There is much debate about which is most effective or has best ROI – CRO or SEO – see this example.

In our view, however, the exciting bit is what happens when you combine CRO and SEO – the results can be way more than double,  See example below:

1. Website #1 has good SEO meaning 1000 new visitors find the website every day, however CRO is poor, meaning less than 1% of the visitors actually ‘convert’ or take some desired action
2. Website #2 has amazing CRO meaning that 90% of visitors ‘convert’, however, SEO is poor meaning that only 10 new visitors view the site per day.
3. Website #3 has both good SEO and amazing CRO, resulting in 1000 visitors per day and 90% of these converting 🙂

Which means:

1. Website #1 has 10 conversions per day
2. Website #2 has 9 conversions per day
3. Website #3 has 900 conversions per day!

Combining SEO and CRO is yet another area of business where 1+1 does not always equal 2.  In the illustration above, the result from combining the 2 processes is 9 or 10 times the result of focussing on just one or the other – and the time and cost outlay involved is only double – clearly a smart business move.

Which first – SEO or CRO?

Traditional advice would be that CRO should come first, then SEO, simply to avoid ‘wasted’ visits from the SEO visits if the CRO isn’t there to convert them into enquiries.

However, our recommended approach is to alternate from one to the other as you work on your campaign, so you’d do some basic CRO at the start of an SEO campaign or when first building a web-page or website, and then work on SEO to bring in the traffic, and then go back and review the CRO, and repeat.

You need real-life web-traffic to fully optimise for conversions, for example, heat-mapping software and other user interaction statistics are meaningless until there is a flow of new visitors.

And if poorly set up SEO is driving the wrong type of visitors, then the heat maps and conversion rate statistics may be misleading too…