5 Ways to Combine SEO, SEM, and CRO for a Winning E-Commerce Strategy

 

SEOOpens a new window , SEM and CROOpens a new window processes are correlated with each other. They are the horses of the same chariot who form the key elements of a successful e-commerce strategy.

Users First

Always remember that it’s the users (your website visitors or customers) who are your top priority. All the efforts and investments for your SEO, SEM, and CRO strategyOpens a new window will be worthwhile only if your landing page or website provides a good, or I should say, GREAT! User experience.

• Creating engaging and informativeOpens a new window content will help engage visitorsOpens a new window , which in turn will boost your Google (search engine) rankings, bringing in more users and the cycle will continue.
• Serving content that answers a user query or adds value to their journey is a sure shot way to push the visitor down the sales funnel.
• Trimming out extra content that is likely to distract visitors or doesn’t add value will ease site-navigation for visitors and help search engines crawl and index it.
• Tailoring content to evolve around SEM campaign structure helps bridge the content gaps. Generally, the SEM strategy revolves around existing content and adapts to dynamic consumer interests. Digging into SEM metrics for optimizing SEM programs can also contribute to enhance existing content and develop fresh content by providing pointers to what works well, how the customer’s needs are changing etc.
• Enhancing customer journeyOpens a new window of a visitor will make her experience seamless and enjoyable and a good UX complements CRO.

Identifying pain points, rigorously testing your hypotheses based on research, tweaking the website based on results will improve UX, and conversions will follow.
 

Sharing Keyword Data
 

SEO and SEM – they both rely heavily on keywords to increase traffic albeit using different marketing techniques. SEO generates organic traffic (unpaid or free listings), while SEM is for targeted paid adsOpens a new window for a ‘right combination’ of keywords.

Instead of operating in silos, SEO and SEM teams need to work together to deliver better results.

For instance, analyzing reports from Adwords to identify trending keywords can help SEO team prioritize them and tailor content around these terms.

SEMOpens a new window team can also review SEO traffic trendsOpens a new window and strategize the campaigns around them. Say, if organic traffic peaks for certain keywords during weekends, it thus is a better idea to plan and accelerate your activities around this time.

With a better understanding of keyword data, you can maintain a high degree of relevance between your ads and corresponding landing pages and make better decisions about your website, to boost your CRO strategyOpens a new window .

 

Also Read: How social targeting can drive real business resultsOpens a new window

 

Focus

A focused approach that highlights a product or a service to a targeted segment generates fruitful results. Avoid sailing in multiple boats, i.e. creating a strategy that has your key product (or service) at the nucleus will help achieve better search rankings, ad clicks and improve conversions.

Your SEO and SEM should revolve around your core competence, which will enable search engines to know what exactly your page is about (SEO), visitors see the ‘exact’ content they were looking for (SEM), help you design your landing page around a central theme, and design obvious CTAs (CRO). This essentially simplifies the path to conversionOpens a new window .

This doesn’t mean your other products (services) should be neglected, but you must ensure that they do not compete against each other for rankings, either on landing pages or user’s attention.
 

Common Goal
 

While designing your SEO, SEM and CRO strategies you must understand that they have common goals: to attain visibility, gain traffic to your website, and ultimately drive conversions.

So, your SEO strategy should optimize content for top keywords to achieve visibility and up your SERP ranking, while continually analyzing other low competition high-search keywords.

For SEM you must enhance your Ad Rank, which considers your bid amount, Quality score, and expected impact of extensions and other ad formats. A successful SEM campaign will segment campaigns to align with products, locations, performance etc., allocate advertisement spend wisely (based on performance – low CPA, high return), perform intelligent ad-distributionOpens a new window and categorisation of keywords (e.g. generic, specific to a product, or brand search) to understand searcher’s intent and placement in the conversion funnel.

CRO will optimize your landing pages, offer a user-friendly experience to aid decision making and give that final push to a qualified lead to make a purchase. For this, you need to plug in the holes, analyze and test to create easy to explore, engaging, streamlined site.
 

Balance
 

They say ‘Chances favor only the prepared minds’ and a successful e-commerce strategy needs to be lucky apart from being well-planned.

SEO, SEM, and CRO must work in tandem to build a super-powered e-commerce strategyOpens a new window . You have to build a great landing page first, for the traffic that will arrive. But you can’t invest too much, because if there is no traffic there are no conversions. SEO that brings organic traffic is the cheapest but requires a lot of research, effort and is a slow process. SEM, on the other hand, can bring you quick traffic but investments are higher.

SEO, SEM, and CRO together is a juggler’s act where a lot of practice and balance is required to achieve that perfect combination to create a winning e-commerce strategy.