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What is ROI For SEO?
ROI stands for return on investment. In layman's terms,
ROI is the amount an investor will get back compared to their initial investment, represented as a percentage.
For SEO, ROI is critical.
This is because if SEO costs more than it returns in the way of revenue, your profit margins will shrink.
However, most people don't realize that a well-designed SEO program grounded in optimal keyword, backlink, content and technical best practice may not be enough to get site visitors to convert to leads and sales.
This is super important because leads and sales are the factors that deliver the overall return on your SEO investment.
The truth is, you need optimal UX (user experience) to get a good ROI with SEO.
This means that after all the hard work of getting visitors to your page is done, you need to ensure your website is designed to convert them to leads and sales.
How Important Is UX For SEO?
SEO is the practice of getting your website to rank highly, and UX is the practice of giving visitors a great experience when they land on your site.
What's more, Google checks your overall UX by assessing how strongly you perform across a range of UX metrics, including:
Bounce rates
Pages per visit
Average visit duration
Suppose you are low in any of these metrics.
In that case, Google will read it as having suggested a junk site to its users, which flies in the face of its mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
This means that they will de-rank you, and all your hard work finding the right keywords, building backlinks and writing blogs will have been for nothing.
How Behavioural Economics Can Improve UX:
Behavioral economics mixes Psychology with Economics.
In short, with behavioral economics, you can create a site that influences your target market's decision to take action on your website.
For SEO, this means that you can link economic decision-making to site design by utilizing concepts to improve UX by:
Boosting conversion rates
Improving user satisfaction
Sharply decreasing bounce rates
Reducing website development costs
Nudge Theory To Boost Conversions:
Nudge Marketing is a great way to boost conversion rates.
To nudge visitors, you need to change the choice architecture on your site to alter visitor behavior without removing options or significantly altering their economic incentives.
Businesses like Amazon and Ikea are masters of this. In short, they use nudges to boost engagement, conversion, and retention.
To do this on your site, you need to gently push visitors towards the option you want them to take.
This means that instead of driving a call to action down their throat, you instead set up your site to enable visitors to "chat with sales" or "add the item to the basket."
The fundamental principles you need to keep in mind are:
Focus visitor attention on the option you want them to take
Create catchy keyword phrases that incentivize a particular option
Use visual cues to guide users down the conversion path
Show some social proof, e.g., customer reviews or case studies
Prompt visitors to take action without deleting other options
SEO nudges should be relatively minor changes to create a decision environment that meets your business model's desired result.
For example, if you are a SaaS company, you'd want to incentivize users to give you their details so that you can set up a demo.
On the other hand, if you are an eCommerce business, you'd want to allow customers to add products to a basket and prompt them to pay.
So you need to think long and hard about how to apply the key principles of nudge marketing to your site to see results.
Reduce Choice Overload To Improve User Satisfaction:
A great way to lower user satisfaction and increase your bounce rate is to create a site full of choice overload.
This happens when there are too many choices on a webpage, creating decision fatigue, unhappiness, and choice avoidance that (you guessed it!) causes visitors to bounce.
To prevent choice overload, you need to keep things simple.
What's more, there are several sure-fire ways to reduce choice overload.
First, cut out any products that are not selling or that are strikingly similar to others on your site.
Next, ensure that your site is easy to navigate and gives visitors what they want, i.e., consider why they visited your site in the first place.
Offering visitors the option to chat with you can also be a great way to help users struggling to find what they need on your site.
The key principles you need to keep in mind are:
Reduce your product range
Introduce smart navigation
Offer users opinions on your products
Leverage customer chat
Add video reviews and demonstrations
Reading between the lines, the key thing to remember is to keep things simple.
You want to make it easier for site visitors to decide and not paralyze them with too many options when they visit your page.
Try telling your visitors what option is best for them, cut out unnecessary options to reduce users' guilt, and ensure you are not bombarding site visitors.
Reduce Friction Costs By Reducing Bounce Rates:
Distracting visitors is a sure-fire way to truly sink bounce rates.
Friction costs represent how distracted visitors become by obstacles that websites put in their way when they visit.
Your website should offer value and shouldn't be a tool for you to capture email addresses or overly serve your business needs.
Remember that Google wants to provide the most relevant search results and the best user experience possible for searchers.
The fundamental principles to keep in mind are:
Don't distract users
Remove speed bumps from your site
Make sure your internal linking is optimal
Ensure site speed is not lagging
Don't go off-topic on blogs and content
To illustrate the principles above, the king of website distractions is registration or welcome banners.
If you are experiencing high bounce rates, try and assess why users are leaving your site.
This could extend to broken internal links or font being too low.
You'd be surprised by the number of people who become quickly perturbed by small, trivial barriers.
Reduce SEO Development Costs With Social Proof:
Lack of social proof can be why users are not converting on your page.
In a world where people of identity theft, hackers, and spam, you'd be surprised how many online users rely on their peers to determine whether or not a site is trustworthy.
Your website should be rich in social proof.
Even if you are not offering any social validation, you can be sure that your competitors are.
This means that they showcase their work, publish positive reviews and engage in community management marketing.
The key principles to keep in mind are:
Add positive reviews to your page
Share user-generated content
Add case studies if you can
Leverage video testimonials
Showcase any partnerships
With this in mind, websites that add testimonials and reviews tend to do on their homepage to target first-time users.
This means you'll be able to attract new customers and can ditch the SEO head-scratching and associated costs.
UX blended with behavioral economics is all about ensuring that your visitors have a great experience and make the right choice.
By incorporating behavioral economics into your UX design, you can ensure that you are getting the best ROI for your SEO efforts.
If this is something you need help with, contact Innovation-X Marketing today.