002: Two Guys on Your Website: The Surprising Link Between CRO and SEO

All right. So I'm Joel Harvey with Conversion Sciences. And I'm Brian Massey with Conversion Sciences. And we're coming to you from the same room, yet separately.

So this is an adventure. We're just figuring this out. MiCROphones in our faces and all. So Brian, you asked me what our topic was going to be, and the truth is, I had not thought about that at all.

This is going to be completely off the cuff. Drive over here. But I think, here's the thing. I think for this to be fun, And ultimately, for the one or two people that are going to be watching this, entertaining is maybe we need to be a little bit less restricted, right?

We can be a little bit more, I don't I don't know if punk rock is the term. But these things should meander wherever they're going to meander, I think. I hate it so much, and that's why we work well together. Well, okay.

So then that's me kicking this off then. You get what you ask for. Remember, don't ask questions you don't want to know the answer to. Excuse me.

So I know we've been writing a little bit about how CRO is SEO. And so why don't we just start there? Yeah. So there was the big leak last week from Google.

We now know all the stuff that they're storing. Didn't necessarily tell us what they're using in their algorithms. But I was reading the summaries of some very bright SEO people that have been doing it a long time. And the thing that kept coming up was all these things are being stored, but the most important thing seems to be have great content and have a great user experience.

Hasn't that been the number one thing for a long time? Forever? I mean, there was a time when exact match domain. You can game the system a It was a little bit easier.

But that was all stuff that got cleaned up, let's say, 2010-ish. From then on, it was really about the two things you just said. Was that a panda, really? Did they call that a panda?

I honestly, I don't recall. We should have a disclaimer. Something like that. We are not SEOs.

But yet we are. But yet, apparently, we are. Because, okay, so basic building blocks, fundamentals. What are both things about?

What do both things ultimately require to do really well. You have to have something you can offer, whether it's content, a product, a service, some combination of those three things, maybe something else, wrapped into an offer. And that has to match something that people need, something they want, a problem they're trying to solve, right? I do.

That's ultimately the basic building blocks of commerce. And it's what SEO is about. It's what CRO is about. Without understanding what people need and what they don't want, what they don't like, what you're providing for them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, nothing else is really going to matter.

There'll be a ceiling, I will say, on what you can accomplish and what growth you can get without actually understanding the fundamental heads and hearts types of things involving people. Yeah. So I heard a segue there into, it's not about the tools. It's just like in SEO, it's not just about keyword stuffing.

Let's go back to Going back to the premise that CRO is SEO. Really, SEO, the things that fundamentally help to protect and improve your SEO, are also the things that fundamentally help you to improve conversion rate. Rather, one being in front of the other, or superior to the other, set that aside. What are the things?

How do we How do we have the best content? What does that mean? And how do we have a great user experience? What does that mean?

What are those? And talking about fundamentals, those are two really interesting fundamental questions. So what are the strategies That I've heard. There is looking specifically at great content.

Recently, Anne Hanley just had a nice newsletter on be yourself, be your brand, talk the way you talk. In our SEO work, we worked with an agency, and they went out and found the sites that were ranking for the keywords that we want to rank for and did a differential and said, Okay, you need to either create or modify your content so it covers all of these topics. Whenever I hear that, I hear two things that... It's not that they can't be harmonious, but they're very different.

Just be yourself and put it all out there, and that's going to work out for you the best, versus boil it down to the number, like the keyword density and the specific number of keywords. Exactly. How many... I think we could go on, but we don't need to.

How do you How do you reconcile those two things? So back in the day when we started, I was blogging, starting in around 2006, around conversion optimization after it was laid out for me by the Eisenberg Brothers on a plate. I wrote whatever I wanted. I wrote at the frequency that ideas came to me, and I really enjoyed it.

I did it for a good four years. Then the The industry started to grow. The tools for A/B testing came around. You and I joined up as partners.

We became really more of an experimentation agency rather than a consulting company. We also in 2013, hired our first SEO, and I was given specific outlines and things to do, and the content stopped being fun. Yeah, at the risk of getting really esoteric really in the past, which- Which is what we did. Yeah.

I mean, everything is based on energy, scientifically and metaphysically, if you wanted to go there. Okay, let's go there. Okay. And I think The content, if you're writing...

I mean, the argument for... One of my arguments for writing with your own voice is that that has energy, that has passion. Like you said, the content was fun. And then whenever you were writing for parameters to feed SEO algorithm, it wasn't fun.

And I think there's probably psychological models that could explain that. The pressure of having to do this thing this specific way Is more difficult than just letting something flow, letting the energy of something come out in your voice, or its own voice, whatever. And I think musicians will talk about that. Athletes will talk about that.

A lot of peak performers will actually talk about that. And I think in the context of this, it's interesting. I think you can't talk about CRO and SEO without also zooming out and saying, SEO is generally, for most of... We look at dozens of analytics every month.

And obviously, we've worked with hundreds and hundreds of partners or clients over the years. And so we have a pretty good feel, like broad brushstrokes. Nice humble break, by the way. Well, I'm being really humble.

I probably could have put those numbers up a little bit. But the point I wanted to make is, there's generally broad brush strokes. There's most sites follow this pattern of desktop versus mobile traffic, channel distribution, that thing. And for 90 % of the businesses we've ever looked at, SEO is just one component of the traffic of the business.

And not just the traffic, because that's a a distorted lens, but the transactions and the revenue, maybe 25 %, would be a number, from a channel perspective, that I would say, on average, maybe you're looking, and it's a terrible thing to do, because every business is so different. It's not the only thing, right? So if you're letting SEO lead it completely, that is the tail wagging the dog, right? So back to the voice.

What is more likely to make a user want to engage with you? A voice that obviously has passion, and personality, and authenticity behind it, or a voice that's just filling in the blanks, like those word games you might have played with kids on a road trip back in the day or something. Just ultimately filling in the blanks. It's not really doing that, because writing that content is hard.

Writing any content is hard. But if it feels that way to the writer, then it's going to feel blocky and robotic. It's going to come aCROss that way. Then nobody's...

Even if you do rank number one for that position, people aren't going to, for that keyword, people are going to be less enthusiastic about engaging with you. On the other hand, Even if SEO only represents 25% of your business, 25%, the last time I checked, is a lot. If somebody said, Hey, can I take away 25% of your business to us today? They would be like, Without any hesitation, absolutely not.

That is a big haircut. I don't think so. So it's not insignificant. And it's something you need to get right.

And like any other traffic channel, it feeds the rest of things. It's going to result in more direct traffic and more email subscriptions and more email traffic. Maybe even more branded paper click traffic or Facebook, whatever. It's all so interconnected.

So let me tell you devil's advocate with that. Pretty easy to do when you're a small business. Usually it's going to be someone who's running marketing. It's going to be their voice and what they think the audience wants.

And if they're in marketing, they know the client pretty well. Larger business where the brand is dictated by committee, and any one person who's... You have different people writing ads, you have different people writing internal content. It's difficult to adopt the brand voice.

Yeah. So I don't know how you mediate that. One of the things that we have been-I think it's difficult for everybody, by the way. If you're playing devil's advocate with me on that it's easy to do that, then we're actually on the same side because it's not easy.

It's hard. But that's what you have to do. It also is easier to just let something flow that feels right rather than feel like you're following somebody else's instructions. But you're absolutely So you're absolutely right.

Yeah. And I think the channel matters because I've always used the email that I do weekly to just be brief, snarky, hit on a point, maybe tease some new content that we have on the site. But that's really my voice. Yeah.

And it's a delight to write. It's your voice. It's what the people on the list expect and presumably want. And Those two things are good.

And if it's a delight to write, then you're checking all the boxes. The way I think about it is it's not like you shouldn't be influenced by the data ever. You should always at least be influenced and informed by the data. So let's just take writing for ourselves, for example.

We know that it would be good for our business to rank for certain terms, and so we want to do that. But if we do that in a way that is only for the purpose of ranking for those terms, then we're really short-changing the... Because these are core pages, our home page or services pages. We do that, again, it's the tail wagging the dog.

We're doing that to get a little bit more traffic while potentially suboptimizing that page for all the people that come there, regardless of traffic channel, that are like, they're working their way down the bottom of the intent funnel to like, I need to talk to somebody if they're on a conversion optimization agency services page. And we should make sure that page is doing everything possible, given the way the numbers work in that funnel, to get them to reach out to us and say, I'd like to talk about maybe working with you.

And so that's where there's, I think, a strategic step backwards is in order. But at the same time, we're optimizers. So the question is, why can't we have both? And so going back to being influenced by data, we should have the SEO data.

In fact, we do. But we should have the SEO data, where we understand how people that are ranking for those terms are, what they're doing, keyword density, links, et cetera, et cetera, relative to us. And we should have goals. And we should also understand what the people are interested in.

Who are our personas? What qualitative data do we have? What have we learned recently? What have we learned in the past from customers and prospects about what they liked about our offer, how we compare, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And I think it's important to have a working understanding of both those things while we're writing content or making any decision about our business. But it shouldn't be... I'll rephrase it and say, that's very different from it being totally prescriptive. So the idea is you can have that a working model of those things we're trying to accomplish and what the people that we're trying to align with in order to accomplish those things want.

You have a working model of those things in your head. But then go about your business and let it flow out. And you know the subject, you know the customers, you know the data. And it all just gets mixed together.

And what comes out is going to be something that ultimately needs to have our voice, number one, and be compelling to the customers, the potential customers, and our readers, number two. Number three, if we can really pull it off, will also help us rank. But then there's also the effect of if people don't like the content, no matter what you've done from the keyword perspective and the link perspective, it It probably isn't going to work anyway because other people aren't going to be talking about it, and the right people aren't going to be talking about it, and the right people aren't going to be linking to it in the right ways.

Still has to be compelling. How are you compelling to people? You understand what people need, and then you give it to them. Yeah.

Not in a disingenuous way, of course. As long as Google brings them. I'm hearing you come down squarely on it depends, and it always depends. So nothing wrong with that.

It's a stew. It's a mix. It's a gumbo. It's a quilt.

It's not a black and white thing, I don't think. I think I'm coming down more on the right in your voice side of things, but That might just be my own biases kicking in there. If you had to choose, I would, too. Really, I do believe that, of course, it doesn't matter if you have no traffic.

But I think ultimately, uniqueness is important. And uniqueness comes from within. It's each of our voices. Everybody has that capability.

Of course, writing scares the hell out of most people. But if they could get past that fear, everybody has their own voice that they would write in, or that they do write in, their own voice that they speak in. And that's ultimately what we're interested in. Back to people.

That's what draws us to people. If 99 out of every 100 people Talk the same, look the same, act the same, were the same, you would probably be bored by those people. But the one person who was a little different, as long as they weren't different in a way that threatened your safety or your security or your stability in some way, you'd find them pretty damn interesting, I think. I think so.

Let's assume that we've got great content that communicates our brand and that also meets those technical requirements of SEO and put it in the context of arriving on the page and on an e-commerce page, like boom, pop up, 10% off if you give us your email address. It's important because it enables the abandoned cart scenarios. You got their email, if they abandon their cart, you can remind them to come back and buy. It makes sense.

But even on our site, we're not an e-commerce site, but we have these We have great resources and things, and we have pop-ups that show up. On certain pages, we've got exit intent overlays. And so getting to the UX side of things, I think most people think that a competent designer is UX. What do you think the difference is between a web designer and a UX designer?

Because if you look on LinkedIn, there's one or the other. I have no idea. The But truthfully, I get asked questions like this a lot in the course of sales calls and other things. It astonishes me how little I actually know about stuff.

But I know what I'm doing. But no, the difference is, I don't know. I don't have to care because ultimately, it's all about delivering what the users, the visitors need. You call it whatever you want.

I see things like UXO and CXO. Somebody runs an ad that says, CRO is so 2019. CXO is the new whatever. It's like, Okay, man, you got us?

They're just titles all for the same damn thing, I think. And maybe different tactical ways you go about addressing it. So a UX designer that's designed, so there's a tactical element of we're creating or recreating or improving something. I don't know.

You tell me, what is it? I think that the difference is probably an increase in salary if you're willing to put UX on there. But I also think that if you're going to claim to be a user experience designer, then that implies that you're doing customer research. Or somebody's given it to you.

Somebody's carrying a brief with all that stuff. That you're following up and seeing what the performance is of all your designs, and If you come up with something that was recommended by the UX literature, but it didn't work for your audience, you find out. You accept that. Yeah.

It's not all biblical and irrefutable. You got to be flexible. I think the answer is in the term user experience. As you said, user.

That implies you should understand the user, the person, person or the collection of individual people that are all interacting with you in parallel. But they're all people. All people. And then experience, which in my view, is like the totality of basically everything that you do that can make people feel something or do something.

Experience. It's everything. It's It's airlines, right? They talk about their products, and some airlines talk about their product.

It's just like, it's our network. It's our network. That's our product. And others will talk about it's our in-plane experience or whatever.

I think it's everything. It's everything that is within your control from the moment I get to the airport to the moment I leave the airport. Everything that's in your control, that's as the airline, that's the I'm a user, and that's my experience. And you can't just pick and choose and say, Oh, it's once you get on the plane, that's our product.

It's the network map. Who cares what the plane is like? It's like people just buy it because they can fly from El Paso to Dallas, and then anywhere in the world. It's so dumb, as far as I'm concerned, to peel things.

Nothing exists in a vacuum. Nothing exists without its own context. So experience is a holistic thing. The holistic.

Everything you do, and show, and say to people, and how does that make them feel? That's user experience. And design, it's not fair to even say just design. How could it just be designed?

If I want to sell you something on a website, I can have the most gorgeous design in the world that it just says lorem Ipsum and lorem Ipsum and lorem Ipsum and everywhere. You're not going to buy all this stuff. You got to have words. Well, I think you hit on, I think, another important distinction, which is I think a UX designer is designing to the content.

A web designer is generally laying out a page and leaving space for images and copy for somebody to come back along. I think that doesn't mean that UX designers aren't doing that. And that's, by the way, a sidebar, a whole other conversation that we've had a hundred times before, at least, and would be a good That's the topic. Let's talk about this distinction that popped in my head when you're talking about the airlines.

There's two ways to approach this. Number one, design an experience just so you don't drop the ball, so that someone coming in doesn't have a bad experience. I guess you might call that a defensive way of designing if you're applying it to the web. The other is, okay, how can we create an experience that will delight them?

That's just going to require customer research. It's going to require some experimentation because what you think will delight them very well could irritate them. It happens all the time. I think most people are pretty happy with what you call table stakes, the defensive, just don't drop the ball with the web page.

I mean, it's where you start, right? When we do an audit, what is some of the most valuable stuff we deliver, the fix its. And this stuff is broken in your experience, or it's suboptimized such that it might as well be broken, often because it's death by a thousand cuts frustration thing. Which, by the way, we had one customer who did an audit recently, just as a sidebar, that did some customer research that we recommended as part of it.

And they were able to confirm, or not able to confirm, the research confirms that notion of this. It's just frustrating. I see little errors here, here, here, here, here A substantial amount of money. Just don't feel comfortable with it.

I'm just irritated. And it's not no, but it makes me pause. And we know that time kills deals. That's also another topic.

But your cognitive bank is being emptied very quickly. It comes with a fixed amount of energy. It's cognitive and trust. It's how are you making them feel?

Tired and distrustful. That's not how you want people to feel. It's not at all what you're doing. I don't know.

There's actually Almost no scenario where I'd want another person to feel that way. It's this negotiation where it's high stakes or something. I want them to feel tired, but I don't even want them to feel distrustful. I want them ultimately to trust me.

That's why you're negotiating. So that's a horrible combination. One of the worst possible combinations you could make someone feel. I wonder if people are feeling tired and untrustful on this podcast.

Yeah, this might not see the light of day. Hey, who knows? Well, is there... How would you sum it up?

I think we're coming to the end of this conversation. Oh, I wouldn't. For all good reasons. I wouldn't.

I wouldn't dream of it. Why be so silly? I think what we've done in the meandering here is we've decided that CRO is SEO, and we've also decided that CRO is a UX design. I wouldn't argue with that.

We We have to put things into categories and buckets. It's important. It's part of being a human being. It's part of the digital marketing world that we live in.

And obviously, there's a difference between users, traffic, whatever you want to call it, and conversions. But I think if I was going to summarize it, the broadest point is everything is interconnected and interrelated. And you can say that about... You can take that statement as high and as large as you want.

But for purposes of our conversation, for every one of those people, every one of those individuals that's coming to your website, and everything that is happening on your website, and all the ancillary things in your digital universe, email, text, whatever else you're doing, that's all interconnected. All of it. And what you do with that is going to vary. A person-to-person, site-to-site, business-to-business, optimizer to optimizer even.

But if you don't understand that, and you don't start with that understanding, you're going to just start doing, ultimately, tiny things that don't really matter. And then you're going to be puzzled as to why aren't we making a difference? Why aren't we moving in evil? So everything is interconnected.

And if you're going to have a UX designer, it's really more like a team. They need research that they're doing or is fed to them. Now, I'm just being angry again. This is going to be an episode where it's just like, it's somehow we're going to edit it to just when you were talking.

We cut out everything I say. The AI might do that for us. Yeah, we'll work on that. Well, I think I can sum it up, and we can let folks get on to the next episode in their podcast queue.

CRO is SEO. CRO is UX design, and CRO is UX Design, and CRO is Flight Attending. We can do it all. What's next?

CRO is ice cream delivery van driving. Man, yeah, you got me. You got me. Well, we'll thank everybody for joining us today.

Or never joining us again. And there will be more episodes, so we just wanted to warn you about that. Don't start thinking about this after you're gone, because you could become curious enough to watch the next one. Don't do it.