What British cycling can teach us about software projects
Digital transformations don't have to be expensive, complex and risky projects. Often a number of small improvements can add up to a significant overall performance improvement.
How to enhance your digital strategy with SEO, UX and CRO
Our Digital Performance Manager explains how SEO, UX and CRO are key to a winning digital strategy.
Your Digital Strategy can be supercharged by collaborating Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), User Experience (UX) and Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO).
Our Digital Performance Manager, Stuart, passionately believes in this formula.
Stuart has a great record of driving organic search performance for notable international clients. In the past he's helped big brands improve their SEO performance, including; Crucial/Micron, FileHippo, Technogym, Argos, The Range, RBS Group, Emirates Airlines and De Beers.
Stuart explains:
“During my ten plus years working in digital I have spoken to dozens of companies wanting to ‘do some SEO’ on their websites to improve their organic footprint.
“A robust SEO strategy is essential for every website. When carefully executed, it is destined to move the traffic needle in the right direction. However, search compliance and accessibility to your optimised content is only one part of the puzzle.”
He added: “All too often brands I have worked with have focused on their SEO practices with good results. But they are left surprised when the stack of anonymous web traffic they’ve accumulated doesn’t convert quite as well as expected.
“Correctly funnelling valuable traffic to the next stage in a visitor’s journey – a purchase or conversion – is the next important piece of the puzzle.
“Too often this stage is tackled by separate teams (or not at all), resulting in a siloed approach to delivering the digital strategy and a big missed opportunity.”
By creating an alliance between your SEO agency and UX/CRO designers, your digital goals become more achievable. Not only will you drive targeted traffic, but visitors will also get the best possible online experience. This will in turn increase your number of conversions.
Put simply, SEO is about getting visitors into your ‘shop’, CRO is about getting them to buy something and UX prevents them from tripping over the doormat.
What do you need to understand before building a winning digital strategy?
There are three vital points to get a firm hold of before crafting a world-beating Digital Strategy.
First of all, you have got to know your target audience inside-out, and understand what you want them to do when they visit your website.
Then you must have a strong knowledge of your current website visitors and exactly what they get up to when they visit.
The final thing to worry about at this stage is your organic presence. This is about discovering how your website can be improved for search engines.
Start by asking yourself these questions:
- Does my website have a good structure and seen as “good quality” in the eyes of the search engines?
- What is my position in search results against my competitors?
- What keywords drive the most/least traffic to my website?
- Are my visitors landing on the right pages?
- How easy is my website to navigate?
- Is my website secure, fast loading and mobile-friendly?
- Where do my visitors come from and what is their intent?
- Does my content fulfil the intent of these visitors?
- To fulfil the intent of my visitors, can my content be improved?
- How do I work with my design team to ensure that changes to my website are user/ search friendly?
“This probably sounds like a lot of investigative work to begin with – correct,” said Stuart.
“Knowledge and insight are the most important driving factors for any decisions you make towards successful changes to your website.
“This applies to anything from the addition of a brand USP on your home page, to a CTA button on one of your landing pages, a whole new responsive website and anything in-between.
He added: “My approach to successfully deliver the right SEO, UX and CRO strategies is to be informed by relevant data and intel.
“This is gathered from an arsenal of technical SEO audits, user behaviour analysis, data analysis, a structured methodology of testing, testing, and more testing, and most importantly, a measurement plan to identify the insights and turn them into actionable steps.
“The goal being to deliver the best possible content to both users and search engines, understanding how site visitors will react in line with key goals and objectives.”
