Many have spoken about SEO and CRO, which are working towards a shared goal in a sense. Whether it’s business pragmatism, or even increasing conversions, there are many things that bring us together, but it’s rarely simple or unified. How much effort is put into this? Many SEOs do worry about whether the changes will hurt the CROs, and they will mitigate that risk rarely, but the other side does anything to see how SEO impacts CRO. Neither side really looks at the risks of this, and how changes can heart organic searching, but let’s take a moment to discuss this.4

There are SEO changes that have a very low-risk or negative impact on version rates from other channels. For example, if you change the meta information that’s invisible on the page, that’s SEO and rarely changes the CRO. But on the flip side, there are CRO changes that don’t impact the organic search performances. If you do have non-indexed pages, if you change this you won’t change your rankings. You should look at the checkout process and login pages. Those aren’t indexed, so you won’t impact the SEO with that.

However, everything else has a real impact on both of these, but there is real risk there. There are SEO changes which change conversion rates, and CRO changes that have a dramatic impact on performance, so there is an intersection on this.

Many will check this with SEO A/B testing, and from there, check the conversion rate, the SEO, and the full-funnel testing which combines both.

Many times, you’ll want to look at the impacts per each channel, in order to consider whether something is negative or positive. You should, for example, see that if you change the layout of the product page, or show more products, will the conversion rate increase. But, if you decide to run an A/B test on this, it may mitigate some of the risks. You may not get enough though in terms of evidence on this. Most importantly, you wouldn’t throw away an SEO that’s winning that reduced the conversion rate, or a winning CRO that impacted search results. You need to look at the underlying hypothesizes, and any significance on this. Knowing the knowledge that it takes to do this will make it better.

You should get used to testing generally, and from there you should learn the user signals, and the satisfaction and task completion metrics that go along with this. This will allow you to sync up all of this information, and bring forth a better methodology in the process. This does play a part, and you just need to test this in order to make sure you’re not impacting the other too terribly.

Yes, they do conflict. They tend to, and if you don’t realize this, you’re going to end up quite burned, and it could impact the future of this in a negative sense, and in other different ways for you too.