Prior to the pandemic, consumers were increasingly using mobile devices to conduct “near me” searches, with the intent of patronizing nearby businesses. These trends were derailed completely between 2020 and 2022. It’s only been over the last two years that things have started to return to normal. However, marketers are quickly learning that a shift in tactics is necessary to maximize customer engagement and lead conversions.
A Think with Google blog post [1] from the end of 2023 revealed how consumer behaviors in 2022 marked a willingness to return to brick-and-mortar retailers, but their mixing of online search and in-person patronage has highlighted that it’s necessary to prioritize local SEO and local CRO marketing tactics in order to be most successful in the post-COVID economy.
This article will provide information about what conversion rate optimization (CRO) for local search is, why it’s important, the benefits of CRO in SEO, how to calculate rates, what the CRO process looks like, and how to implement CRO for local search.
What is CRO for local search and why is it important?
Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, plays an extremely important role in local search. By optimizing marketing strategies to drive local traffic into brick and mortar locations, CRO helps to maximize customer engagement and grow revenue over time.
Are SEO and CRO the same?
CRO is an iterative improvement strategy that focuses on analyzing customer behavior and data in order to increase sales conversions. SEO is primarily focused on improving organic search engine ranking of your website to increase traffic and leads.
Is SEO part of CRO?
While often treated as separate strategies, there is overlap in that CRO tactics push customers to take actions that are designed to maximize the conversion rate of the increased traffic generated by SEO strategies.
Is Google Analytics a CRO tool?
CRO strategies are dependent on insight garnered from data analytics. In this sense, Google Analytics is a powerful CRO tool that provides the highest quality data and customer insights possible to help business owners improve website SEO and CRO to maximize conversions.
Will Google penalize my site ranking for using CRO methods?
CRO and SEO are disruptive strategies designed on making changes to your website, often from both a design and content perspective. Because of how A/B testing works, search engines can see drastically different versions of your website in very short spans of time, which could lead to search engines refusing to serve up your page for the relevant search keywords.
In order to prevent Google from reading A/B testing as cloaking behavior—that is, purposely misleading search engines by serving up ideal content pages while directing visitors to pages with different messaging—it’s important that CRO optimization doesn’t change the core content and purpose of the page element being tested.
What are the benefits of CRO in SEO?
Before we dig deeper into CRO for local search, it’s important to explore the relationship between traditional CRO and SEO. Conversion rate optimization and search engine optimization are deeply entwined and when combined strategically, the two methods can result in significant benefits for your brand.
Combination of CRO and SEO tactics improves search engine rankings
Google is raising the bar again in 2024 with algorithm changes that are designed to align search results with user intent. Search engine optimization tactics help align website content with user intent to boost your website’s authority and thus improve SERP position.
When deploying CRO to improve your website, the effort tends to be focused on the user experience, which overlaps with content optimization and layout and design improvements. Making improvements in these areas naturally improves the searchability of the site and further impacts SERP ranking.
Conversion rates are maximized
CRO is concerned with ensuring that content on your website and the user experience lead to the best conversion rate possible. But customers have to find your brand first, and that’s where a strong SEO strategy maximizing site traffic is crucial for this synergy to be effective.
Both CRO and SEO have a high ROI
Rather than undergo an expensive full re-design of your digital assets, CRO methods test various elements of your site to find out where improvements will have a positive impact on conversion rates. This keeps the costs of improvements low, while driving up sales over time.
Similarly, SEO tactics are geared towards driving more qualified leads to your website over time, and can be done fairly inexpensively compared to the more costly approach of prioritizing paid search advertising and social media campaigns. WIth costs kept low, the increase in qualified traffic helps improve the efficacy of your CRO efforts and boosts conversion rates and profitability even higher than CRO or SEO alone.
How to calculate conversion rates
Traditionally, when considering CRO and conversion rates, we’re tracking website visitors and online purchases or lead conversions. Because this article is primarily interested in the role of CRO in local search performance and tracking conversions of customers in brick and mortar settings, we’ll go with a somewhat stripped down explanation of conversion rates.
- Conversion rate = [(# of conversions) / (total number of in-person visitors)] x 100
You can use this same approach to track the conversion rate of marketing campaigns, site visitors, or paid advertising, all by replacing “in-person visitors” with unique website visitors.
What is the CRO process?
With a goal of optimizing the user experience in order to maximize conversions, the process of executing a conversion rate optimization initiative must be a methodical process. CRO is specifically targeted at influencing visitor behaviors to perform desired behaviors on your website that make them more likely to convert into paying customers. How does the CRO team know where to make changes, though? It’s easiest to think of CRO as an ongoing experiment.
Use data analytics to identify opportunities
Before making any changes to your website, it’s important that you gather user data to gain insight into their current behavior. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is to leverage the Google Analytics platform to understand who current users are and how they interact with the various elements of your website. More specifically, you can see where they are leaving your site and which pages and forms are underperforming in terms of traffic.
Involve users in the dialogue
A mistake marketers often make during this discovery phase is to only rely on the data and what they can quantify with the tools they have available. However, it’s crucial to remember that ultimately, you’re interested in what’s driving and influencing customer behaviors.
The only way to effectively understand why users are behaving in certain ways on your website is to hear it from the customer directly through surveys and direct outreach. User feedback is critical in bridging the gap between what your data is showing you and the actual behavior drivers that need to be addressed.
CRO testing hinges on your initial hypothesis
With data and user feedback in hand, your marketing team should be able to formulate a multi-step hypothesis of what web elements need to be addressed. At the hypothesis stage, you’re team is focused on:
- What elements need to be changed
- What behaviors will result from those changes
- Why those changes in behavior will lead to the desired effect on conversion rates
For our purposes here, you might find that website visitors are looking for information about a special offer in your brick-and-mortar location for a specific product, but sales of that product are low. The data reveals users aren’t taking advantage of the special offer, and feedback from customers reveals that it’s hard to find because it’s buried with other offers and products.
With that in mind, your initial CRO hypothesis might be, “We believe we can increase customer engagement with this offer by creating a specific landing page for the product and restructuring our content to better guide visitors to that page.
Best tested with A/B testing
While it’s possible to go about testing multiple variables that might impact customer behaviors on a single page, this requires a significant amount of traffic to allow patterns to emerge. This is why more often, CRO-focused marketing teams use A/B testing to test several variables on different versions of a page in order to quickly identify which variables have the most impact on behavior.
Iterate, improve your page, rinse, repeat
With data from your A/B testing in hand and feedback from customers about their experiences, you can decide if your hypothesis was correct, and if so, make a plan for more in-depth changes to your site structure, SEO, content, and other page elements.
If the data reveals that your hypothesis didn’t pan out, further analysis and research is required. However, it’s important to take the time in the follow-up research process to fold in insight from testing so as to better guide and inform the research process based on the new data.
How to implement CRO for local search
If you search for statistics related to local search, you’re likely to come across numerous top ranked articles saying that 46% of all Google searches include local intent. And that was true…in 2018. Some other statistics that pre-date or coincide with the COVID-19 pandemic that are still impacting local SEO and local CRO strategies in the post-COVID economy include:
- 72% of local searches result in a visit to a store within five miles.
- 18% of local smartphone-based searches led to a purchase within 24 hours.
- 88% of searches performed with a mobile device for local businesses result in a call or visit to the business within 24 hours. [2]
Marketing experts who are focused on local strategies are only now in 2024 finally getting a handle on how the pandemic impacted many of these metrics and statistics that they rely on for strategic planning. A rapidly emerging priority in local marketing is to improve customer engagement and increase the number of qualified incoming leads, so that in-store or in-office teams can maximize conversions.
There are a number of ways to leverage CRO’s focus on iterative improvement to your website and digital assets.
Mobile-first optimization
A 2022 survey by Reviewtrackers revealed that 57% of local search queries are performed on a mobile device. [3] Redesigning your website interface and to be mobile-first and responsive to the devices users might be using can be tricky and will take significant CRO testing to get the interface and layout just right. The benefit however is an improved visitor experience that appeals to a segment of the market actively seeking out services in your niche.
Revisit local landing pages and optimize calls to action for local traffic
CRO strategies are the perfect tactic to spruce up your local landing pages. This is especially important for businesses operating in multiple areas, so that each page can be localized and targeted without impacting your SEO and conversion rates in other areas. Your call to action (CTA) prompts should undergo CRO A/B testing to find the right combination of verbiage and visual aesthetics to entice local searchers.
Localize your keyword usage
Your CRO keyword research should include a deep dive into local culture to identify any terms relevant to your brand’s products or services that will help your website resonate better with local customers in a given community. Once you’ve identified possible keywords, you should start testing them in your on-page and technical SEO elements such as content, headings, and meta and alt tags to find out which are most effective with the local audience.
Extend localization into your branding and product or service offerings
Once you’ve optimized on-page and technical elements, you should extend your CRO localization efforts to expand your brand presence into the local community. Stand out from the competition by identifying which products and services can be localized or opportunities for special offerings unique to that community. Showcasing the community in the case studies, reviews, and testimonials you share will help improve brand credibility and boost your reputation locally.
Localize leadflow and retargeting during the CRO outreach phase
We discussed above the importance of involving your audience and customers in the CRO process. A key step in CRO is to gather direct feedback in order to make more informed decisions about what consumers expect from their user experience.
When using CRO for localization, leadflows for gathering testimonials and feedback should be clearly focused on inviting information about the community’s specific needs and should incentivize providing feedback with content or discounts exclusive to that community. That same localization and incentivization should be a part of your remarketing efforts as you serve up customized ads that you’ve calibrated with the feedback gathered from the community.
Focusing on local CRO for future success
It’s important to remember that CRO for local search, especially in conjunction with SEO, is an ongoing process. Consumer behaviors will constantly change and search engines will always have new algorithms that must be adapted to in order to maximize your traffic and ultimately your conversions.
Small businesses and entrepreneurial startups, with limited resources and staffing, may be hard pressed to keep up with the ongoing changes in search engine optimization and the CRO for local search tactics necessary to remain competitive.
Partnering with a professional agency or freelancer with experience in crafting and implementing local CRO strategies will give your team the insight necessary to maximize your lead conversions and boost profitability while establishing trust and brand credibility in your customer base.
Sources
- Holiday Shopping Insights: Be ready for determined shoppers, Think with Google
- 16 Stats That Prove the Importance of Local SEO, Hubspot
- Local SEO Statistics and Trends: a 2022 Report by ReviewTrackers, ReviewTracker