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December 15, 2021Conversion or Engagement? Determining Your ROI Optimization Strategy
When running an online marketing campaign, the best-case scenario is generating lots of traffic, building immense brand loyalty, and then funneling all your traffic into successful conversions, resulting in greater revenue for your business.
Unfortunately, campaigns don’t always work this way.
There could be a flaw in your conversion strategy, leaving your massive traffic stream essentially useless, or there could be a holdup in your traffic lead generation strategy, filtering only a slow trickle through your otherwise successful high conversion rate.
Customer engagement and conversions are both important elements to your marketing strategy, but invariably, you will need to place a greater emphasis on one over the other.
Deciding which to focus on can be difficult, especially when you’re working with a limited budget, but it’s important to set a primary goal; otherwise, you could spend your time and effort inefficiently.
Conversions: Advantages and Disadvantages
Conversions can come in many forms, such as getting a user to make a purchase, sign up for an email list, or simply fill out a contact form.
Your conversion will vary by medium and type. Source.
No matter how you choose to qualify a conversion, committing to improving your conversion rate can be extremely beneficial for your campaign:
- Conversion rates are the floodgates for your traffic. Improving your conversion rate means, on average, you’ll get more revenue per site visitor.
- Increasing a conversion rate generally functions as an immediate fix. You’ll start to see increased revenue immediately after implementing your changes.
- On the other hand, conversion rate changes are linear. If you increase your conversion rate from 20 percent to 30 percent, it will not continue to grow unless you make another change.
- Conversions take less time to improve, generally speaking, since their problems are easier to diagnose and they have fewer moving parts.
Engagement: Advantages and Disadvantages
Engagement is more of a long-term strategy, manifesting in your content and social media marketing strategies. Through engagement, you’ll nurture a network of fans and followers to come to your site (or landing page) in greater numbers. There are some key advantages and disadvantages to favoring engagement over conversions:
- Engagement is the source of your traffic. Increasing your engagement means you’ll see greater numbers of visitors, and thus greater revenue if your conversion rate is consistent.
- Engagement efforts take a long time and a lot of effort to execute. Content strategies can take months or even years before they start to see results.
- On the other hand, engagement strategies increase your audience exponentially. It takes a long time to warm up your initial audience, but once you’ve hit that threshold, you’ll start to see compounding returns—50 visitors the first month, 100 the second, 200 the third, and so on.
- Engagement issues are hard to diagnose, and it takes a massive effort to adjust your campaign to align with changes in your long-term vision.
Once you’ve decided which is your primary goal, you can start taking the necessary steps to improve that area of your strategy.
Improving Your Conversion Rate
Before you start improving your conversion rate blindly, take a look at your current setup for any glaring problems:
- Is your landing page fully functional, loading quickly, and looking the way it’s supposed to? If not, contact your web developer to correct any problems.
- Is your call to action apparent and easy to find? If it isn’t prominent, you may need to adjust your design to make it so. An arrow or a brighter color can sometimes help.
- Is there a value for users to convert? There needs to be a value associated with the action—for example, is your product worth the money? Are users getting value in exchange for submitting their information? If not, you’ll need to take efforts to readjust your campaign to make a stronger offer.
Aside from those initial errors, you can make gradual adjustments to refine your strategy and improve a landing page that’s already good:
- Revise your headline to be more concise, more prominent, and more compelling for readers.
- Offer your incoming traffic something even better than what they’re currently getting for their conversion.
- Add a video or a testimonial that will increase your authority and give users more information to make a decision.
- Set up a separate landing page for a different segment of your traffic, with more appropriate language, and split your incoming traffic into the appropriate funnel.
- Cut out anything that you don’t absolutely need. Remove jargon and fluff from your content, and eliminate any design features that are superfluous.
- Improve trust by adding proof of the value of conversion, such as testimonials or a direct comparison with a competitor that favors you.
If you want to drastically improve your conversion rates, the best thing to do is set up a separate, yet similar landing page. Make significant alterations to the design, the headline, the layout, the offer—everything you can think of. Then, use the same flow of traffic directed to each of the landing pages, and measure which landing page is most effective. This is called an A/B test, and if done in a few separate rounds, you should wind up with a landing page that incorporates all the best elements of all prior landing pages, and produces the greatest number of conversions as a result.
SEO: A Fringe Benefit of a Customer Engagement Strategy
Businesses from multinational corporations to local mom-and-pop shops have been scrambling to get more visibility on search engines. People rely on Google and other search services to find practically everything they need, from products and services to general information, and attaining a noticeable position on those search services is almost a necessity in the competitive landscape.
However, many modern businesses have overcomplicated the idea of SEO, to the point where it actually works against them. Rather than focusing on fundamental concepts that can improve their business and their search ranking simultaneously, they pour their efforts into micromanaging myriad nitpicky tasks. In our age, SEO is more a byproduct of a successful customer engagement strategy than it is a wholly independent strategy. Finding success requires addressing this principle.
Old SEO vs. New SEO
Part of the problem stems from the fact that older SEO strategies were tactical and independent from any other strategy.
There was minimal overlap in the early days of web; design was design, SEO was SEO, and customer engagement was hardly a part of the equation. All it took to rank on Google was a ton of keywords stuffed into your site and a ton of indiscriminate offsite links pointing back to your domain.
Obviously, these processes have evolved as Google has rolled out gradual updates to combat the issues of bad backlinks and poor customer experience. Onsite content and offsite links were still vital, but the process to build them became more refined. Rather than trying to adopt a new strategy that naturally incorporates the cultivation of these ranking factors, many modern businesses are still using a hunt-and-peck style approach, implementing one-off tactics to piece together a high domain authority. While this approach is technically effective, it is nowhere near as efficient or as powerfulas it could be.
Google’s Ultimate Motivation
To understand why the technical approach to SEO is ultimately less effective than a customer engagement strategy, you have to understand the underlying motivation that keeps Google running. There is one thing that Google wants, and it drives every algorithm update and business decision they make: Google wants people to have a good online experience. That means getting people the best possible results for their queries—the most accurate, most relevant, highest quality, and ultimately most satisfying sites Google can find. Every factor that influences search rank is chosen based on its conduciveness to a great customer engagement experience. Therefore, if you do a great job of giving your customer engagement a great experience, you’ll naturally rank higher as a result.
SEO Factors Driven By Customer Experience
It’s easy to talk in generalities about ranking factors and best practices, but in order to be effective, you need to dig into the fine details that constitute a successful and SEO-worthy customer engagement campaign.
Take your customers through the funnel of engagement
Many of these factors are related to peripheral areas of online marketing efforts, such as design or content management, but they’re all important if you want to achieve the greatest results.
There’s one quality they all share; they are all focused on giving your customers a better overall experience. This is your top priority, and the SEO benefits you get from these strategies are secondary.
Onsite Navigation
Onsite navigation is a critical factor for a successful online customer experience. When a new customer visits your site for the first time, what do they see? What do they think of your company? Where do they want to go, and what do they want to do? Is it easy for them to find what they’re looking for?
These are all questions you’ll need to answer positively. If you aren’t sure, you need to take a look at your site design and structure, and make adjustments to perfect the inbound customer engagement experience. Use focus groups, A/B tests, heat maps, and Behavior Flow data from Google Analytics to make an objective determination. Great navigations have a comprehensive yet concise and easy-to-find list of potential areas, with clear and specific information about the function of each section. Sites with navigations like these are rewarded by Google, but more importantly, they tend to have better customer relationships.
Regular Content
If you’ve been reading any SEO news over the past several years, you know the importance of writing great content on a regular basis. But too many business owners are still focused on writing keyword-focused topics, rather than topics their audience genuinely wants or needs to read.
You can use keyword research to find great topics, but tread with caution. Don’t write with the intention of showing off to Google. Write with the intention of bringing value to your readers. Post in forums, participate in discussions, and ask questions on social media to get a feel for what your customers and readers really want to read about. Then, all you have to do it write it. The rest will take care of itself; you’ll rank high for relevant inbound queries, and the customer enagegement who find your content will be more likely to stick around and buy from you.
Social Signals
Of course, your social media presence is also an important factor that goes into factoring your rank. Your claimed profiles, filled out information, and ongoing updates help Google analytics understand what your business is, but it’s the customer engagement factor that really helps your rank.
Businesses with large followings, and those with highly engaged followers who like, click, and share their updates rank higher than their inactive counterparts. There’s no way to buy or build such a dedicated following, so the only way to do it is to post meaningful updates, address people personally and directly, and keep your focus on rewarding people who engage with you.
Offsite Links and Brand Mentions
Building links one by one can actually do more harm than good. It takes a ton of effort to find the right sources, create an ideal rhythm, and vary your strategy enough to sneak past Google’s robots.
Instead, focus on giving a great experience and let the rest do the work for you. Create a detailed, lengthy piece of content that nobody else can offer—original research works great here—or make an infographic or video that people will want to see and share. If you’re successful in promoting and cultivating the viral spread of this content, you’ll attract hundreds of links, and you won’t have to worry about “appearing” natural, because your link building will be natural, and your search rank will climb accordingly.
Positive Reviews
After the Pigeon Update, the importance of positive reviews online started to skyrocket. Google now scours the web, especially for local directories like Yelp and TripAdvisor, to get an understanding for how well a service performs. The quantity and quality of reviews they find is considered as a component of your rank. It’s possible (and punishable) to try and manipulate your rank by directly posting fake reviews, but it’s so much easier just to give people a great, memorable service and let them take your online reputation into their own hands. It really is that simple.
Improving Your Engagement Strategy
Improving your engagement strategy isn’t going to be as cut-and-dry as improving your conversion rates, but there are a handful of strategies you can refine:
- Step up the quality and frequency of your content. Perform a content audit to see what new topics you can introduce to your blog that will please more readers and elicit more attention. Then, double your publishing efforts—if you’re used to doing one post a week, step it up to two.
- Post more frequently on social media. On Facebook, post at least two or three times a day. On Twitter, post five times a day or more, and space your posts throughout the day to get the most coverage.
- Increase direct engagement on social media channels. On all your relevant platforms, make a concentrated effort to respond to every incoming comment or question. And go beyond replies—look for potential users who might be interested in your brand, and reach out to them directly with a follow or a comment.
- Give your readers more opportunities to share content by providing infographics, videos, and other types of multimedia.
- Take advantage of interactive opportunities, such as surveys, games, contests, guest posts, and open Q&A discussions with your followers.
The key principle to remember with your engagement strategy is that it takes time to produce results and achieve a positive ROI from content marketing. Increasing the amount of content you syndicate isn’t going to lead to a direct increase in website traffic, but when combined with other properly aligned engagement strategies, you’ll start to see improvement month over month.
Both engagement and conversions are necessary components of your online marketing campaign, and you’ll have to address and refine both over time. Keep this in mind when you outline your short-term goals.
If you’re interested in a free audit of your current brand engagement and conversion strategies, visit our SEO locations page and contact us! We’ll take a walkthrough of your current efforts and point out key areas for improvement.
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