGC)

When was the last time you bought something off the internet? Your decision was probably informed by reviews from other users or someone from your network. That’s the power of UGC.

It works because humans are more inclined to trust recommendations from their network than what a brand says about itself. Research validates this: according to research on online reviews from Capital One Shopping, more than 99% of U.S. consumers read online reviews before making a purchase.

UGC can take various forms, including testimonials, reviews, photos, and videos. Incorporating these elements into your web content can influence your website’s performance on the SERPs and your conversion rates.

For example, your Google Business Profile reviews might compel a searcher to check your website for more information. Placing another review on your web page can help them make decisions faster. Other reasons are:

• Prospects will likely trust your brand when others have had a positive experience with your product or service.
• Search engines use user engagement and off-page factors like backlinks to ascertain your website’s credibility. Social proof indicates a good user experience and acts as a vote of confidence in your website’s authoritativeness.
• Prospects are more likely to find your brand online when someone in their network recommends it.
• Prospects are likely to convert when someone credible gives a good review about your brand.

What to do:

• Offer your product or service in exchange for a review if you don’t have any reviews yet.
• Incentivize your customers to create and share UGC with their network through social media campaigns, contests, and discounts.
• Add customer reviews to high-value pages like product pages or case studies.
• Optimize your UGC for SEO by adding relevant alt tags (for visuals) and using the right keywords and tags.
• Use A/B testing to know the best UGC type on each web page.
• Set up social listening using tools like Buffer to see how customers mention your brand on social platforms.

Step 7. Use Calls-To-Action

CTAs are a powerful conversion strategy. They help users make quicker decisions by telling them what action to take on your site. See this example from HigherVisibility.

Helpful tips to mirror:

• Make the CTAs visible. Use large, brightly colored buttons, as they seem more conspicuous and often convert better.
• Replicate your CTAs strategically at different positions on your web page if the page is long.
• Write CTA text carefully, since it’s equally important. Instead of using passive verbs like “learn more” or “read more,” use precise, benefit-oriented verbs like “Send my custom strategy” or “Download your free eBook.”
• Use contrasting colors so the CTA buttons stand out on the web page.
• Use A/B testing to test different CTAs and learn which works best for your audience.

Step 8. Experiment, Test, And Reiterate

As we shared earlier, the key to success in CRO and SEO is a data-backed approach. Conducting CRO experiments shows what you need to improve on your website and the exact strategies you need to implement for results.

What to do: The first step is the research stage. Here, you evaluate your website performance to understand why it’s not performing as expected on high-value pages, or why it is.

Next, conduct qualitative and quantitative research to find answers to your research questions, especially for underperforming pages. Quantitative data shows what is happening on your website, e.g., site analytics and traffic data. Qualitative data looks into why users acted the way they did, e.g., usability tests, heat maps, surveys, and session recordings. For example, if quantitative data shows high traffic but a low conversion rate, qualitative data may show that your CTAs aren’t clickable or clear enough. Leveraging this data, you can create a hypothesis for improvements. The improvement could be simplifying form fields, using clear CTAs, offering multiple payment options, or providing reassurances about site security.

Once you’ve done experimenting, how do you know the exact strategy that will improve your website’s conversion rate? This is where testing comes in.

Testing. You need to test everything. This process eliminates guesswork and ensures your website layout and content changes are based on empirical evidence rather than mere intuition. What can you test:

• different offers, e.g., longer commitments, buy one get one free, automatic renewal, and installment payments,
• different pricing structures,
• product or service pages bringing the highest and lowest conversions,
• weak links in your marketing funnel for re-optimization,
• CTA text, placements, and structures, and
• content length and format.

Pro tip: Conduct usability testing using tools like UserTesting or Userlytics to gain deep, granular insights into your web pages and identify ways to improve their conversion.

Use predictive analytics. Predictive analytics employs different methods (machine learning, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and statistical models) to predict user behavior as they interact with your site. Instead of guessing, this method helps you uncover patterns in your customer data to make informed decisions on future campaigns. The result:

• reduces the possibility of a failed campaign,
• delivers a higher return on investment,
• increases conversion rate, and
• enables personalized targeting for optimized web performance.

Predictive analytics also helps you draw hypotheses for improving customer experience on your website. For example, if the predictive analysis reveals that many website visitors abandon their carts at the payment stage, this might be because they experienced a friction point that altered their purchase process.

Finalize with A/B testing. A/B testing software, such as Optimizely, Convert.com, and VWO, helps you identify the best-performing variant in your CRO and SEO campaigns. You’ll also learn what to do more of (and less of). Using our example above, you can split your traffic into segments A, B, and C to test how to improve your conversion rate.

• Segment A: simplify form fields.
• Segment B: offer multiple payment options.
• Segment C: re-optimize content highlighting reassurances of on-site security.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is SEO Part Of CRO

No. SEO and CRO are two separate disciplines. SEO improves your visibility and rankings in search results to bring in organic traffic, while CRO increases the share of visitors who take a desired action once they arrive. They aren’t the same practice, but they share the goal of a better user experience and work best together.

Which Is Better, SEO Or CRO

Neither is better on its own, because they solve different problems. SEO brings the right people to your site, and CRO turns more of those visitors into leads or customers. Traffic without conversions wastes your effort, and a high-converting page nobody visits won’t grow revenue. The strongest results come from running both together.

Will Optimizing For Conversions Hurt My SEO

It doesn’t have to, and it shouldn’t when the work is coordinated. Conflicts happen when a CRO change ignores SEO, like adding a heavy video that slows your page and drags down rankings. We coordinate SEO and CRO on the same account so changes support each other, protecting your rankings while lifting conversions.

What’s An Example Of SEO And CRO Working Together

Site speed is a clear example. A faster page ranks better in search (SEO) and keeps more visitors long enough to convert (CRO), so one fix improves both. Another example is a page that ranks well but converts poorly. SEO earns the ranking, and a CRO fix like a clearer CTA or stronger social proof captures more of that traffic.

Conclusion

If you’re all about:

• improving your user experience and website performance,
• multiplying your conversion rates,
• satisfying user search intent, and
• staying ahead of the curve,

Then you should combine CRO and SEO in your digital marketing strategy.

However, it’s not as easy as it looks. To avoid conflicting SEO over CRO, you need someone who understands the intricacies of both strategies and how to combine them for the best results.

One of our clients, Restoration Roofing, had an in-house team handling their marketing, but they weren’t seeing any results. Running SEO and CRO together through our Targeted Growth System, we improved their conversion rate and organic traffic. The results? They saw a:

• 162% increase in organic traffic YoY,
• 400% increase in organic leads YoY, and
• 164.9% increase in organic visibility YoY.

Contact us today to get a free custom strategy on how we can achieve your growth goals through CRO and SEO.