SEO News

What is CRO?

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the improvement of signposting and usability to enhance the rate at which people buy. If you’ve been using SEO techniques to send more traffic to your site, it’s likely that you’ll be looking for further ways to improve your market share.

By harnessing modern directives to improve the quality of search results you can improve your site’s usability and ranking capabilities whilst ensuring you get the best out of your traffic. 

There are two main ways to analyse and gather information on usability, through A/B Testing and Surveys, and they both have their benefits, so it’s up to you to select a combination of techniques which you think are most suitable for your business. 

Before you dig into the various usability testing methods, consider points of inspiration, this might even be your competitors.  

If you want some stimulus, then look at Interflora.co.uk. It has some of the best rates of conversion in the industry, and some of the practices might directly be applicable to your website.

Why CRO?

If you spent all day sending quality targeted traffic to a website, but the c’lient’ wasn’t converting in line with industry standards, you might be forgiven for occasionally feeling like you were swimming upstream.

But if you realised just how little your department was invested in compared to marketing-centric departments, you might just go postal. 

‘For every $92 spent on acquiring customers in the US, only 1$ is spent on conversion’

Digital job titles are merging more and our practices are becoming all-together more unified, as departments work together towards the business goals. As we can see from the statistic above, it’s important to give credit to all facets in a measured manner.

One way to justify this can be through attribution modeling, this is a theory which can attribute conversions to all interaction stages in the sales process, not just the last click.

So if your Ecommerce team have modified the checkout process, adding a retention strategy for dropped baskets, and this has been instrumental in bringing a customer back to the website but through another channel like search, then the partial credit can be attributed to the CRO department. 

Start with a strategy, where improvements to conversion are valued as important as traffic gains, in order to achieve the overall business goals. By reducing the steps taken in the customer journey, and improving opportunities for up/cross-selling you can ensure that you leverage traffic to its potential. 

In the words of Bryan Eisenberg; “For you to achieve your goals visitors must first achieve theirs”. 

Examples of proven/employed CRO techniques

Product page

A few years back Amazon decided to remove the traditional left hand navigation from its product pages. The justification behind this was simple, give your customer fewer opportunities to change their mind, and they might actually buy what you’re offering.

Now Amazon didn’t take this step without adding other elements to the product page to ensure that if the product offered wasn’t right, that there were other routes that the customer could take.

Just take a look at an Amazon product page, it’s pretty exhaustive with the amount of information, creating a ‘one stop’ shop for customers, where the content hopes to answer any potential question they might have, and the content appeals to search terms frequently used.

So whilst the content can improve rankings & benefit conversion rates, it’ll also help cut down on complaints too, as users are given a better picture of what they are purchasing. 

Checkout process

A few companies use an enclosed checkout, which simply put, is a basket purchasing process whereby if the customer has instantiated the buying process, they are encouraged not to drop out.  

If a drop does occur, re-marketing can take place via email and the details from the previous interaction are saved for the next visit.

Analysing conversion optimisation opportunities

There are many ways which you can start examining the customer journey, but one of the best quick and dirty ways is to use Five Second Test where you can submit a screenshot of your page and gather responses from the fivesecondtest community.

It’s free to sign up, and you can even earn credits by acting as a tester on other peoples assets, which can prove really useful if you’re looking for inspiration.

You can ask a variety of questions, SEO Manager at 7thingsmedia, Ewan Stevenson, has tested a wealth of questions and compiled the below list which bring the most insightful responses:

• Do you recognise the brand?
• Can you tell what the brand actually does?
• Can you see the call to action?
• Is the page too cluttered or noisy?
• Is mock-up A better than mock-up B?

Eye tracking technology is another great way to analyse the overall layout and design of your site. Crazyegg.com provides the functionality, and also supplies heat mapping tips and advice taken from their experience with a vast amount of high-profile brands.

If you’re a SME or you can’t justify a more robust package like IMB Analytics (CoreMetrics), then this out of the box solution is a great way to analyse game changing improvements.

Driving longer on-page engagement

One of the key tips for SEO in 2013 is the use of embedded videos to drive higher engagement times and conversion.

We should all know by now that adding explanatory videos can improve conversion by around 20%, Ariat stated that visits where a product video had been viewed had a conversion rate that was 160% higher than visits where no video was viewed.

A slick way of showing the video is to supply auto-play parameters, meaning browsers will see the video upon page load.  The SEO benefits are overt, by adding to the view count, you can improve ‘social signals’ that are so key to getting relevant, fresh content higher in the SERPS. 

If you want to add an embedded video to a landing page of your own, then locate the video on YouTube, click share from the navigation, then the embed tab and copy the code snippet.

Just remember to transcribe the contents of the video if it contains useful information!

Content? links? on-page perfection?

Google likes it when browsers can find engaging and easy to use content quickly. It keeps people coming back again and again.

So what if they can find the content easily, but it’s clunky and horribly designed? Drop rates would certainly show the lack of engagement.  

For SEO to survive it has to evolve. Black Hat techniques are still prevalent, but if you want to serve future-proof SEO strategies, you need to think about what Google will look for in the future.

With on-page engagement factors becoming more influential over ranking ability, refining the customer journey, whether it’s a route to content, or products, will ultimately improve the perceived value of your website. 

Seven takeaways

1. Take inspiration from industry leaders and even from your competitors’ websites. Look at what surveys and usability reviews say about your competitor websites; is the feedback constructive for your own offering?
2. Use the newly available Attribution Modeling tools in Google Analytics to give credit where credits due.
3. Add value, and when you can’t add value, attempt to encourage user behaviour that results in sales, i.e. Enclosed checkouts.
4. Test various solutions with large amounts of users to reduce the impact of spurious results.
5. Internalise feedback, digest it fully and don’t just listen and react blindly, think about what works for your competitors but more importantly what will work for you.
6. Your customers will interpret value in different ways, so think about the target audience, and ensure your improvements benefit real world purchasing activities, such as finding reviews, FAQs and product guides.
7. Think about your customers, and what their requirements might be, but also about their behaviour, and how different scenarios can affect demands, i.e. mobile site testing

Desert

The next time an algorithm update is released instead of running around screaming ‘damage limitation’ you can have a smile on your face, knowing that your brand is improving its online offering ahead of Google’s next moves. 

Posted by Dr-Pete

The morning of July 19th there was a major Google update, and no one is talking about it. Put simply: We missed it, because we just weren’t looking for it. Overnight, the number of queries we track in the MozCast 10K beta system that show some kind of Knowledge Graph jumped from 17.8% to 26.7%, an increase of over 50%. This was not a test or a one-day fluke — here’s a graph for all of July 2013 (as of August 20th, the number has remained stable near 27%):

So, let’s get to the meat of it — who were the big overnight winners? What did those “new” Knowledge Graph boxes look like, and were there any clear patterns?

The overnight winners

There were 908 queries that picked up Knowledge Graph (KG) entries on July 19th in our data, so the full list is a bit much for a blog post, but let’s look at 20 high-volume queries (this data was actually pulled on August 16th, since some queries had lost KG boxes in the interim):

1. garmin
2. primark
3. avianca
4. ancestry
5. suntrust
6. toms
7. royal caribbean
8. cheap tickets
9. oakley
10. forex
11. tractor supply
12. discount tire
13. ulta
14. casio
15. nectar
16. famous footwear
17. new balance
18. david’s bridal
19. gander mountain
20. philippine airlines

At a glance, 16 of these seem to be known brands (I think we can count “ancestry” and “cheap tickets” as brand queries in 2013), with “forex”, “tractor supply”, “discount tire”, and “nectar” not having obvious brand associations. We’ll come back to “forex” (I discovered something interesting there), but Google is treating both “tractor supply” and “discount tire” as brand queries. The Knowledge Graph for “tractor supply” shows:

A search for “discount tire” shows a smaller, expanding KG entry, below ads and a map (for my search, at least):

The one clear outlier in this group was the search for “nectar”, which pulled up two KG-style entries (we classify them pretty loosely, to throw a wide net): (1) an answer-box style entry (but in the right-hand column), and (2) a disambiguation box:

Across the entire data set, “brand” queries seemed to fare well in this Knowledge Graph gold rush, although there were exceptions. Let’s look at an interesting case — the search for “forex”.

The Forex oddity

“Forex” is a highly competitive search term, and pretty notorious for being spammed. When I went to check the query, I wasn’t seeing a Knowledge Graph entry, so I took a look at the history since mid-July. The #1 position has bounced back and forth between Wikipedia and Forex.com. Across 32 days of data (since July 19th), Wikipedia has ranked #1 (in our data set) 10 of those days. Every day Wikipedia has ranked #1, the SERP has shown a Knowledge Graph entry:

On the 22 days where Forex.com ranked #1 (and Wikipedia ranked #2), a Knowledge Graph entry only appeared three times (13.6%). As you can see, the KG entry is informational, suggesting that Google is interpreting the query as an information-seeking search. While this is highly speculative, it’s possible that the informational interpretation that drives this KG entry is also pushing Wikipedia into the #1 spot. When, for whatever reason, Google interprets the query more loosely or as a navigational query, then Forex.com ranks #1 and the KG entry often disappears. Again, this is just speculation, but it does demonstrate that — like rankings — KG entries are being interpreted and displayed in real-time and can fluctuate from search to search.

The Wikipedia connection

You can see even from these few examples that many of the new results are using data from Wikipedia. When Google launched Knowledge Graph in May of 2012, they stated that “Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook.” Of course, this implies that Freebase, Wikipedia, and the CIA Factbook are sources, and observations of KG data seem to support this.

What’s interesting about the new Knowledge Graph entries coming from Wikipedia is that they suggest that the data itself isn’t new. It’s unlikely that Wikipedia entries/data exploded overnight, so that leaves us with two theories: (1) Google imported more existing Wikipedia data, or (2) Google chose to let more queries display a Knowledge Graph entry and lowered some kind of algorithmic threshold. As large as Wikipedia is, it’s unlikely that storage capacity is a major issue for Google, so I think that (2) is the more likely explanation — Google has simply loosened the restrictions on which queries can trigger the Knowledge Graph.

The entity connection

So, what’s tipping these new Knowledge Graph entries? I try to avoid the word “brand” when talking about the algorithm, because it carries a lot of bias and we all seem to mean something a little different. I do think, however, that there is an entity connection that certainly looks brand-like. Here’s another odd query that gained a KG entry on July 19th — “chicken recipes“:

For most of us, I think Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken is a bit of stretch for “chicken recipes”, which is clearly an informational query. Even Google organic results clearly recognize the intent, with actual recipes for chicken dishes taking up the entire top 10.

Here’s another odd query that generated a suggestion for an entity — “army games“:

What’s funny is that Google doesn’t display a “Showing results for…” spelling correction or seem to think that I actually meant “armor” when I typed “army”. They’ve just chosen to give a fairly unrelated entity a bit of extra credit. All of the top 10 rankings are based on “army” and there is no mention of Armor Games outside of the KG entry.

The entity/brand connection is a nice theory, but then we have a query like “vegetarian recipes“, which also picked up a KG entry on July 19th:

Here, the Knowledge Graph entry is informational, and doesn’t seem to have a brand/entity association. So, before we go off on the “BIG BRANDS GET ALL THE BREAKS!” warpath, I think we have to take a deep breath and try to get a handle on the facts. My gut feeling is that Google has bumped up the volume on the Knowledge Graph, letting KG entries appear more frequently.

In many cases, this seems to have benefited brands, but keep two things in mind: (1) Many of these brands are small, and (2) That could be a side effect and not the primary intent. The simple fact is that brands are entities, and as Google builds a “web of things,” entities are going to gain ground and pages are likely going to lose ground.

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Develop local insights and strategies

China is a massive country, and although it might look homogenous to outsiders, this is far from the case. 

With more than a billion people spread out over an area nearly 40 times the size of the UK, China is an incredibly diverse market.

Different regions in China have different government policies, economic situations, weather, culture and use of language. Therefore it is essential to have local knowledge with a deep understanding of local customer needs.

One faux pas made by many companies is to simply translate keyword lists in English (on Google) into Mandarin and expect success. This is far from the case. 

Know how you will measure success

As with any other marketing campaign, it is essential that you get the basics right with Baidu by establishing the right goals, KPIs and metrics. 

Without this, it will be impossible to measure return on investment and work out whether the efforts put into any search strategy have been effective.

For companies looking to get started on Baidu, they should make sure they have this part tightly defined before they invest heavily into this market.

Ensure you track the right metrics

In addition to setting KPIs, it is important to make sure that the appropriate technology is in place to ascertain whether certain KPIs and goals have been met.

Whether you choose to use Baidu’s analytics (Baidu Tongji) or another tool depends on your requirements, but either way you should make sure that the appropriate configurations have been made.

Get your Baidu keyword strategy right

As Eddie Choi summed up in his blog post on the search behaviour of Chinese internet users, it differs from that of other countries. As such, your keyword strategy should be locally tuned.

Out of the tools recommended in the report, two include:

• Baidu Popular Search Ranking 搜索风云榜 (top.baidu.com) – provides the ranking of popular search items on Baidu.
• Baidu Data Research 数据研究 (data.baidu.com) – provides industry-specific reports of in-depth consumer insights, search behaviour and more.

Have you got any tips you would like to share?

Has your company had any successes or failures on Baidu? What would you recommend for companies looking to use the platform? Have we missed anything out?

Leave your thoughts in the comments below!