SEO, SEM and CRO are the 3 main factors that are important for digital marketing strategy. This post will help you with what you need.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEM is a subset of the (Search Engine Marketing) strategy. SEO is about developing website content. It helps your website rank in search engines. It is free for organic search traffic. However, initial investments are required for targeted studies. It is especially important for long-term projects and e-commerce platforms.
The advantages and disadvantages of SEO
Advantages of SEO
SEO is the foundation of effective lead generation. It is effective when used correctly. SEO support for your website provides results indefinitely, although it requires constant maintenance and improvements.
Disadvantages of SEO
For an experienced person, it is a skill that can be applied after many years of trial and error. It takes time to achieve significant results. It is a complex and challenging process.
SEO mistakes can take your site back. Before engaging in online behavior, you should follow the appropriate paths to your SEO planning. For example, when you move your website to a different hosting infrastructure or make design/software updates, you should apply A-Z controls and be constantly monitoring your site.
SEM – Search Engine Marketing
SEM stands for search engine marketing. It refers to promoting a product, site, brand or page to increase site visibility in search engines.
The areas covered by marketing depend on the circumstances and the marketer. It’s usually a combination of paid search ads and efforts to get strong search rankings.
The advantages and disadvantages of SEM
Advantages of SEM
Paid ads are quick and scalable. They are dependable and effective with the right strategies. They offer the best short-term ROI.
Disadvantages of SEM
For many advertisers, the more clicks I get on my website, the more I sell. In the long run, it is only suitable for high-budget advertising. It may not matter how many clicks you get in a high budget, but depending on the way you do business and how you use resources on your website, you may incur good results or an annoying cost. The biggest problem is that those clicks evaporate once you stop paying for them.
CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization
CRO stands for conversion rate optimization. The conversion rate on a website is determined by how many people who reach the page continue with the actions they started. For this reason, digital customer journey planning is very important on websites. But conversion rate optimization isn’t just about completing the purchasing process. At the same time, it is a meaningful conversion action for every user that has value, such as filling out a contact form, creating a membership or downloading a brochure.
In general, conversion rate optimization is getting the visitors you want to take action to actually take action. It’s calculated by dividing the number of visitors by the number of people who take the desired action.
The advantages and disadvantages of CRO
Advantages of CRO
CRO is the best and most measurable return on investment for digital marketing. You don’t need to be a coding expert to implement CRO on your website. You can start measuring increases in conversions by making small changes to your homepage or landing page.
To optimize conversions, you need to know two main things: why your visitors come to your site (i.e., user intent) and how to go directly to the subconscious to guide visitors to actions.
Disadvantages of CRO
The art of conveying the message needed so that visitors can take the actions you are aiming for on your website is not something you can find on the Internet. While you can learn, understand and apply conversion rate optimization techniques, it is a skill that requires years of experience and knowledge.
If you implement the wrong strategy for your business, your website will be messy, with no sense of direction or behavior for visitors. Once you master conversion planning, you can start making persuasive offers.
How do you combine SEO, SEM and CRO?
Let’s take a look at how a combined method should be applied for experts.
SEO and SEM make a lot of sense when combined because one is part of the other. They basically don’t work together, but they can be applied simultaneously.
Once you complete your SEO work and start getting organic visitors to your site, you can use SEM to continue getting more visitors. At the end of the day, both of these will be managed by CRO.
Standalone SEO
When you start investing in SEO and SEM, you should also implement CRO. The point you need to pay attention to is that copywriting for SEO is inefficient on the CRO side by itself. You may be neglecting conversion rates while making endless efforts to keep Google’s algorithms happy.
Standalone SEM
How much does the advertising budget need to be to make the advertising model sustainable? If you can afford it, any budget will suffice. But you’re burning through your cash flow at an alarming rate.
Standalone CRO
Let’s say you invert the picture here. First, you focus on improving conversions on your website. This means making improvements to the content, UI and UX. While focusing on improvements on your site, free and paid leads coming to your site will decrease because you do not have a clear SEO and PPC planning. In this case, the conversion rate doesn’t matter.
If you’re not doing your marketing efforts in the right order, you’re probably not using your marketing budget to its best potential.
If you only use two of the three, it will not be enough. However, if you can build up SEO weight on your site and your conversion rate is sufficient, you can pause PPC ads. Or you can continue. Many large businesses consistently opt for PPC ads as they continue to make a profit.
SEO, SEM and CRO: Which should come first?
Your digital strategy may differ depending on the type of business, industry and competition. However, all criteria should be common with these 3 strategies. To explain this better, you should have implemented SEO and CRO strategies before attracting visitors to your site.
If your website doesn’t tell visitors enough why they’re visiting that site, doesn’t make them feel comfortable about credibility, doesn’t tell them what to do to meet their purpose of visit, chances are your site won’t get conversions. No matter how much you advertise on a low conversion site, your return on investment will always be below the expected values.
What should your digital strategy be?
First, you need to develop high-converting landing pages. The best work you can do for a core product or service is to create a strong landing page that will serve as the target of your traffic sources.
A mix of excellent content, impressive design and UX to increase conversion rate will allow you to improve on-page SEO factors to ensure strong ranking potential in search results.
Another important issue is that you can create high quality, advisory and informative pages by creating blog pages with basic content. In this way, the authority of your brand will rise and you will appear more popular in your own industry. Another effect is that it will reduce your visitors’ reluctance to buy, especially for high-cost products and will provide you with better SERP rankings.
There are three important criteria to pay attention to when developing a digital strategy.
Ensure consistency in your content. Search engines and visitors prefer websites with consistent behavior. Publishing strong content on a regular schedule will encourage potential buyers to revisit you and will make search engines trust your site.
Earn social shares. Audiences love to share with other communities. Having well-prepared guides and social shares about an offer you will find will be social proof for your potential buyers and will enable them to approach you more positively.
Target multiple channels. Turning to popular digital channels where you can compete allows you to present your content in front of as many people as possible. By publishing your website content on cross platforms, you can generate potential buyers who are interested in your brand.
Last word:
Doing business in today’s economy requires business owners to compete effectively online. The internet is full of digital marketing tools for your sales strategies. Try to take advantage of these environments by investing as much as possible. Every effort you make will take you further in the physical world.
