how do seo, cro, and brand storytelling fit together?
Good question – and one that I have received a lot over the years. To give you a comprehensive answer, it pays to define each of these components and then chat about how they fit together.
Let’s start with brand storytelling.
What is brand storytelling
As always, let’s quickly recap what I mean with brand storytelling.
So brand storytelling as a messaging strategy is not the same as telling stories in your marketing. That’s a really common point of confusion, so I just want to clear that up first off. You might tell some “actual stories” as part of your marketing, but brand storytelling as a messaging strategy goes deeper than that.
It basically means deconstructing your customers’ hero’s journey to understand their internal narrative, and then creating a brand messaging strategy that embeds your brand narratives into that hero’s journey. So what you end up with is that each brand message you’re putting out there, clearly relates to your customers’ hero’s journey. Which of course helps them connect with your brand and your message, and makes them feel like you “get” it. So it’s messaging that resonates and that makes your customers feel validated and heard.
Instead of the alternative approach of company centric messaging that no one can connect to, or customer centric messaging that sticks to a superficial level, where you’d talk about features and benefits and use cases and stuff like that, but you wouldn’t venture into the more human aspects like desires, emotions, and your customers’ internal transformation. And those are really the things that sit at the heart of a brand storytelling messaging strategy, because they’re at the hear of your customers’ story… of your customer themselves. So that’s what we need to connect our messaging with if we want to connect with our customer. Okay? That’s how brand storytelling as a messaging strategy works.
And the way you bring those messages to life is through your content, copy, stories, sales messages, etc.
Ok, then what about SEO?
Although brand storytelling tells you what to say, to whom, and when, it doesn’t mean that they’ll automatically get found by the right people. That’s where SEO comes in.
SEO or search engine optimisation really has a couple of parts to it, but they can be broadly split into on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO:
- On-page SEO covers tactics you can control on your website to help search engines rank and understand your content better. Like your site’s content, title tags, keyword usage, URLs, heading levels, image tags and optimisation, internal links, etc.
- Off-page SEO refers to actions taken off your website. Like backlinks and mentions on other sites.
- Technical SEO refers to activities that directly impact how search engines index and crawl your site. Like site speed optimization, structured data, and more.
When it comes to optimising your content, we’re really looking at on-page SEO. The other two fall into other areas of responsibility; e.g. off-page SEO usually falls to your marketing team who may do outreach and targeted link building, and technical SEO falls to your website developer who should be taking care of these things behind the scenes anyway.
So, today, when I talk about SEO, I’m talking about on-page SEO.
How to “do” on-page SEO
To understand what you need to do to rank highly on the search engine results page (SERP), it pays to understand what Google (and other search engines) are looking for in your content. And that basically comes down to a number of factors.
These include things like your content relevance, which the algorithm judges based on things like your click through rate, bounce rate, average time on site, number of clicks someone does while on your site, etc. So the better and more valuable you make your content, the higher your relevance which positively impacts your rankings.
So if you think back to brand storytelling, the whole premise is making your content valuable and relevant, so you should already have this aspect covered really.
But the way that you link your high quality content with what your audience is looking for is through tactically employing the right SEO keywords. Because even if you’re providing the highest quality, most desirable information that your audience is looking for, unless you can put it in the same words as their search query, it’s likely to fly under the radar. So using the right keywords is probably THE most important aspect of on-page SEO
Another major factor that plays into your SERP ranking is stuff that makes your site trustworthy. Google doesn’t want to be seen promoting scam or fraudulent sites, which is why trust is a huge factor for SEO. There are several ways Google “judges” how trustworthy you are, some of which you can impact while others need to be earned.
Things that fall into the trust-building category include off-page stuff like the number of reputable backlinks you have, technical stuff like ensuring your site has an SSL certificate, and on-page stuff like proper internal and external linking of your sources, providing your company contact details in the footer of every page – including a real address and phone number – linking to policy pages and terms and conditions, and providing a “Satisfying amount of high quality content” (in other words, more & better than the competition.)
So if you take all that stuff together, it can basically be summarised as EAT. In other words, you need to demonstrate Expertise, Authority, and Trust, and whoever does the best job of that for specific keywords and phrases will come out on top of the SERPs.
And if you do brand storytelling right, it helps you create somewhat of a positive feedback loop when it comes to building EAT because when you know exactly what your audience needs and how to meet them where they’re at with your content then they enjoy your content more, which in turn leads to more engagement, more time on your site, more clicks, etc. Which in turn leads to better rankings (because remember, Google judges time on site, click through rate, etc. positively when it comes to determining your site’s relevance).
So you’re essentially creating a better user experience, which builds trust more quickly, and once you’ve got trust in the bag, your recommendations are better received by your audience, which drastically improves your conversion rate, which in turn again improves your perceived relevance and page quality. So BOOM! When you combine SEO, brand storytelling, and CRO principles correctly, you’ve got yourself a website that acts like a well-oiled machine.
But you still need to build that bridge between your audience’s searches and your brand storytelling content, so let’s take a closer look at keywords and how to select and employ them effectively.
Effective keyword research
Why we need to do keyword research: To see how many people are searching for a particular phrase every month (+ trends for that phrase); this helps you position your website in line with what your prospects are looking for.
How to do keyword research:
Step 1: Generate A Master Keyword List: Brainstorm everything that’s relevant to your product / service and understand what your audience is looking for. This comes back to the questions they have or the problem they are trying to solve. And you should already know what those things are since they’re integral to your brand storytelling messaging.
So the way you find your master keywords is by inputting different search terms you think could be relevant into a keyword research tool like KWfinder, SEMrush, or Moz and seeing what the search volumes are for those terms and for your locations of interest. These tools will then all give you a whole list of associated keywords, which are essentially related terms and their respective search volumes and keyword difficulties, so that you might see, “oh the term I entered doesn’t get many searches, but this basically synonomous term over here does – ok then, I guess I’ll use that one.” Which is how you can start getting a good idea of the stuff your audience is looking for in their own words.
Step 2: Flesh out your list: Once you’ve got your master list, you can use online tools to find additional relevant phrases. For example, you can chuck some of your terms into tools like Answer the public, Keyword Shitter, or Google Auto Suggest to give you more ideas about the kinds of stuff associated with your core terms and phrases that people are additionally looking for. This can even be a great way to gather ideas about supplementary content you could be creating for example blog articles or other content that answer these additional questions or problems your audience has. Because remember, the more valuable and better content you can provide, the higher you’ll ultimately rank
Step 3: Validate your keyword list: Next, you’ll want to validate your keyword list by checking the actual search volumes and difficulty scores. This will tell you how much bang for buck you’ll potentially get from using certain terms based on how many people are searching for them and how many pages are trying to rank for them. In an ideal world, you want to be targeting “high volume, low difficulty” keywords and phrases. So terms and phrases that a lot of people are searching for but not a lot of people are trying to rank for.
But, of course, the world is not ideal, so “high volume, low difficulty” keywords and phrases are basically unicorns. In the end, you’ll probably need to compromise and combine some high volume, high difficulty keywords with some lower volume, lower difficulty keywords to build a solid “keyword theme” for each of your pages that then has the best shot of being found and achieving reasonable or even good rankings.
How to integrate your keywords into your content
Once you’ve got your keyword theme for each page, which will include a focus keyword and some secondary keywords and phrases, you can start thinking about how to integrate them into your content effectively.
As a general rule of thumb, it pays to intentionally integrate your focus keyword in a number of places throughout your content like at the start of your title tag, once prominently near the top of the page, 2 – 3 times in the body copy (including variations and secondary keywords), once in an image alt tag (helps with image search), once in the URL, and at least once in the meta-description, but without it ever appearing unnatural or like keyword stuffing.
So really what you’re trying to do is write like you normally would, in your brand voice, conveying your core brand messages, but with the addition that you’re bearing in mind the words and phrases people are looking for and intentionally and strategically integrating them into your content as they fit, but without forcing it or making it seem unnatural. Make sure what you’re writing makes sense, and when you read it out loud sounds good & conversational. Don’t worry about achieving a particular keyphrase density or including them a magical number of times.
The key really is simply aligning your key messages with the stuff people are looking for based on their search terms and queries. Because we’re never trying to create demand or force people into something they’re not looking for – the internet is so vast, they won’t find it anyway. Instead, we’re trying to channel existing demand and existing desire onto our products and services and to do THAT, you need to build a bridge between that demand and those desires and your messages and content and the way you build that bridge is by researching your audiences’ search terms and phrases and strategically employing them in your content, while presenting your messages, building a robust argument, and applying the laws of persuasion to optimise your conversion rate.
So now we’ve covered off that first part of finding the right terms and phrases to build your bridge. And the second part – your core messages and arguments – are really your brand storytelling strategy, so then now let’s look at the last part – following the laws of persuasion within your website and within your messaging to optimise your conversion rate. (Which, in turn, contributes to that positive feedback loop we talked about earlier.)
Principles of CRO
Perhaps at this point it’s a good idea to do a super quick recap about what your conversion rate actually is. Bear with me if this is too obvious, but I feel like a lot of folks completely disregard CRO and simply throw more money at getting more traffic to their site, be it with PPC ads, social media content, paying for ongoing SEO efforts, or whatnot, without ever bothering to understand or optimise their site for conversion.
So your conversion rate is basically the percentage of people who visit your site (traffic) who then take the action you want them to take. This might be a direct sale, like buying something straight off your site, or it could simply be getting them to take the next step in your funnel, like sending an enquiry form so that your sales team can pick up and take over the next step.
And to put that all into perspective, a GOOD conversion rate is around 3% – but most sites achieve WAY below that. So of all that glorious traffic, in most cases, at least 97% will visit your site, hang out for a second or two, and then bounce back out, never to return again. So when we talk about conversion rate optimisation, the question we’re really asking is how can we get more of those people – of that 97% – to stick around just a little longer, at least long enough to take the next step.
And luckily for us, CRO isn’t a guessing game. It follows pretty well laid out, scientific principles that can be applied and measured. But still most websites are designed and written less scientifically than a toilet brush. So let’s look at what you can do to change that. Because improving your conversion rate is probably one of the most profitable things you can do for your business, since it basically gets you more customers for free. Think about it, your ad spend and marketing costs for your website stay the same regardless if 0.5% of website visitors become customers or if 10% become customers. So your conversion rate has a disproportionate impact on your profitability, which gives you a massive competitive advantage. Because when you maximise your conversion rate, you’re essentially maximising the return on your online marketing, which means you have more money to invest in more marketing, which means you can get a larger piece of the pie.
Ok, so I mentioned that CRO is basically a science rather than an art. And that’s because years of marketers doing zillions of A/B tests have revealed certain trends and patterns that hold true across all websites, across all industries. So although the gold standard is obviously running your own A/B tests, the reality is that most organisations below the enterprise level don’t have the budget, capabilities, or capacity to really do this. But that doesn’t mean they can’t engage in CRO, because if that’s you, you can still get 90% of the way to optimal by applying the proven CRO principles that apply to basically all sites.
So let’s chat about what these established trends and patterns of best practice CRO are and how you can use them to improve your own conversion rate.
Essentially, they can be broken down into 6 categories, that we can chat through one by one. They are:
- Understanding the needs of your user
- Using the right language
- Website usability
- Trust building
- Effective copywriting
- Effective design
Now let’s look at each one and how you might improve it to improve your overall conversion rate.
1. Understanding the needs of your user
For a successful website, you need to understand your user. That includes understanding what makes them tick, what stops them from ticking (in other words, what halts them in their tracks, makes them bounce, makes them abandon cart, raises objections, etc.), and how you can increase their dollars per tick (i.e. buy more, opt for higher ticket offers, become repeat customers.)
When you understand your user, you gain a much better idea of what to say to them and how to say it. So, you can optimise your value proposition, your offer, your language, and where you need to meet them (stage of awareness). This is all pretty inherent to the brand storytelling as a messaging strategy approach anyway, so it should be something you’re familiar with and have worked through extensively.
If not, then this is really where you get the very most bang for your conversion buck, so I’d suggest you take the time to get deeply familiar with your customer, their needs, and their journey.
2. Using the right language
Next up, using the right language. This point has a couple of facets to cover because on the one hand we’re talking about using language that supports conversion copywriting principles, and on the other hand we’re talking about using language that builds brand awareness, trust, and rapport by reflecting your brand’s unique tone of voice.
So what does the “right” language look like from a copywriting perspective? This is a huge question, because obviously conversion copywriting is it’s own entire discipline that you could spend years studying and it can’t really be boiled down into 5 simple rules or whatever. So my best advice here is to work with a conversion copywriter who has this stuff down pat and understands not only what words to use but also how to structure messages on a page and across different pages to optimally support conversion flows. However, if you’re determined to DIY, then the most important thing to remember is to keep it customer centric. In other words, make sure that every word, every sentence is easy for your customer to understand and helps them answer the top question running through their mind of “What’s in it for me?”
Now the other facet of language is tone of voice. Another mammoth topic that I can’t really do justice to in a short podcast segment, so I might actually just record a full episode on just this aspect in the future. Essentially, you need to craft a unique brand tone of voice that reflects your brand values and becomes a recognisable voice that your audience can relate to. This makes all the difference between brands that all sound the same (ever come across a unique sounding lawyer?) and brands that are distinct and memorable. But how you actually do this – and do it well – is something I’ll cover in more detail in a future episode.
3. Usability
So incredibly many websites have a ton of usability issues that quickly kill conversions. I once audited a site with disappearing menu items, where a menu item would disappear when you clicked on it, and it made it crazy hard to navigate the site because it seemed like you were being sent around in circles and you had no clear overview of where the heck you are on the page. And I could give you thousands of examples of poor usability just like this. In many cases, poor usability is born from a good intention of making a site particularly unique or interesting, but it has the opposite effect if it violates our expectations and goes against established conventions. So I’d urge you to fight the temptation of sacrificing clarity in a bid to be overly fancy – it almost always backfires, and the good ole proverb of “if you confuse them, you lose them” always holds true.
So what are the most common usability issues?
Think stuff like:
- Too much complexity
- No clear customer path
- No clear calls to action
- Broken links
- Missing Information
- Unintuitive navigation
- Unclear Marketing Fluff
So perhaps an example when we think about the last one here – the “unclear marketing fluff,” it’s stuff like “Music, meet home” which is a phrase that says absolutely nothing to anyone, whereby a much clearer and effective value proposition would be actually telling the audience what your thing does and why it’s cool, like “The world’s leading speaker system: Play any song in any room from any phone.”
Because the last thing you want is to make your audience guess what you’re even offering, but that’s a shockingly common reality. And I guess it often comes down to our own inability to un-know what we know, and to recreate the state of mind of the uninitiated, so we think something makes complete sense when really it’s anything but. So a good way to deal with this messaging thing and with the other usability issues is getting a second, third, fourth, even, set of eyes to look over your website, your customer journey, your messaging and to find the gaps in your logic or clunky usability issues. Because when it comes to actual living, breathing, customers, they won’t bother. The minute your website or content isn’t smoothly helping them along their customer journey, they’ll bounce. And rightly so.
Ok, enough about usability. Let’s chat about the next principle of CRO which is trust building.
4. Trust building
So we’ve talked about trust from a search engine perspective, and really, when it comes to CRO we’re looking at fairly similar things. Except this time we’re trying to persuade a human that we’re trustworthy whereas for SEO we’re trying to persuade an algorithm that we’re trustworthy.
But the way Google and co operate these days, the algorithm requirements are very closely aligned to the human experience. So trust from a SEO perspective is actually quite similar to trust from a CRO perspective.
So let’s take a look at what kind of trust building elements help your customers across the line to the point of conversion.
And I guess we can roughly categorise these into qualitative and quantitative trust builders.
Quantitative trust builders are pretty binary – either you have them or you don’t. And having them in place will help you immensely in increasing your conversion rate because it reduces your customers’ perceived risk in engaging your product or service. So this includes stuff like:
- Having your contact information easy to find across your website, like on your about page and in the footer of every page. This shows your audience that you’re a real, legit business and not some internet scammer.
- It also includes things like displaying ratings and reviews – preferably from a third party app like Google Reviews – to show prospective buyers that other, past clients who put their trust in you were satisfied
- Then we’ve got stuff like displaying the logos of credible professional bodies you’re a part of to, again, cement your credibility and show your prospective customer that you’re not some sort of gung-ho cowboy masquerading as a professional
- And lastly there’s just the general impression of your site as a whole. Does it look professional? Does it make you look trustworthy? Does it show a level of dedication to your business that reflects the level of dedication your customer expects from you? Or is it sloppy and riddled with spelling mistakes, where the customer can assume you’d conduct their project with the same lack of attention to detail?
These are all the kind of quantitative trust builders you can look at, where you can assess your site with a type of checklist to make sure you’ve got all that stuff covered.
But then there’s also the qualitative trust builders, and I guess the main thing in this category is really your policies and guarantees. Where you can really score a lot of points with your audience if you lower their perceived risk of doing business with you. And that can look very different depending on your product or service, but it includes stuff like having a free trial or at least a demo if you’re a SaaS business, or some sort of satisfaction guarantee if you’re a service based business. Or even guaranteeing certain metrics that you know you can meet like increasing your client’s XYZ KPI by x-percent in such and such a timeframe or they get their money back. And all of this qualitative stuff needs to be super closely aligned with your brand storytelling messaging approach, where you’ve identified what the objections are at the point of conversion and you’re so familiar with your audience’s state of mind that you know exactly what kind of guarantee or risk reversal strategy will be most effective to get them over the line.
5. Effective copywriting
Effective copywriting is all about applying the right persuasion principles to make your words strike a chord with your customer. So although much of this comes down to your message itself, which is the brand storytelling part, how you package that message into words and sentences will make a huge difference in how effective it actually is.
Because even if you have the best messaging strategies, and you know exactly what to say and to whom, if you then say it in a way that’s boring or simply uninspiring, people are unlikely to listen. And this is super common. I think we’ve all been to more than enough websites where we didn’t even have the chance to fully take in the message because the words already put us to sleep before we could even fully assimilate them into a coherent message in our heads. One of the biggest culprits here is dry, corporate language, using third person, or droning on about the company and how great it is without tapping into the audience’s pain points, interests, or emotions.
But another – possibly equally bad – culprit is copy that simply looks “hard” to read. Like when you land on a page and you’re greeted by a wall of text that just instantly goes in the too hard basket. You probably won’t even start reading if it looks dense and difficult, even though it may be the most engaging copy with the most compelling messages. So to avoid this instant turn off, make sure you use elements of eye relief to make the copy look easy. That doesn’t mean everything needs to be distilled down into meaningless little soundbites (remember “music meet home”?), instead it means using formatting elements strategically and breaking your copy into clear and digestible modules that build on each other so people can read as little or as much as they like and still get a really solid idea of your message.
So when you think about modular content, what that really means is distilling your message into it’s most compact essence – your core value proposition – and leading with that. Turning that into a headline, for example, to immediately capture people’s attention. Then once you’ve got that attention, your next job is to keep that attention, word for word, section for section. Because the reality is, people NEED to read your copy to grasp your message. And people need to grasp your message to buy into what you’re offering so that they convert. So it’s a huge mistake to simply cut out 90% of your copy with the excuse that “people don’t read”, because that’s simply not true. People DO read, and people NEED to read before the’ll buy from you. People don’t read boring and uninspiring stuff. So the job of your modules of content is to build on each other and layer in messages, trust builders, proof, emotions, stories, all that good stuff that keep people hooked and engaged until they’ve had the chance to take in your message and make an informed decision.
So after your headline, which has hopefully grabbed your customers’ attention, your next module will be some sort of intro copy that answers questions like:
- what problem do you solve and for whom
- What is your product or service and how is it different / better than the current solution
And then, once you’ve clarified those basics, it’s time to layer in some proof like showing logos or reviews of past clients similar to your audience to show them A) you’re trustworthy, and B) they fit your persona definition. In other words, you’re well qualified to help them because you understand them and you’ve done it before.
Then you can move onto a further module that outlines some core benefits, and you can even break this up visually by using bullet points or a slider even. These bullets should be clearly differentiated from your competitors and contain proof points underneath like features or stats that backup your claims.
Next up you can include further modules like use cases or case studies, a how it works section, and of course a compelling CTA.
And for each module of course you’ll want to use clear signposts like headlines, sub headlines, paragraphs, bullet points and design elements to guide your users through the content and see what they need to see – and at the right level of detail – without getting bored or overwhelmed.
Because when you structure your messages across your page like that, and use compelling copy to bring those messages to life, then you’ll keep people’s attention long enough to get that all important buy in, and you’ll vastly increase your chance of conversion.
Right, moving on to the last conversion principle I’m going to cover today and that is effective design.5.
6. Effective design
Now, when we think about effective design, many people think it needs to be fancy, unique, or have all the bells and whistles. But when it comes to maximising your conversion rate, that stuff is actually quite counterproductive in most cases. Because fancy design tends to have a major flaw in that it violates people’s expectations in a bid to be different. And you can probably imagine what that does to usability.
Countless CRO studies and A/B tests have found that the top converting websites are those that conform nicely to people’s expectations of what a website should look like and how it should be navigated. The good old menu along the top, 5-7 pages, each with a clear and unique purpose, content presented in a centre column that doesn’t run too wide, a large enough font that you don’t have to squint at your screen, and something that’s just all around easy and intuitive.
So instead of trying to make your site as aesthetically pleasing as possible, or as unique as possible, ask yourself how you can make it as functional as possible. If you’re not sure just how functional your site is, it’s – again – perhaps a good idea to get some test guinea pigs to carry out certain tasks on the site for you and offer their feedback, or you can do things like watch user tests or eye tracking studies to see how people navigate a site and then use wireframing and prototyping tools to improve your own site’s layout based on your insights.
Wrapping up
Whoa, ok – that was a LOT to cover in a quick and dirty run down of topics that could easily become an entire season of episodes each, but I guess my aim today was just to really show you how all this stuff fits together.
How you need to think about SEO principles so your messages are even found.
And how you need to think about conversion principles to make your messages as effective as possible, even though the brand storytelling approach still sits at the heart of those messages.
But that once you consider all three together, so SEO, brand storytelling as a messaging strategy, and CRO, you can create this powerful feedback loop that really gives you a competitive edge because when you convert a higher portion of your traffic, you can afford to invest more in marketing because your marketing is so much more effective, so you can start to spin this flywheel that will ultimately see you gain more market share and end up with a bigger piece of the pie.
That’s how they work together. And if you’re missing one of the cogs of this well oiled machine, the rest will have to work so much harder, or the whole thing just falls apart. Which, of course, is the last thing you want, especially when you’re investing so much effort into the things you’re already doing.
Alright guys, I hope that was helpful, and I hope that if you’ve been neglecting any one of these strategies, I’ve given you a nudge in the right direction and inspired you to look at those weak links in your marketing chain so you can patch it up and build a strong, positive feedback loop.