How to increase conversions with an SEO audit
Focusing on SEO while neglecting your conversion rate is a great way to wind up with a website that ranks highly for keywords your audience doesn’t use or attract a bunch of users who aren’t really looking to buy what you’re selling. That’s why you have to think about choosing the right SEO tools for you and focusing on more than just the technical aspects of your audits.
That’s right: you can use your SEO audits to improve not just rankings, but convert and/or conversion rate as well.
How will your SEO audit also improve your conversion rate?
One of the best parts about SEO audits is that you’ll boost conversions without ever having to open your analytics or view your conversion funnels, making them powerful CRO tools. This is because improving elements of your user experience will boost both search optimization and conversion optimization.
Site Speed
Slow page speed is the number one way to turn both humans and search engines off from your website and business. In fact, more than half of users will leave your website if it takes more than three seconds to load. 80% of those users will never come back.
A good SEO audit tool will alert you if your page is too slow, and find the bottlenecks that are slowing it down.
Shaving valuable seconds off of your site’s latency can be a huge boost to your sales. Just ask Amazon.
Mobile Friendliness
Just like with page speed, mobile friendliness is an important SEO ranking factor. And your mobile SEO audit is a great way to find opportunities for some CRO.
But wait a minute, you might say, mobile conversion rates aren’t very good anyway.
True (mobile conversion rate for ecommerce sites is less than half of desktop). But, it’s trending up year over year, and tablet conversions are just about even. So using your SEO audit to gauge your website’s mobile friendliness will also show you where to improve your mobile user experience.
Better user experience = better conversions.
As an added bonus, if you’ve got a brick-and-mortar storefront, improving the mobile version of your website can result in more store visits (and purchases).’
Broken Links
Links are how people move around the web, so a broken link is the same thing as having a bridge out on the way to your store. If no one can get there, no one can give you their money. Google also hates broken links because they’re bad for user experience and make crawling a website much, much harder.
An SEO audit will find your website’s broken links, allowing you to rebuild that bridge and get traffic flowing back to your store.
HTTPS Security
Getting an SSL certificate for your website will make it more trustworthy to customers, making them more likely to convert, and to Google, who gives a ranking bump to secure URLs.
Your SEO audit will identify if your website is secure. If you use one that takes a good look at your site, like Site Crawl, you’ll also be able to find sites that host non-HTTPS assets. This is very, very important for both CRO and SEO. Secure URLs with non-HTTPS images, scripts or videos will throw up a big scary red warning page in users’ browsers.
That’s a really good way to scare people off for good.
Custom 404 Pages
When someone links to a nonexistent page, it’s important that you have a soft landing spot for those visitors.
Seeing a 404 page is very frustrating for users, and dropping them on a blank default page leaves them with nothing to do but close the window. Add a custom page with some fun images, text and helpful links.
As I’m sure you’ve seen before, 404 pages are great opportunities to reinforce your company’s brand and maybe get some good press for it.
Adding internal links to a custom 404 page will still be considered a crawl error, but there will be a path for crawlers to follow to your homepage and beyond.