Struggling with SEO? Here's the Real Reason Your Leads Aren't Converting [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 68]

This transcript has been generated by AI and not checked for accuracy. 

Connor DeLaney
0:00:00
So you might think that you have an SEO problem, but in reality, and most businesses fall in this trap, you actually have a problem with.

Alex Winter
0:00:17
Join us for Impact Live 2024 in Hartford, Connecticut, this October 14th through the

Alex Winter
0:00:23
16th.

Alex Winter
0:00:24
Over three days, business owners, CEOs, and marketing and sales leaders will learn proven strategies to drive business growth. Attend expert-led sessions on marketing, sales, leadership, and AI, and get a chance to network with industry pros just like yourself. Discover how companies like yours are dominating their markets. Secure your spot at impactplus.com backslash impact-i.

Alex Winter
0:00:49
And for all of our endless customers' listeners, we have an exclusive discount code that will save you a hundred bucks. So when you're on the checkout page, just enter the code ECPOD100 in all caps for a hundred dollars off. We'll see you there at impact live 2024 up in Hartford, October 14th through the 16th. Welcome back to endless customers, the show that teaches you how to earn trust and win

Alex Winter
0:01:12
more business in the age of AI. I'm your host Alex Winter. And today we're back with Connor Delaney.

Alex Winter
0:01:17
Welcome back, bro.

Connor DeLaney
0:01:18
Thanks, buddy. Excited to be back. I'm excited to have you. Thanks for being on the show. You always provide really great insights. Today we have a cool one.

Connor DeLaney
0:01:25
I think it's one that there's a misconception, but I don't think people know that it's a misconception. We hear this a lot about SEO, and really I think what people are trying to get at is leads, right? So SEO pulls into this huge wrap around like, if I do SEO, I'll get more leads. And that generally is true, I guess,

Connor DeLaney
0:01:46
but there's a lot more layers to that than I think what most business owners may know about. So what's a good place to start with the SEO web

Alex Winter
0:01:56
that we need to unpack today?

Connor DeLaney
0:01:58
Yeah, I mean, I think there's the, it's funny because SEO means so much and it means nothing. Like it is the biggest like jargony, like I want to fix SEO is like the most blatant I don't know what I'm talking about statement that we hear. It's like we need to create synergy.

Connor DeLaney
0:02:15
And look, that's okay. Like there's a lot of people out there that say we need better SEO and they have no clue what that means. And that's where I think we have to start is let's call out the elephant in the room. SEO means so many different things to things like keywords, things like conversions, things

Connor DeLaney
0:02:34
like showing up in Google. We all have our own definitions of what SEO means, which is why this topic is so interesting of the way that we think of SEO needs to be different. And I'm hoping that in today's conversation we're going to help better define what your business actually needs and some key areas to focus on when you say, these are the goals we have, does fixing or improving SEO do that or is there something else that we have to focus on instead?

Connor DeLaney
0:03:03
Yeah, I think that makes a huge amount of sense. I think something too that for business owners, SEO definitely helps drive leads and can help drive traffic but it's very top of the funnel as we like to say. Or it's like at the very head of the funnel. You know, social media and where people first start to interact with your brand and with your services and your

Connor DeLaney
0:03:22
products, it's very top of the funnel. So you have to be strategic in how you position that content in order to pull people down the funnel that you want. And even though you may be doing SEO really well, once they get to your website or to that next conversion point, what's that look like?

Connor DeLaney
0:03:35
And what are the layers to actually getting the leads that you want versus just saying like, more SEO. Right. So let's start here then Alex, is when we say SEO, a lot of people are going to define it as, I want to have, I want to show up on the top of our search results, I want to be on page one. Page one baby.

Connor DeLaney
0:03:54
Right. I want more people to be clicking and going to my website and I want more people to find us and convert. That's typically what people think of at SEO. Now, how that all works, that's where you start getting into things like, how do we rank for the right keywords? How do we help both the SEO gods and the consumers?

Connor DeLaney
0:04:15
And how do we play all these different games? How do we use a tool like a SEMrush to help us rank better? You start trying to play this game, and so it becomes kind of an algorithm game. And that's where I think a lot of businesses spend too much time focused on those numbers rather than focusing on the things that we all care about which is conversions.

Connor DeLaney
0:04:37
We want more leads. We want better leads. When we talk about SEO, it is for most people defined as more of a top of funnel goal of we need more, we need more, we need more. Where I like to focus on is going to what we call conversion rate optimization, which means we want better,

Connor DeLaney
0:04:55
we want better, we want better. So instead of saying we just want massive volume, we want better quality. That's where I think a lot of people go wrong with SEO. That's not what SEO solves. SEO, let's just use this example.

Connor DeLaney
0:05:14
If you go on and you're searching for, you go on a Google or a Bing, you go on and you search for In-Ground Pools, our favorite thing to talk about here. You go on and search In-Ground Pools. There's going to be a whole bunch of different options that show up there. Now how do we know that they can actually help me, the consumer? I'm going to get more focused on what I'm going to search for.

Connor DeLaney
0:05:35
I might want to say In-Ground Pools for Mystic, Connecticut. I'm going to go and narrow that in. What happens next is you click on that link and they land on your website. SEO is very much defined and designed, rather, to get you from the search engine to your website.

Alex Winter
0:05:55
Right.

Connor DeLaney
0:05:56
Then what? That's where what I like to call CRO, or conversion rate optimization, comes into play. Once they land on your website, what do you want them to do? If they land on your homepage, where do you want them to go?

Connor DeLaney
0:06:08
How do they know they're in the right place?

Alex Winter
0:06:10
This is a huge piece, too, and this is something I think we talk about a lot internally here because it happens so often where people are spending a lot on SEO. It gets people to their website, maybe they spent a ton of money redoing their website,

Alex Winter
0:06:21
they have a shiny new website, which is beautiful and wonderful, but they haven't even heard what CRO is or what you're really talking about. This is the differentiator between a conversion and not. How can a business owner and how can marketers focus on this optimization of these conversion

Alex Winter
0:06:38
rates?

Connor DeLaney
0:06:39
Yeah. Let's continue to paint the picture of the funnel because everyone knows there's top of the funnel, there's middle of the funnel, there's bottom of the funnel, and then there's closed, which is where we all want to get as many businesses to. We want to get as far down this funnel until you put the bow on it and you say,

Connor DeLaney
0:06:54
here's your gift. So for SEO, it's primarily top of the funnel. Now, there will be people that argue, yeah, but you can optimize more for keywords. I would say when you start getting really narrowed in, that's when you start focusing on conversions

Connor DeLaney
0:07:08
rather than just search results because you want to be driving people that are actually interested in buying to doing that. So how you do that. One, if you're thinking about how do you win on the search engine side, it is focusing on the high intention keywords.

Connor DeLaney
0:07:25
Again, the difference between in-ground pools and, or let's think of a more fun, maybe guitars. I know you're a big guitar guy.

Alex Winter
0:07:33
I am a big guitar guy.

Connor DeLaney
0:07:34
You could search, you know, best guitars, and you just want to learn about different guitars, or like how to update the strings on your guitars, whatever. But then it's like, best electric guitars for folk music. That's getting a little weird. Let's do like alternative rock, like best electric guitars for alternative rock bands.

Connor DeLaney
0:07:54
Amateur, let's get even more specific. Now we're talking about people that are searching for such a specific thing that they're actually looking to probably buy something. There's more buyer intent behind conversion rate optimization. So you, maybe that's the difference between keywords when you're in the search engine. Yeah, that also happens naturally too, where like I wouldn't... Oh, as a buyer it's your way you buy, too.

Connor DeLaney
0:08:13
You start off very like, look, what's the best guitar? And then you read a few things and you're like, oh I really like punk rock and I'm an amateur or I'm a professional or whatever. So then you start to add to your your keywords as you search to try to get more pointed to find the answer you're actually looking for. Right.

Connor DeLaney
0:08:31
So that's how buyers buy. But you have to continue that beyond just the search engine side because winning in the search engine is great, but if your website looks like crap and doesn't tell you where to go, no one's going to actually take action on it. So the next thing that has to happen is they land on, let's say, your home page of your website.

Connor DeLaney
0:08:46
How do you help a customer, one, know that they're in the right place. You know you think of you land on a guitar website. They're probably gonna say Something about creating amazing music with all the best instruments that are affordable for anyone you have that kind of message That's resonating with the person who's probably an amateur guitar player. I am NOT, but maybe I mean you're more than a mature You're pretty great, but if you told me to pick up a guitar. I'd be like here. Let's start with how do I strum this thing. But it has to focus on do I know that I'm in the right place, do I actually believe that these are the people that

Connor DeLaney
0:09:22
understand my problem, do they get what I'm trying to solve here? And number two, where do you want me to go once I've landed on this site? What do I do next? That's where conversion rate optimization is, because

Connor DeLaney
0:09:33
you're trying to take customers down a journey to get them to actually want to interact and talk with you. And this is coming from the sales guy, like I understand that the role of your website is to get them along to the point where when they talk with me, I know that they're serious about buying. That's what conversion rate optimization is about. SEO has gotten them maybe to your website, now you've got to take it and focus on what's going to get them to actually want to buy

Connor DeLaney
0:09:55
from you. Right. SEO does not solve the buying issue, which is where most businesses go wrong, is they think that more leads come out of just ranking better on Google. There are certain ways that that works, yes, like they ask you answer, you focus on certain topics like cost and problems and comparisons like that will drive them forward. But I would argue that's more focused on that conversion rate side because that's showing higher intent.

Connor DeLaney
0:10:20
As we continue on the website, you land on their home page, you see a couple of buttons. So they read that message, they say, I feel like I'm in the right place. These guys get me. I resonate with that. What do I do now? There's usually buttons that we're gonna recommend.

Connor DeLaney
0:10:33
There's that primary call to action, which is the schedule a call, book an appointment, get in touch, get started. The action driver, what I'll call the business intent, the I want to work with someone to figure this out. Then there's what we call the secondary or transitional call to action, which is the

Connor DeLaney
0:10:50
I'm not ready to talk to someone yet, but I do want to keep exploring. I want to keep educating myself. That's typically where you see things like pricing calculators come into play. That's where learning centers or educational resources, maybe a downloadable guide comes into play. That's, you know, guitars or like how to understand purchasing a guitar, things to factor, stuff

Connor DeLaney
0:11:08
to think about, those kinds of things. That keeps you on the website. That's a conversion rate optimization focus because SEO isn't really going to cover that. But that's more looking at when someone lands on your website, how do we keep them on the website and how do we keep them moving? How do we keep building momentum in that sales process?

Connor DeLaney
0:11:25
And to keep them engaging with the content that you have on your site. Yeah, and engage with you. You want to take them down that journey. You want to show them where they should go next based on where they are. But your job when it comes to conversion rate optimization is to capture where they are today and where they need to get to in order to come back to that schedule a call button. At the end of the day, you want as many qualified buyers booking calls with you, booking appointments,

Connor DeLaney
0:11:50
making purchases, doing whatever that action needs to be for your business. It's not just get people to the site, it's get the right people to convert on your site. And again, I would say if there's a rabbit hole to dive down, that's where a lot of businesses are going wrong. I just had a conversation with a team yesterday

Connor DeLaney
0:12:07
that said, we get somewhere between 80 and 100 leads in a given month. About 60 to 80, let's call it about 60 of those 80, we'll use that math. 60 of 80, three out of four, are not a fit. They will not work with us due to different things.

Connor DeLaney
0:12:25
What that tells me right away is we haven't guided them through the ability to disqualify themselves. And that's part of conversion rate optimization too. When we think of conversions, we want conversions as high as possible, but we want to know that, and I use a baseball analogy for how I look at selling, I want them, if they get to first base, which is that initial call, I want as many qualified fits to go from first to second to third to scoring at home as possible.

Connor DeLaney
0:12:53
But I'm willing to say, if less people have to get to first, so that example, I would rather 30 to 40 great fits get to first base than 80 of them. But then my goal would be, maybe 10, let's say like we get 40 great ones. We go to second base, maybe it's 30 great ones.

Connor DeLaney
0:13:11
We go to third base, maybe it's 25 great ones. We get to home, maybe it's 20. That tells me I'm closing at 50% of the leads that come through. For this team, the drop off was they go from 80, and I'm drawing it on my little notepad for those that are listening, just so I draw it out. They go from 80 to 24 when they get to second base, so there's a huge drop off. Huge drop off.

Connor DeLaney
0:13:33
Then they go from 24 to about 8, and then they close somewhere between seven and eight. So once they get to that later stage, but there's a huge drop off. Yeah, that's not even close to what the number of people is mentioning. And that tells me that the conversion points

Connor DeLaney
0:13:47
for their site, they're not as educated as possible. So there's a lot of wasted time by their sales team probably. But there's also a lot of things that if we focus on the right conversion points, the right journey, they could be learning and educating themselves

Connor DeLaney
0:14:00
rather than your salesperson having to do it and ultimately disqualifying a lot of people. SEO doesn't solve that. But conversion rate optimization does. Now you get my wheel spinning. It's a really good point that you bring up.

Connor DeLaney
0:14:11
And I like the way that you positioned it because it really clicked with me. And I used to sell at a previous engagement before I came to Impact. So I know a little bit about selling. I'm not like the best salesperson ever,

Connor DeLaney
0:14:21
but I've rolled my sleeves up and done a little bit. And I think back then, dating myself now, but back then it was very much the numbers game, where it was like the more leads we get, it's a numbers game, you churn and burn, and the odds are the more you bring in,

Connor DeLaney
0:14:35
the more chances you have to convert. And that was really before all the tools and technology shifted into what we have now. And it was starting to then, but now it's like we're 10 years later, it's exponentially changed,

Connor DeLaney
0:14:48
and people have all this access at their fingertips to find all this information. So that whole adage of churn and burn, the more you bring in, the better off you are. I don't know if that's true anymore. And the longer I'm here at Impact and the more I understand endless customers, it really comes down to the quality of the leads. And if you had asked me before, I would have said I'll take as many as you can send my

Connor DeLaney
0:15:06
way and now I'd take way less, but ones that I know are qualified and that are ready to make a buying decision and that fit what we're looking to,

Alex Winter
0:15:16
who we're looking to work with.

Connor DeLaney
0:15:17
Yeah, Alex, that's where a lot of businesses are shifting to, and I would say the ones that are doing that the best right now are the ones that are saying, how do we get our conversion rate higher and how do we make the most of our existing team?

Connor DeLaney
0:15:31
And that's not just from like the, because I think when we say, how do we get the most of our existing team, it sounds like how do we milk the cow as long as we can until it runs dry?

Alex Winter
0:15:40
Which is- That's not what you mean. No. It does sound that way, but I get what you're trying to say where it's like, let's not waste time on leads that they're going to spend a lot of effort on that probably aren't going to convert historically and give them leads that are good so they can spend their time

Connor DeLaney
0:15:53
in the right place. Right. I think about the goals of a lot of businesses. There are the businesses in the world that want to be the juggernauts of industry, that are running the ship, that are growing exponentially. There are a lot of businesses out there and I imagine there's a lot of listeners that

Connor DeLaney
0:16:08
aren't saying we need to 10X our business in the next couple of years. Like a lot of people say how do we help our sales people have better lifestyles where they are making more money but also continuing to do great work where they can take that great money and invest it back in their families? How do we make it where people are really happy working here?

Connor DeLaney
0:16:31
And how do we make sure at the same time we're not sacrificing our business goals? I think there's so many businesses that because they think of SEO, I would bet that there's a lot of companies out there that say we have a leads problem in the sense

Connor DeLaney
0:16:42
that we just seem to have to keep hiring people. You know, here's the horror story scenario that comes to mind when we talk about this is you have a huge influx of leads and you have to hire five people to help take on top of the existing team that you have and then those leads dry up. What happens to those five people? They probably get let go. It probably becomes really competitive. There's

Connor DeLaney
0:17:08
probably this like fight for leads. Yeah, no. Because they're just, yeah, and what it creates is a less healthy environment and then the business leader has to make the difficult decision of, we now have so many leads that we can't service them or we can't take them on and frankly most of them aren't even good quality leads. A lot of them are tire kickers, a lot of them are not actually good qualified, some of them are spam. When you start running into those problems, that's when you know that we probably have opened

Connor DeLaney
0:17:34
a floodgate that isn't actually helping our business and that's where the difference between what you were talking about earlier of, man, I'll just take, you got to turn and burn, we got to get, you know, I got to hit the quotas, got to do that. That kind of business model is shifting and that's what's making business difficult for people is we are now focusing on a, more of a quality business than we are a quantity business. And that's not saying the actual business itself, but just in the spirit of sales, we're now focusing more on, if we want good quality,

Connor DeLaney
0:18:03
high intent buyers, we have to focus on how do we actually get them to convert and get through the funnel, and how do we make that our website, our content, everything that we do from the marketing side into the sales side transition through and say, all of this is going to work,

Connor DeLaney
0:18:20
and it's going to drive better quality people so that we get the outcomes that we actually want, which comes back to the business goals. Your business goals probably aren't hire 20 more people, it's probably how do we become more profitable and allow our people to grow and perform at a higher level.

Connor DeLaney
0:18:36
Yeah, absolutely. And it's gonna be different for every business. So this plays into your strategy, but overall your business strategy is part of this factor as you start to map out what this journey should look like for potential customers and for your sales team.

Connor DeLaney
0:18:48
You talk to a huge amount of potentials, you talk to a lot of now clients, you interface just a lot of client facing stuff. So this is a huge part of why I wanted to talk to you about this is, what have you been hearing and what are some of the conversations maybe

Connor DeLaney
0:19:01
that you could share with us? Have you heard from businesses that are going through this right now? Have you talked to anybody that was like, we need SEO and that's not really what they needed and you had to maybe help them kind of understand

Connor DeLaney
0:19:12
one, what we're talking about, and then two, what they were actually trying to do. Yeah, there was a team that I spoke with that said, you know, we're talking about a bunch of different stuff. And at the end of our conversation, they said, you know, the one thing we didn't talk about today was SEO and the execution of SEO.

Connor DeLaney
0:19:29
And they had been creating content for a while, and they'd been doing some of the things that, you know, Impact recommends, and that a lot of, you know, best practices recommend of create content, publish on your website, do the thing, make videos, all that stuff.

Alex Winter
0:19:41
Two to three weeks, let's go.

Connor DeLaney
0:19:42
Yeah, and they said, you know, we've been doing this for a bit, but we haven't really focused on SEO, so we want to focus on that now. And I asked them, you know, what's SEO mean to you? And they said, well, we want to show up on Google results, we want them to land on our website, we want them to click through our website, educate themselves, and then convert and talk to our sales people and then become deals.

Connor DeLaney
0:20:05
I was like, one, that is a whole lot of stuff. And two, that is not just SEO. That is like sales process. That is website options, all these different things. No, that all sounds great, but that's a lot more than just SEO. Yeah, that is a lot of SEO.

Connor DeLaney
0:20:16
And so as I spoke to him, and I knew what his goals were. We had talked about if you want to, they don't want to grow their business. So they're actually a pretty good example and they hadn't come to mind, but they're the example that would come to mind when we think about the story that we were telling earlier. They said, almost word for word, I want, this is a

Connor DeLaney
0:20:35
family-run, family-owned business. I'm going to be a second generation owner in a few years. What matters to me is I don't need revenue to go up, because we're all living pretty well. We're pretty happy.

Connor DeLaney
0:20:46
I would rather every single person that works here continue to grow in their roles, continue to, I want to pay people more, I want to give them more, and I want our business to be more efficient and more profitable. And immediately I went back and said, if I were you, I wouldn't focus on what you're saying SEO is because I don't think you need more leads. I think you need to focus on the leads that are coming in, the opportunities, the prospects, the visitors to your site, how do you get them to convert

Connor DeLaney
0:21:17
and show high intent? And as we started talking through that piece, he realized, yeah, we focus on getting volume in, but we don't convert a good chunk of them. Like, they don't actually even get close to being a prospect that can buy from us because we're just focused on getting more and more and more leads in. But there's so many people that we end up disqualifying right away just because they can't afford it or they don't have the space for whatever they're buying. Not a good fit for whatever reason.

Connor DeLaney
0:21:45
Yeah, they're not a fit. And so when they're not a fit, that tells me just focus on how do we make them a better, how do we focus on getting better fit customers so that every time your salesperson is going out, they have a good opportunity to close. It never feels like, oh, I'm going to go roll my eyes because there's no chance that this customer is ever gonna buy from me.

Connor DeLaney
0:22:05
If your salespeople are feeling like that, what's that mean? It means they're probably not the happiest in the role. It means if they found something better, they might be willing to leave. Or they're gonna complain and say,

Connor DeLaney
0:22:15
if you're gonna send me out to do all this, I wanna get paid more. And you don't have the ability to do that. You want happy, if you have happy salespeople, if you have happy service people, if you have happy employees period, they're more likely to do better work, to care more about your business, and to want

Connor DeLaney
0:22:31
to drive success because their success quickly becomes the business's success and that just becomes an endless cycle of good, of happy people that want to see the business succeed because the business's success means their success. Absolutely, I don't think there would be angry sales folks if every lead that came through was a quality lead that they could have

Alex Winter
0:22:50
a great conversation with.

Connor DeLaney
0:22:51
Even 70%, even 60%. Those numbers, they depend on the industry, so there is a little bit of like, look, I'm gonna put the asterisk on top and say whatever your number might be. But I imagine if a company went from 20%

Connor DeLaney
0:23:04
of our leads book an appointment to 50% of our leads book an appointment, and we don't have the same volume, but we have better quality, and we can hit the same revenue targets, I think a lot of companies

Connor DeLaney
0:23:16
would probably be pretty happy with that. Even, and then you can then, so the magic of that, Alex, is then you can expand it and do new, innovative ways to drive more leads when you need to, versus having to focus on,

Connor DeLaney
0:23:30
if our leads start slowing down, that means our numbers are just gonna plummet because they're gonna follow it, versus I would rather you constantly be able to say, if I'm getting 50 leads a month and 25 of them close, that's 50%. If I go and get 100 leads a month, that should mean that I'm getting 50 leads that close.

Connor DeLaney
0:23:47
And so you start playing that numbers game of, if you have a good conversion rate, then you can actually grow and maintain your business easier because you understand what that means versus we just need volume. We need as many leads as possible and we're going to hope that we hit that 10 to 20% instead of it being, how do I just know, I'm confident that I can grow the business when I want to versus trying to just get leads in because as soon as you get that influx, now we're getting in a weird

Connor DeLaney
0:24:15
situation where you got to either hire people or you got to drive your people into the ground. Yeah, which I don't think anybody really wants to do and I think you make some really great points in the sense that it's like the rising tide that lifts all boats, right? If you implement this correctly, the sales team's going to be happy, the company's going to be happy, the culture internally is going to be great, but that also affects the outward-facing part of the company too. So for all these potential clients, the leads

Connor DeLaney
0:24:35
coming in, they're going to have a good experience. The perception, the way that it's positioned, it's going to feel buttoned up, so it's going to be great for both ends of the spectrum, really. And that's the dream scenario that we're striving to get to. Right, yeah. And you know, it's tricky, and I'm sure there's one thing that's on the audience's minds as we've been talking through this, is like, so what exactly is,

Connor DeLaney
0:24:56
like how exactly do I go do CRO instead of SEO? And like what's that require? And there's more acronyms too, right? Yeah, there's SEO, CRO, and then we also, well I was gonna say this too earlier, so CRO is important, but then when you're on websites

Connor DeLaney
0:25:09
we also talk about the CTAs and how important CTAs are and that directly plays into your CRO and now I'm stumbling over these acronyms

Alex Winter
0:25:16
because there's too many.

Connor DeLaney
0:25:17
There's so many different acronyms and there's so much like marketing jargon.

Alex Winter
0:25:21
Yeah, so let's break it down

Connor DeLaney
0:25:22
so that people have like a really clear picture of. Yeah, the key areas that I would focus on and I'm gonna try and list them out as we go. Cool. But we mentioned some earlier and I'm really gonna focus in on

Connor DeLaney
0:25:34
when we're talking about the website because the SEO side, yes, it's getting people to convert and we talked about it earlier so maybe I'll start here. Number one is writing about content that your buyers are actually interested in and that influences your buyers. If you're a local business, write about, you know, create content that's focused on your

Connor DeLaney
0:25:52
area that you can actually service because an issue that a lot of companies run into, you focus on national, call it national keywords, it's not a real thing, but just the idea of like if you write about a topic that anyone in the country could write about and you can't actually help them, I mean take for example if you're a local ice cream shop. If you're a local ice cream shop saying here's the best flavors ever, that's different than like here's the best ice cream flavors in this specific area or for this location or

Connor DeLaney
0:26:21
whatever. Silly example, but you get the same idea of it's better for you to focus on the actual customers you can service than the ones that, and again, maybe ice cream's a silly example. So I'm gonna shift.

Alex Winter
0:26:33
No, it's a good example.

Connor DeLaney
0:26:34
But let's think about, so here's a better one. Plants. We have a little plant on our desk, so plants come to mind. I try to use funky ones because it makes it a little more fun. This is our plant herald, by the way.

Connor DeLaney
0:26:44
Our little plant herald. So, herald, herald might be great for a person who owns a home in Connecticut because maybe they can withstand the winter. A plant in Florida might be different than a plant in Connecticut. If you just say, best plants for the outdoors, that's a much different, much broader scope

Connor DeLaney
0:27:02
question than best plants for the outdoors in Connecticut, best plants for the winter season in Connecticut, plants that can sustain life through the brutal temperature changes of the Northeast. When you start narrowing in further and further, that's when you start to realize, okay, that's part of the conversion side

Connor DeLaney
0:27:21
because now we're not just talking about all the plants, we're talking about the plants for this specific area. Oh, and Connor happens to sell heralds to all of the different plant owners and plant moms and dads in the world that like to have plants in little southeastern Connecticut.

Connor DeLaney
0:27:36
That's when you start focusing on the content side of things. Now, you go click on that article, now we start talking about the website. So let's say you land on the homepage of connorsplants.com. Maybe there's a little bit of work to do there.

Connor DeLaney
0:27:50
We'll work on the name, yeah, we'll get that.

Alex Winter
0:27:51
So it starts with the messaging

Connor DeLaney
0:27:52
like we talked about earlier, which is as soon as they land there, I should be saying something about having beautiful plants that you can love and nourish and take care of in Connecticut. I'm gonna focus on a few key areas.

Connor DeLaney
0:28:06
I'm focusing on, you probably want plants. You probably want plants that have a certain outcome for your life, maybe they make you happy, maybe you want them as a project to help grow and sustain, and you live in Connecticut. I focus on all those things, that's telling me high intent.

Connor DeLaney
0:28:19
Now again, that's a local option. There's other things that you can do better, it's like focusing on certain brands that you offer. Maybe you are a, like someone that goes and installs a certain brand of windows or a certain brand of doors. You start talking about the brands, there's different ways that comes apart. So the messaging comes down to, am I resonating with the person? Do they trust me? Once you get

Connor DeLaney
0:28:43
those two things down, the next thing that has to happen and as we think about it, there's two areas. There's the calls to action, like you said. What do you want me to do next? Once I see you can help me and you seem credible, I want to work with you, what do I do next? You want them to click on a button and maybe I say, come, like, view my shop and they're going to go order their plant online.

Connor DeLaney
0:29:04
Or the second one might be like my plant care guide and you're driving them to take an action on your site. That's, again, continuing conversions but keeping them on the site, keeping it sticky. When they go and read that article or that guide, as I'm going throughout, I want to be linking to other pieces, but I also want to have a clear call to action, that clear next step that says, after you've read this, you may want to go and shop, or maybe you're saying, here's five issues that

Connor DeLaney
0:29:29
happen. I want to... But something clearly like, this is what you need to do next. Guide them down that. Right, maybe it's a pricing calculator, maybe it's another article, maybe it's... But like something that clearly goes like, if you've gotten this far, you're certainly interested, here's the next step.

Connor DeLaney
0:29:42
Well, so here's the third thing, and this is where I think a lot of businesses miss, and it's funny because it's one of my favorite LinkedIn posts that I made in the last year. And I got a lot of interesting questions after it. I think the most underestimated part of a website

Connor DeLaney
0:30:00
might be the navigation. And when I think about why that's the case, think about the journey that we want customers to go down. We talk about messaging, we talk about the calls to action. What if they get to the bottom of that article and they're not sure what to do next exactly?

Connor DeLaney
0:30:14
You need to give them a map of where they might go next. And when I think about the navigation, this is where conversion rate optimization gets really interesting and where you can really get into the weeds on it. Because your navigation should be the journey that you're guiding people along. It should be clear where they're starting and you should be actually

Connor DeLaney
0:30:33
thinking through the steps of what's on there. That's why whenever I work with teams, I always say the about us should not be the first thing that they can click on in the navigation. Because it's not what customers actually think about in the moment. Instead, they think about types of plants, maybe a certain other like ways to buy other things. You can take them through the journey. For other businesses, I think of the services we offer

Connor DeLaney
0:30:58
and then you think about how areas that they can service and then they go to educational content and then they have at the end, maybe it's the button, the conversion button that you want them to do. That's the kind of journey that you're taking folks down.

Connor DeLaney
0:31:13
But from conversion rate optimization standpoint, it's the how do we help anyone wherever they are on our site take the next step they want to take. They should have a clear journey that they're going down and the navigation is a really important component of that. It's huge. Huge component. And that's for me, I feel like when I get lost on a site or if I'm not sure as an end user what to do next, I tend to default. There's two things

Connor DeLaney
0:31:35
that happen. I either go to look for the nav to figure out how to navigate to where I do want to go and if that's not there, I can't figure that out, then I bounce back to the search and I start over. That's exactly what I was thinking because that's the, frankly, that's the last line of defense. I mean, think about the, and this is like a funny user experience thing, but for conversions,

Connor DeLaney
0:31:57
this is the key. When you go to, Alex, when you go to change and let's say you don't know exactly where to go, you have your two options. You're either going to go back to the navigation or you're going to go to hit either the back arrow or you're going to go open a new tab or type in a new URL or whatever. The navigation, your mouse physically has to go over it.

Connor DeLaney
0:32:18
So your eyes naturally look at it. And this is getting really in the weeds so I understand that we're like really diving in and out. But this is like a thing I'm passionate about. You, as a user, have to go through the navigation to get to the search bar again,

Connor DeLaney
0:32:31
to open a new tab, whatever it is. You have a split second to say, oh wait, maybe I do want to click on that first, and maybe that dropdown actually shows something that I want to see. It is your last line of defense before someone leaves,

Connor DeLaney
0:32:43
especially when they're not sure where to go next. But from just, from a conversion, I'll loop it back to a conversion rate optimization standpoint. It gives them a journey step to take. And if they don't know exactly where they are, they should be able to re-navigate themselves

Connor DeLaney
0:32:57
based on the journey that they've seen in your navigation. It should guide them along the way.

Alex Winter
0:33:02
Yeah. Well, clearly, I can tell that you're into this.

Connor DeLaney
0:33:05
This is a- I know. I went down a rabbit hole a little bit with it, but I hope that it- No. Dude, but I love that. And honestly, it's an important rabbit hole to go down because if we loop this all the

Connor DeLaney
0:33:13
way back to the beginning of the conversation when we started, the very broad like, I need SEO. Sure, that's true, but SEO drives you to a website or to a certain action step and then you need to map out what that action step looks like and what that CRO is going to be. Now you're realizing all the different components of this. SEO is only going to get you so far and it may not solve the goal that you have.

Connor DeLaney
0:33:36
Again, the goals, some goals are going to be, I want to blow up. I want to do so many things. I want to have so many leads. I want to just be doing that. Others are, I want so much better quality because we spend so much time with garbage leads and that's no fun, no help for anyone.

Connor DeLaney
0:33:52
No. Well, we've heard on the street too that there are instances where a business thinks they have an SEO problem and really it's a CRO problem. So that's you driving them to the right way a really good point Yeah, and we've also heard times to where the website and the CRO point is great But the SEO isn't driving them to the correct places. So right there are there is a balancing act

Connor DeLaney
0:34:11
Yeah, I think to that point it's you know for some people they say I feel like we have all the right pieces on our Website and no one's there. Yeah, and that's that's when you run into well, how do we get more people to our website? And that's a real SEO. That's actual right and and again, that's like, yeah, that's an interesting one, but it's so uncommon, because so many, nobody, not as many people focus on the conversion rate

Connor DeLaney
0:34:37
of their site without having people actually get there. Because conversion rate optimization only works when you have data and inputs that are telling you what's working, what's not, and how do we optimize it, rather than, if there's a business out there, I would love to talk to you,

Connor DeLaney
0:34:54
where you have all these things mapped out and nobody's showing up, because it's usually the other way around. And you have more people showing up and leaving, doing exactly what you said earlier, because they don't know where to go,

Connor DeLaney
0:35:04
don't know what to do, and it doesn't resonate. Yeah, so if you're listening, Connor is ready and available, and I know how good you are with this stuff. When it comes to mapping customer journeys and the customer experience.

Connor DeLaney
0:35:13
We could nerd out, but we could also, we can keep it high level-ish, but man, if there's one thing that talking with teams, being able to have this kind of conversation, this is usually where the light bulb goes off for folks, because a lot of the businesses out there, like if you're established enough to have a consistent website and you're looking at improving it, it usually comes back to, I feel like we're getting people here and

Connor DeLaney
0:35:33
we're not getting enough out of the people that show up, rather than we're not having enough people show up. And even if they think that's the case, that's usually the alternative, and that's when I like to start asking questions. Yeah, and I think sometimes too,

Connor DeLaney
0:35:44
the misconception can, and we've heard this too, where like, I just redesigned my site, or I need to redesign my whole site. But from my experiences, I would rather have a site that maybe needs some improvement, but is decent enough that we could use it

Connor DeLaney
0:35:56
and have good SEO that drives people to a CRO, to a CTA, where they can convert, versus like putting all this money into rebuilding a site that doesn't have conversion rate optimized and there's so many people to it. Alex, that is where I think a lot of teams

Connor DeLaney
0:36:12
would actually enjoy this too is CRO, the ability to update your conversion rate optimization side, like the tests that you can do cost next to nothing if you can make updates on your website. It's anything, you know, the simplest example

Connor DeLaney
0:36:28
I can think of, and I was talking with Vin, who leads our web team here at Impact. Big bearded dude, if you guys have ever watched the podcast before.

Alex Winter
0:36:35
Vin Gaietta, yeah.

Connor DeLaney
0:36:36
Yeah, Vin's the man, but I was chatting with him and he said one of the tests that we typically do is we look at landing pages, where people go enter their information, and he said, you know, we champion landing page videos because we want people to go and watch this content.

Connor DeLaney
0:36:50
One of the changes they made was typing out the steps that we highlighted in that landing page video and like writing the text. And there was a team that had like a 40% increase in conversions because they just, it might have even been more than that.

Connor DeLaney
0:37:02
It was something crazy. But he said, that's the kind of changes you make. Like conversion rate optimization testing and getting that data, I also would rather have people coming to our site and we improve the conversion

Connor DeLaney
0:37:12
because it's like maybe you change the text of your call to action buttons, maybe you add a line or two of text to a website page. It's not a shift our budget around, it's tweak the phrasing or change the color of a button. There are such small things that we can do, but what's so cool about it is those can have significant impacts and as long as you have the data to show if it's changing it or not, that's when you actually start to see the results.

Connor DeLaney
0:37:39
It costs a fraction of the price to change it, typically takes minutes to try, and you can always just go back versus saying, all right, we gotta make a $50,000 investment because we gotta try and win this.

Alex Winter
0:37:51
Yeah, no, and I've seen it happen, those small tweaks and just doing some like A-B testing, it's unbelievable.

Connor DeLaney
0:37:55
Yeah, A-B testing too, you could have both of them up there but your goal is to gather data and just make small, small tweaks. Like, it's not, you don't have to overhaul your SEO strategy. Instead, it's let's try this little tweak.

Connor DeLaney
0:38:09
Let's change the messaging on our homepage and see if it works. It's much smaller and much more within your control, too. And maybe that's the key within all this, too. When we think of like the top of funnel, bottom of funnel, getting people to the website,

Connor DeLaney
0:38:22
your website is the thing you control the most. You don't control the algorithms. Now more than ever you don't have the control of the algorithms like we wish we did. You have control of your website. You have control of if people are landing there, you can control more than you think about if they convert. As long as you make the journey clear and easy to follow, it's very likely they're going to follow it.

Connor DeLaney
0:38:42
And it's low cost to do this. So there's no excuse. No excuse. I love it. I can hear Vin in my head too like, iterate, iterate. It's not reinventing the wheel every time. You get the foundation and then you start to build slowly on it. That's really cool. We covered a lot of ground. I'm going to hit you with a tough one. This is my new favorite thing we're doing on the show. What's the one thing? It's very they ask, you answer. What's the one thing business leaders, marketing professionals out there that are listening and watching, what should

Alex Winter
0:39:08
they take away from this conversation?

Connor DeLaney
0:39:10
today's conversation on SEO versus CRO is evaluate the goals and needs of your business to determine the actions you need to take. That's super high level. What I mean by that is you have to focus on does your business need better quality leads? How is your website performing? Do you have the data to make the right decisions that show if I want to get my business from A to B, here are the actions I probably need to take. Are we focusing on the right data points that show us where we need to go? If you align your goals as a business with the strategies

Connor DeLaney
0:39:51
that you're putting in place, you're going to see the right results as long as you understand the different options that you have.

Alex Winter
0:39:57
Well said. Well said. Connor, thanks for being on the show and for chatting with us today.

Connor DeLaney
0:40:01
I just love picking your brain and getting all these cool insights. Always, buddy. Yeah, it was fun to dive down this rabbit hole. I always enjoy it and believe me, this was a topic for the ages. Yeah, sounds like we gotta go do some like ABCRO testing.

Connor DeLaney
0:40:14
All the acronyms and all the letters that we can throw in there, we've got work to do and I'm sure a lot of us do. Well, thanks again and for everybody that's watching and listening, this is Endless Customers. I'm your host, Alex.

Connor DeLaney
0:40:23
I'm your host, Alex.

Alex Winter
0:40:24
We'll see you on the next episode.