Not many businesses consider the fact that SEO can do more than just improve your rankings and bring people to your website. While website navigation and other on-page factors are a big part of SEO efforts, SEO also has a lot of what Crazy Egg calls “indirect” benefits that are incredibly important to the overall success of a website, even if these benefits don’t get quite as much press.

It’s hard to believe, but onsite conversions are just one aspect that can be improved with your SEO knowledge and by looking at some of your SEO metrics. Although people are already on your actual site by the time onside conversions happen (and they probably got there thanks to your major SEO efforts), SEO can still be influential. Once you get the hang of how the two can work together you’re one step closer to having an SEO strategy that really encompasses all aspects of your website.

How SEO Can Help Your Onsite Conversion Rates

Keep in mind first that onsite conversion happens because of work that you directly put into your website in order to create onsite conversions—CTAs on the landing pages, engaging and relevant content and video that fosters clicks, etc. In some cases your SEO asks the same things of you because after all, Google’s entire mission behind good SEO is making your website easier for users (including when they are on your site!). For example:

  • Navigation is the biggest point to consider. The Google bots want you to have easy navigation on your website for user experience, and this directly affects the onsite behavior of users.
  • SEO also has you focus on your headlines and making sure you’re using keywords and making sure they’re clear and even tested. When a visitor is on your website, a headline could make the difference between reading an article and clicking a CTA button or clicking to another website.
  • Load time is a huge part of onsite conversions as well as SEO. You can visit here to learn more about load time for your website.

The really unique part about thinking about onsite data and SEO, however, is how you can actually use your SEO reports to help you make onsite changes. According to that same Crazy Egg article, you can do this in a few different ways:

  1. Look at your average position to help you see which pages are doing well when people visit and which pages probably need optimization. Once you look at some of the pages that are ranking well, you can visit that page and then determine if it’s your SEO that needs work or if the actual page needs onsite optimization to improve conversion rates.
  2. Your bounce rate never makes a website feel good, but it can be a good way to see if people are bouncing off of the pages you know you’ve worked hard to optimize. If the page that visitors usually visit before they make a conversion isn’t doing well, then it makes sense that you’re not getting the onsite conversions numbers that you’re after.

In the end, SEO is going to naturally affect what a user does on the page because again, SEO is all about the user. You can’t get the conversion if you aren’t getting people to your page, but you have to make sure that you’re ready to go once your SEO gets you there. If you have a solid SEO strategy this should be no problem at all for you.

Visit this article to learn how these two aspects can also be flipped—how your onsite data can help improve your SEO efforts. Once you give it a try, let us know how SEO helped you improve your onsite conversion rates in the comment section below.