LPO and CRO Explained

Just when you thought you knew all the terms of internet marketing, they added a few new ones…

If you’re involved in internet marketing you know SEM, you live and breath SEO, you watch your CTR like a hawk, you know the importance of minimizing bounce rates, and do everything in your power to help your visitors progress through your sales funnel. So, here’s a question for ya. Have you ever heard of CRO or LPO?

What is CRO and LPO?

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a segmented form of web page optimization that focuses on a page’s ability to convert traffic. Conversions, which could potentially be any action deemed of value, are used as the core metric for making decisions on what to test and improve.

CRO is very similar to Landing Page Optimization (LPO), seeing as how their end goals are basically the same: to increase a page’s ability to convert.

How do they differ from SEO?

The biggest difference between LPO/CRO and SEO is where they are used in the conversion funnel. SEO is primarily concerned with ranking for targeted keyword searches by optimizing the content on your pages, link building and gaining high relevancy. It has its own conversion metric that you should be very familiar with: Click Through Rate (CTR).

Once a visitor has reached your landing page, your focus changes from getting clicks, to getting conversions through your Call-to-Action (CTA). This is where the switch to a more conversion-specific optimization plan could be utilized.

Think of SEO as getting more people to your website or landing page, and CRO/LPO as getting more people to take action once they’ve landed there.

Of course, this process is never just black and white. You’re going to have pages on your site that you don’t necessarily want indexed by search engines, (i.e. sales or squeeze pages, and other types of landing pages). In these cases CRO will be your main focus. On the other hand, you will have pages that will act more like gateways, or passages, that rank highly in search and have a larger organic footprint, where a solely SEO approach may work better.

The key is balance. You know your audience better than anyone, so keep their expectations and needs as priority #1 when it comes to testing and optimization of your web pages.

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