CRO and SEO: What's the Difference?

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Both CRO and SEO strategies can (and should in many cases) be combined within the same business. However, their objectives are very different.

While CRO focuses on optimizing different aspects of your online presence to increase the number of users who perform the desired action , the goal of SEO is to organically achieve better positioning of your website in the SERP to increase its visibility and traffic .

As you can see, these are actually very dataset  related techniques, as the more traffic you generate, the more likely it is that more people will take the desired action. That's why experts recommend implementing both types of strategies simultaneously in most cases .

 

What metrics can be improved through CRO?

In addition to the more general improvements we mentioned earlier and the conversion rate (of course), if we talk about other metrics or KPIs (key performance indicators) that tend to improve with CROs, these are the ones we would highlight:

Click-through rate ( CTR )

 This indicates how often people who see your ad, link, button, etc. click on it.

User engagement : These include various metrics that indicate how users interact with your content. For example, likes, comments, or shares are all part of user engagement.




Dwell time : This is the time a user spends on a website, that is, the time between entering and leaving.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) : The amount of money the average customer generates for the company over the duration of their relationship with the company.

Average Order Value (AOV) : The average amount each customer spends when shopping at your store. It's calculated by dividing your total purchase revenue by the number of purchases made in the same period.

Bounce rate : Measured as a percentage, it indicates the number of users who enter your website and leave without taking any action, that is, without interacting.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) : The average price it costs a company to acquire a new customer.

 

Where can I apply the CRO?

CRO can be implemented in digital products that you develop as part of your marketing strategy. Below are the most common ones.

 

Landing pages

Landing pages play a key role in gathering customer data, but they are also widely used in the SaaS (Software as a Service) sector to promote services and attract customers.

When you want to optimize a landing page in a CRO strategy, it's very common to run A/B tests and generate different versions of the same landing page to see which one works best and why, in order to choose the most effective one(s).

CTAs (calls to action), images, headlines, and certain parts of the content are the elements that are most often changed from one landing page to another in this type of test.