Conversion mistakes we’ve made. And how conversion affects SEO. With Rand Fishkin from Moz.

Photo of Rand and Karl
Learning from your mistakes is expensive. So learn from ours.

Below, you’ll find the slides and video from a webcast we co-presented with Rand Fishkin, the co-founder of Moz. Rand is one of the web industry’s most innovative thought leaders. His company’s values—embodied by the acronym TAGFEE—are well worth reading; they are bold and innovative. In addition to being an expert in search engine optimization (SEO), he has extensive knowledge of conversion rate optimization (CRO), having contributed a whole chapter to the first edition of Marketing Sherpa’s Landing Page Handbook.

Dr Karl Blanks is the co-founder of Conversion Rate Experts, a consultancy that has designed pages for more top-500 websites than any other company. He has the benefit of having grown almost every type of web business.

What you’ll get from this page

  • How CRO affects SEO. Many companies worry that CRO will damage their search-engine rankings. Rand explains how to increase your conversions whilst keeping—or even enhancing—your organic rankings. (The section “Does CRO mess up SEO?” which starts at 13:57 minutes is a must-see.)
  • Strategic and tactical mistakes that Conversion Rate Experts has made and seen when optimizing for conversion. It’s likely that your company is making some of these mistakes right now, and can easily fix them. The mistakes are
    1. The “Kaigai Keitai” Problem
    2. The Cinema-Foyer Effect
    3. Why returning customers cause noise
    4. Not having ADA on the project
    5. Switching to the beauty track (this section, starting at 37:25 minutes is a must-see)
  • Q&A: Rand and Karl answer the attendees’ conversion questions, most of which were about the SEO implications of conversion rate optimization.

The slides

The slides from the talk, some of which may be confusing without the audio (see the video below).

A video of the talk

A video of the talk.

The talk in podcast format

To download the audio of this talk, and others, subscribe to our podcast.

A transcript of the talk

This talk was converted into the following two articles:

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