How To Make Your SEO 10x More Effective | Ep. #838

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we are going to talk about how to make your SEO 10x more effective. What in the world can you do to make your SEO 10x more effective, Neil?

Is it links? Is it content? What is it?

It's probably not those two this time.

That's right. What can make your SEO 10x more effective is one simple thing, conversion rate optimization. Everyone is saying that SEO is becoming harder. Everyone's saying that paid ads is becoming more expensive. So what does everyone do? Most people are saying, hey, it's not even worth going after these channels. But what the smart people are doing is focusing on CRO. See, if 100 people came to your website and one of them converted into a customer, you now have your numbers on, hey, this is how much you can spend on marketing based on your profit margins. But if you focus on CRO and you can get that number to be 2 or 3 out of every 100 visitors turns into a customer, now you can spend more on paid ads, you can spend more on SEO, you can spend more on link building. You don't want to buy links, but nonetheless, you can do manual outreach, content marketing, stuff like that. It's the one thing in marketing that isn't popular, but it's one of the most effective strategies that people are too lazy to use or leverage.

Yeah, and look at my pencil.

I know, I was about to say, I'm like, what the heck is that? Is that an iPad pencil?

It's an Apple Pencil from The Network Studios. Check it out if you want to record podcasts in Culver City. There's your ad. Anyway, so—

We didn't get paid to say that.

We did.

But the funny thing is every time we record here, I always tell the owner, I was just like, you know what? I'm going to create a new podcasting company and not use it. He's like, what is it going to be called? I'm like, The Studios: The Network.

The Studios: The Network, guys. Check it out, coming soon. So, okay, how do you get started with CRO? So one thing I've mentioned in the past, just before I even talk about how to get started around it, we've done episodes in the past, check those out too. At a certain point, especially if you're a large enterprise, at a certain point, CRO and SEO, they almost meld together. Okay. So because you're getting so much traffic coming to your site already, a lot of the changes that you're making from an SEO perspective almost become like you're doing these little tactical CRO changes, right? So how do you get started in the first place? So what I would recommend is, look, ConversionXL, that's a great blog to read about tactically in terms of, look, if you're looking for ideas, if you're looking for inspiration, you can go there. You can also go to conversionrate-experts.com. There's a hyphen between each. They haven't been publishing new content for a while, but their old stuff is still pretty good. Neil's site, neilpatel.com, and his old one, quicksprout.com, there's some good tactical stuff around CRO there. And in terms of if you want to get started for free, You can just add Google Optimize to your site. It's not going to cost you a dime. Or if you're looking for a paid solution, Visual Website Optimizer is an option. Optimizely is more of an option for enterprises. Those are just a couple of ways to get going with it. But just trust me, look, if you're going to spend money on SEO, you better be looking into CRO at least a little bit. And plus, sometimes it's just a couple of levers that you pull. It makes all the world— world of a difference versus just trying to bang your head against the wall all the time. Doing the same tactics over and over from an SEO perspective.

Yeah. And in general, when it comes to CRO, it's all about getting data that's both quantitative and qualitative. And this is where people make the biggest mistake. Quantitative data is what you see in Google Analytics. It's your numbers. You look at your funnel. Hey, here's how many people visit my homepage. From there, my product page. From there, my checkout page. Here's how many people actually visit the thank you page because they bought and they didn't bounce away from the checkout page. And that's great. That data, the quantitative data, will show you where people are falling off. The step that has the greatest fall-off rate percentage-wise is typically the page you want to focus on the most when it comes to conversion optimization. But in addition to that, you need to look at qualitative data. Qualitative data is what people are telling you. When you survey people using tools like SurveyMonkey, you can get feedback that you wouldn't just looking at the numbers. For example, if everyone's dropping off from your homepage and that's the biggest drop-off area, you don't really know why. But when you talk to people, whether it's you adding Intercom or Drift or whether it's surveying them through Qualaroo or SurveyMonkey, this is going to give you ideas on what people don't like, why they're leaving. From there, you can then make tweaks to the page Typically, a lot of the changes that can help improve the conversion rate are copy-related, but by combining both quantitative and qualitative data, not only will you know what to focus on, but you'll know what changes to make as well.

Yeah. So the other thing too, a lot of people talk about statistical significance, right? So they're, you know, from, and I recommend Googling this, but statistical significance is like, you know, when you reach a certain amount of volume with your tests, statistically it's correct to select this one winner. That's the, you know, you have 99% statistical significance. That means, you know, most likely this test is going to be a winner in the long term, right? If you're at 80% or so in the long term, probably not so safe of a bet because if you're, especially if you're a large enterprise, that can actually come back to bite you in the butt because 80% actually isn't that great. My point of saying all this to you right now is, look, when you're starting, especially when you're starting to run tests, especially when you're a smaller company, let's say a startup, look, you can think about statistical significance, but oftentimes you're going to have to run a ton of tests. Where it might take you months or years to get statistical significance. And sometimes you got to be like, look, if the numbers look good and the statistical significance is up to a certain amount and you feel good about it, you might just roll with it. Otherwise, what's going to happen is you're going to run a bunch of tests, you're going to wait forever, and you're just going to have a bunch of tests sitting in Google Optimize or VWO that have never really finished. And that means you never really got anything done because you're waiting for statistical significance. So, it depends on the size of your organization. But more often than not, I think most of you listening to this, think about it, but don't let that be the end-all be-all.

Yeah. And you can pick what area or what conversion point you're optimizing for. So if you don't have a ton of traffic and you're in the B2B space, you may not want to optimize for a sale. Instead, you can optimize for a lead because you have much more volume. In general, your salespeople may know what's qualified and by optimizing for more leads, as you're getting more conversions, then eventually you can shift your focus to optimizing for revenue. But at the beginning, you may have to optimize for things like emails or touchpoints that have a higher conversion rate and you have more conversions so that way you can reach statistical significance or you can run A/B tests and figure out what really is working and moving the needles.

All right. So that is it for today, but guess what? So just to update you guys on the path to 1 million downloads a month, I think we're on track for maybe— my numbers were wrong last time. I think we're on track for maybe 800,000, 810,000 this month.

Yeah. And depending where we go, right? So it's like, I'm going to end up doing some things that are going to help with the growth in the next 30 days or so. So hopefully the numbers start picking up quite a bit faster than they normally are right now. Great.

So here's how it works. Go to marketingschool.io/stats and then basically go rate, review, subscribe. And basically you're going to be able to see our path to 1 million downloads. Once we get there, we're going to throw the live event and then the live event will be in downtown LA. You get the videos recorded as well. You're going to eat with us too. You're going to get to meet us. It's going to be great. But we need your help getting there. So please do that.

And we get to meet you as well, which is awesome for us.

It's going to be awesome for both sides. So go to marketingschool.io/stats. Those are the next steps. And that is it for today. See you tomorrow.