13 Easy Ways to Increase Conversions with Technical SEO

In a dull corporate world, optimizing the website for search engine rankings and optimizing landing pages for conversions are usually regarded as two separate workflows. Do you want to benefit from some different approach without increasing the workload on your marketing team?

Treat every search engine optimization technique you are going to implement as a conversion optimization lever. To help you with that, we've gathered the main tips you could use within your everyday SEO routine. Keep reading to find out more!

What is conversion rate optimization?

Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, involves increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action. This can be submitting a form, becoming a customer, etc. The CRO process also involves defining user navigation through your website, the actions they take, and the factors stopping them from achieving desired goals.

What is a conversion?

A conversion basically means a visitor who's completed a goal you defined. And, of course, these goals vary from business to business: this can be making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.

Examples of conversions

There are two main types of SEO conversions that differ mostly in terms of the goal's scale.

So, there are macro-conversions that include the following:

• Purchasing a product;
• Requesting a quote;
• Subscribing to a service.

Another type is micro-conversions, which include the following:

• Signing up for email lists;
• Creating a user account;
• Adding products to a cart.

What is a conversion rate?

Conversion rates show how your website visitors engage with your content. Conversion rates cover many areas, such as:

• Contact forms
• Downloads
• Subscriptions
• Engaging with online chat features
• Upgrading memberships
• Promotions: limited access, sales, and other promotional opportunities

Knowing the current conversion rate of your website can help you turn potential customers into paying customers faster.

How can you calculate the conversion rate

To calculate the web conversion optimisation rate, divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors.

Conversion rate = Number of conversions / Total number of visitors

For example, if a given e-commerce website receives 1,000 visitors and 50 customer orders in a month, then the monthly conversion rate would be 5.0%.

Thus, you'll get the following: conversion rate = 50 / 1,000 = 5.0%

5 ways CRO benefits your website's SEO

Conversion rate optimization has distinct benefits for SEO, including the following:

1. Improved customer insights. Website CRO helps you better understand the key target audience and define the type of messaging that best addresses their requests. This way, conversion rate optimization aims to find the perfect customers for your business.
2. Better ROI. A higher conversion rate means using more of your resources. By learning how to get the most out of your acquisition efforts, you'll increase conversions without the need to attract more potential customers.
3. Better scalability. While your audience may not scale as you develop your business, CRO lets you grow without wasting your resources and losing prospective customers. You can do so by turning more browsers into buyers, and that's what CRO is about.
4. Better user experience. CRO onpage optimization defines what attracts users to your website and expands on it to create an outstanding experience for them.
5. Enhanced trust. To get a user to share their credit card information, email address, or any other personal data, they have to genuinely trust a website. CRO helps you make your site an outstanding salesperson: professional, trustworthy, and able to answer all of your customers' questions.

13 Tips for improving you conversion rate optimization strategy

Now that you know the key basics of SEO CRO, let's talk about the best practices that can help you improve conversion rates for your website.

Catch eyes: use header tags to empower your CTA

The attention span of the website visitor shrinks drastically all the time. Thorough long-form content has a chance to be read (and work on the bottom line!) only if you persuade your visitor to do so. One way to communicate your message briefly is to have an eye-catching header and then divide the text into consumable chunks of 2-3 sentences (or 50-60 words) with headers that summarize the full content.

To optimize headers, try adding keywords to the article title (H1 tag) and other headers (H2-H6). The basic requirements for the H1 heading are that each page:

• Should contain only one H1 heading;
• Must be no longer than 65 characters;
• Should have a unique H1;
• Shouldn't have the same title and H1 tag.

These noticeable areas can be used to highlight the main key points of the text. They are prominent on-page, and if enriched with the relevant keyword phrases, they can catch the eye of a skimming reader and naturally lead them to the call to action on your page.

Work on the invisible: meta title and description tags

Write meta titles and descriptions according to the best practices so that when they are used as snippets on the search engine results page (SERP) they create correct expectations for the visitors and lead them to conversion even before clicking.

Imagine a user browsing on SERP. What makes them click on one result over another? And even more importantly, what will make them stay on page and move further down the purchase funnel once they click? We call it correct expectations.

However, no conversion will happen if a user doesn't click on a link to your website, and the same is true if they don't expect the conversion path you want them to take. Though the meta section is (almost) invisible to the user who has already landed on the page, a correctly optimized title and description have some influence over the page's appearance on SERPs.

Google can extract any piece of information from the page that it finds the most relevant to the searcher's intent and use it as a description. But with a meta description optimized with natural language keywords of appropriate length (it is advisable up to 160 characters, but Google likes to change its length according to different factors) and with a primary CTA, chances are high that this text will be used on SERPs.

For example, my client, online travel service provider, increased the CTR of their pages on SERP and conversion rate of the landing pages without direct impact on the rankings after re-optimization of the meta description of the pages from high search volume keyword stuffed to the text using natural language keyword phrases and highlighting the unique value proposition of the service.

You can also analyze competitors' titles and descriptions to improve your own. Just crawl the needed websites and check out the tags you want. You can quickly do so using Netpeak Spider:

• Select the URLs you want to check;
• Go to Parameters and choose Head Tags;
• Click "Start" to launch the crawling process.

The research results are on the main dashboard. It's easy to navigate, so you can quickly find the stats for a desired URL.

Draw with words: use keywords to fit the reading patterns

Use keyword insertion and highlighting to correlate with natural reading patterns. This will optimize the page and communicate the message most naturally.

When we talked about shrinking attention spans, we already discussed scanning pages instead of reading thoroughly through them. In fact, the patterns human eyes follow when skimming through a page are perfectly documented.

For example, Adobe's 12 Do's and Don'ts of Web Design list Z and F layouts as the most popular in the Western world and state: "Well-designed websites typically lay out their content in an 'F' or 'Z' reading shape."

How can SEO help here? With its keyword distinction technique! Try to place keywords in the text following that pattern. This way, not only will search engines use those phrases to rank the page, but the user scanning the page will also capture them and be naturally led toward the conversion point.

Do it fast: optimize page load speed

Increasing the load speed as part of the technical SEO efforts, even by 10%, leads to a significant drop in your page's bounce rate. That naturally affects the conversion rate, too.

With the global rollout of its mobile-first index this year, Google emphasizes the importance of page load speed.

But wait, that's exactly where conversion optimisation meets search engine optimization!

Research by SOASTA (featured by Google as part of their Partners Help information on conversions) shows that every 1 sec of additional waiting for the page to load causes up to 27% loss in conversion rates in the form of bounced sessions. So, when working on load time improvement, you are actually working on conversion rate improvement, too.

Know exactly where your customers are: use local SEO techniques

Address, map, and local phone number are part of local SEO CRO. They also appeal to your visitors from the neighborhood and make overall business perception more trustworthy, organically increasing conversion rates on the website.

Think With Google regularly publishes data on the increasing number of "near me" searches, which have grown by 500% in just two years!

Imagine you're looking for a new product or service in your neighborhood. There's a high chance that all the top results will be locally relevant. However, which one will more effectively persuade you to order from them: the one with a simple product offer, price, and checkout options, or the one clearly stating its physical address, map, and phone numbers?

When working with local citations, adding a business address to the digital map services also increases the chances of a customer converting into a call, submitting a request, or obtaining directions without even hitting the website itself.

Call them by their names: voice search optimization

The percentage of searches originating from voice recognition devices is growing exponentially. Recent research published by Digital Marketing Depot states: 'mobile-only and voice assistant usage surges by an estimated 130% this year'.

When optimizing your pages for voice search, you improve the conversion rate organically by providing people with conversational interfaces, natural language-oriented texts, and messages that aim to answer your customers' exact needs.

Remember so-called SEO texts placed somewhere in the footer of Ecommerce category pages? Luckily, these keyword stuffed overoptimized pieces of content targeting search engine crawlers but not customers are no longer able to make its way to the top of SERP. With Rank Brain algorithm, natural language optimized texts created with understanding of the searcher intent have more chances to rank high, especially for the voice search.

Natural language is more persuasive and well-structured. Synonym-rich content that instantly addresses user needs not only ranks higher but also naturally leads a customer to the next step of the purchase or other form of conversion.

Be better than the best: target #0 position

Pages optimized for #0 positions convert better because of their structure. This is because the best SEO CRO techniques to target featured snippets include lists, tables, natural language questions in headers, and logically structured content answering them.

To target the so-called #0 position or featured snippet placement on SERPs, you need to create long-form, in-depth content, structure it with lists and tables, and make sure you clearly answer natural language questions with expert advice.

Once obtained, featured snippets attract a much larger share of traffic than even the #1 position. But that's not the only benefit of this SEO technique. Lists, how-tos, and headers that consist of natural language questions with clear answers following them make content more consumable for the reader and easy to navigate, so a properly optimized page shows greater CTR and CR.

Haunt them: prioritize mobile optimization

Responsive design makes it easier to convert on mobile and any other device your users prefer to use.

Mobile optimization includes responsive design, improvements to the user experience on all devices, content reorganization, and prioritizing speed and load time. All these practices ensure that the user will find the page in SERP, and make it much easier for the user to convert via smaller forms and accessible functional elements, even with an unstable connection.

Know your limits: reconsider popups and interstitial content

Google penalizes websites that interrupt user journey with intrusive ads and popups.

On one hand, to meet Google's guidelines, you need to remove the popup intended to obtain the user's email or phone number or redirect them to the selling page. But let's face it: popups do convert!

So here, to actually get the traffic from search to the converting pages and then convert the visitor, you need to find the sweet spot between being too intrusive (and conversions drop from something so annoying as the multiple pop-up windows appearing on every page of the website user is trying to navigate) and using the popups potential for catching the attention of the user.

A/B tests to the rescue! Use them to test whether the attention-grabbing techniques you use affect organic traffic, track positions, CTR, bounce, and time on page for the URLs where popups are being used.

Speak to them in different voices: use social signals

SEO uses star ratings to grab additional real estate on the SERP and customers' reviews to add unique text to the product pages. Luckily for CRO, both these techniques make it easier to convert the user who came from search to the buying customer.

According to Hubspot, 70% of people are more likely to make a purchase online if others recommend the product or service. So, by including customers' ratings and reviews on your pages, you can positively impact conversion rates.

Use spider power: take crawl and index under control

Technical SEO works with sitemaps and indexing directives to ensure that only relevant, unique, and optimized pages are included in the index.

According to the study by Robin Rozhon, their client experienced 54.9% revenue growth after eliminating 80% of pages from the index.

How did it work? They kept only the pages that attracted organic traffic (read: were perceived as of value for Google and other search engines) in the past, which significantly increased their crawlability and indexability and the trustworthiness of the entire domain.

By keeping only valuable pages indexed, they were able to increase conversions as all users landing from search were provided with the full-bodied unique, optimized product page or category page.

Mark your data: implement microdata schema markup

Influence user expectations and increase chances of conversion even before they visit your website by including your address, phone number, and product information in the SERPs.

You can use properties like product name, price, availability, and currency for products so that they will be provided to searchers in rich snippets right on the SERP page or on the Image Search.

For addresses, you can format your offline address, contact numbers, and working hours so the searcher in the inquiry state will have the option to call your business or get directions without even hitting the website.

If you want to make sure that structured data (schema markup) is embedded on all necessary pages, you can check it using Netpeak Spider and follow these easy steps:

1. Go to the sidebar and select "Structured Data: Markup Types" in the Content group.
2. Paste the website address in the 'Initial URL' field and start crawling.

You can check structured data implementation and work with other basic features even in the free version of Netpeak Spider crawler, which is not limited by the term of use or the number of URLs analyzed.

P.S. Right after signup, you'll also have the opportunity to try all paid functionality and compare all our plans, and pick the most suitable for you.

Using Open Graph meta data for social media sharing

Use META optimization techniques, including providing special og: properties, to control how your pages are displayed on social media and influence users' decisions starting from their news feed.

Controlling the way your data is shared on social media is a simple way to make sure you manage the expectations of the readers before they land on your website so they are already on their way to conversion. You have control over such data as:

• Title (<meta property=”og:title” content=”…” />)
• Description (<meta property=”og:descrition” content=”…” />);
• Image (<meta property=”og:image” content=”…” />);
• Displayed URL (<meta property=”og:url” content=”…” />);
• Twitter Card (<meta property=”twitter:card” content=”…” />)
• Twitter image alternate text (<meta property=”twitter:image:alt” content=”…” />).

This can be particularly useful when you need to use slightly different messaging on SERP and social media like Facebook or Twitter. For example, you can try optimizing the title and description of the article for clicks from the user in the inquiry stage of the purchase funnel and for attention-grabbing on social media, where users are basically not acquainted with your product or service.

How to conduct a comprehensive website audit with Netpeak Spider

Regular website audits can help improve your website's overall performance and define the tactics to streamline conversion rate optimization. Netpeak Spider is an excellent solution for that.

With Netpeak Spider, you can monitor your website's metrics, download all your crawling results in a convenient PDF format, and integrate valuable insights from other SEO services (e.g., Google Analytics).

Plus, the tool is easy to handle. All you have to do is this:

• Gather all the URLs you need to check or paste the list from a clipboard into the search bar
• Select all the metrics you need to check
• Click "Start" to start the crawling

Once it's done, you'll see the research data together with the list of issues (if there are any) and a brief explanation for each. Netpeak Spider will also prioritize them according to their criticality and offer helpful troubleshooting tips.

Check URLs for SEO parameters with Netpeak Checker

As we've explained earlier, SEO checkups are essential for improving your website's performance and SEO conversion rates. In that essence, Netpeak Checker comes in handy.

This powerful analytical tool offers multiple features and integrations with other related services. Here's what Netpeak Checker can offer you:

Integration with 25 other services to analyze 450+ parameters

Netpeak Checker enables over 25+ integrations with other SEO-related services: Moz, SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, Serpstat, Google Analytics, etc.

50+ on-page parameters

Netpeak Checker shows all the essential on-page parameters in an interactive dashboard. Here, you'll find redirects, titles, response time, status codes, mobile-friendliness, and many others — simply select the metrics you need to monitor and click "Start."

Website traffic estimation

Netpeak Checker helps evaluate the traffic on your and competitors' pages, calculate potential link-building donors’ share ratios, and show the search traffic share by location. Moreover, it shows critical category data and the prevailing types of traffic (search, organic, direct, mail, social, etc.).

Batch Core Web Vitals checkup

Get valuable insights from Google PageSpeed Insights and monitor your website's loading speed, responsiveness, and visual stability.

Integration with Google Drive & Sheets

Connect your Google Drive account to Netpeak Checker to quickly export any report to Google Sheets and share them with colleagues or partners right away.

Final thoughts

The primary SEO techniques aimed at improving your website's rankings and driving more traffic can be easily furthered to website conversion optimisation. By thinking from a wider perspective, you can simultaneously increase the traffic and make it more valuable, bringing in more revenue from organic and other channels. Here are the ideas from the post in a nutshell:

• On-page headers and subheaders: use them to highlight the key points and lead your reader to the call to action (CTA) even if they're not reading thoroughly.
• Meta section: write meta title and description tags according to the best practices so that when they are used as snippets on SERP, they create the correct expectations for the visitors and start leading them toward the conversion even before clicking.
• Using keywords: use keyword insertion in a way that correlates with reading patterns — that will not only make the page more optimized but also communicate the message in the easiest, most natural way.
• Page load speed: increasing the load speed, which is now one of the most important ranking factors for search engines, even by 1 second leads to up to 27% growth in conversion rates and a significant bounce rate drop.
• Crawling and indexing: keep pages that can convert your visitors. Use a comprehensive indexing strategy.
• Mobile optimization: make it easy for your mobile users to research, interact, and convert.
• Local SEO: people are more likely to convert when your content answers their immediate need exactly where they are, and showing the proximity of your business to the searcher helps with such conversions.
• Voice search: the number of searches originating from voice recognition devices is growing exponentially, and when optimizing your pages for voice search, you improve the conversion rate organically by using natural language, taking user intent into account, and structuring the content in a logical, easy-to-consume way.
• #0 position: long-form, in-depth content organized with lists, tables, and summarizing paragraphs can get you a very prominent featured snippet position on Google SERP, which in turn will bring more traffic (gain in conversions from search), improved mobile experience (gain in conversions happens on mobile), and more visits from voice search (improved CR again!).
• Popups and interstitial content: To find a sweet spot between showing your CTA prominently in a popup or interstitial ad and risking annoying your customer or getting penalized by the search engine for intrusive windows, A/B test thoughtfully the amount, timing, and placement of popups to achieve the highest conversion rate without being punished by Google.
• Social signals: adding social proof to your landing pages (e.g., customer reviews, testimonials, and endorsements) makes your content unique for indexing and ranking purposes, appealing, and results in more conversions.
• Microdata schema markup: optimizing your content with micro schema markup can give searchers access to information such as your address, phone number, product information, and prices exactly on SERP so you can have people call (and therefore convert) from search without even visiting your website.
• Open Graph metadata for social sharing: by controlling how the information from your website appears in social media, you can start interacting with users who see it in their newsfeed in a controlled manner so the path to the conversion begins on their territory before they even visit a website.

Let us know if you have any other tips to increase conversions using technical SEO in the comments below. By the way, our partner SEO Content Strategist Maddy Osman provides Skillshare classes (which include an actionable primer on technical SEO). Check them out if you're better at learning when you have someone to walk you through the material :)