You have been optimizing your website for months now. You’ve done industry research and selected target keywords. You have written new content, increased your site speed, built new links, and run dozens of split tests on your site to find out what your audience wants to see. Surely by now, your site is the best it can ever be, so should you keep optimizing? The answer is yes. Website optimization is a journey, not a race. SEO and CRO require a lot of patience. Before you decide to ditch optimization for a faster route, consider some of the following benefits to investing in long-term SEO and CRO strategies.
Reasons to Invest in Long-Term Optimization Strategies:
1. SEO and CRO bring customers to your site:
You already know that SEO brings traffic to your website. Whether you are a local service provider, or an online retailer, ranking high in the SERPs has a big impact on your website traffic. You may also have realized that increased traffic does not always translate into equally increased business and revenue. This is where CRO comes in.
SEO helps your website get found by quality leads by putting your website at the top of the list for relevant search queries (aka keywords). CRO turns those leads into paying customers by optimizing your site to meet the user’s needs, and guiding the users to take the desired action.
First you show the search engines that you are a match, and then you prove it to the users. By doing this, you can get your traffic, and revenue too!
2. SEO and CRO help you beat the competition:
In this digital age, you are no longer competing with the shop next door. Now your competitors are anyone from anywhere. This means that you have to step your game locally, and nationally too. That’s where optimization comes in.
SEO helps you get found in local searches as well as in national listings. This visibility is half the battle in beating your competition, as demonstrated by first-page results getting anywhere from 70%-90% of all traffic (depending on the source you cite). Unlike PPC campaigns, your competition cannot simply pay extra to usurp your spot. SERP results, while not entirely egalitarian, are some of the most fair and therefore most trusted forms of marketing available.
CRO works a little differently, but this where you can really solidify your competitive edge. Not only can you run tests to find out what captures your users’ attention, but you can use this information to improve your website’s design, messaging, offers, and marketing campaigns. With this information you can increase your conversion rate and keep users coming back. Afterall, if users buy from you once they are likely to come again, further increasing your market share and decreasing the competition’s.
3. Optimization builds your reputation:
A website that ranks high in the SERPs is usually considered to be both high-quality and trustworthy. This is because search engines, like Google, have strict standards for first page listings.
Think of it this way; would you rather go to a restaurant that’s been featured in multiple food magazines, is recommended by your friends, and has dozens of 5-star reviews online, or a restaurant that you know nothing about? You’d probably choose the first restaurant. Search Engines work the same way: the more they see that people like a website, the higher they rank it, further vouching for its reputation.
SEO and CRO work hand-in-hand in this endeavor. What is good for your audience is also good for the algorithm. Improving the UX of your website, creating content that provides useful information and answers questions, and making your user’s time on the site as easy and enjoyable as possible will help boost your SERPs rankings as well as your reputation as a business.
Remember, the better the experience you have somewhere, the more likely you are to go back, and to recommend it to other people as well.
4. Long term optimization brings long term benefits:
SEO takes a long time to build, but the benefits of your rankings also last a long time. Unlike many forms of marketing, SEO keeps growing and keeps working for you 24/7. Once you start optimizing your work builds on itself, creating unlimited potential in terms of traffic. As long as you keep up the work, your rankings and traffic will not disappear overnight, the way they do if you stop paying for ads.
The same goes for CRO. Testing and implementing winning variations can take a long time. When you are just starting out, you may not see ROI right away, but as you work to figure out your audience’s preferences and needs you build a better site. The result is a user-friendly website that meets your audience’s ever changing needs and preferences.
You shouldn’t expect to see immediate results and sudden jumps in revenue when you start new campaigns. Instead, you should expect to see incremental revenue that builds over time. Optimization is about building a solid SEO and CRO strategies based on steady growth and improvement, like a good investment portfolio that pays dividends over time.
5. Optimization can save you money:
That’s right, SEO and CRO can actually save you money. How? Because they lower the need to spend money on ads. SEO doesn’t just bring more users to your site, but when done correctly, they bring in the right kind of users to your site. In fact, organic traffic converts at higher rates than paid traffic in almost every industry!
Speaking of conversions, CRO is a vital part of this money saving equation. CRO helps you maximize on the traffic you gain from SEO by turning that traffic into customers. CRO helps you learn more about what your users want from the site and from your business as a whole. This can help you create more effective ads, content, and can help select better keywords for SEO.
Better traffic and more conversions means you can lower your cost-per-acquisition and increase your ROI!
Summary: It’s hard to be patient when it comes to growing your business, but creating long-term SEO and CRO strategies is well worth the time it takes. The steady, incremental benefits you gain from investing in optimizing your website turns into long-lasting, compounding rewards for years to come. Isn’t that worth staying the course?
