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SEO vs user experience: which one actually drives conversions?
I keep seeing people stuff keywords into headings to please Google while the text becomes unreadable, but when I tested a clean, conversational page against an optimized one in a split test on my client's ecommerce site, the ugly one got 40% more organic traffic but the clean one had a 25% higher conversion rate, so which side are you landing on when the numbers fight each other?
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alex_coleman5d ago
Whoa, clean pages boost conversions, so screw the extra traffic if it doesn't pay the bills.
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caseyw125d ago
@alex_coleman makes a solid point there. But here's what I'm wondering - did you look at the quality of traffic from the SEO page versus the clean one? Like, were the people coming from Google bouncing right off, or did they actually browse around? Because that 25% higher conversion rate on the clean page could be because the visitors already knew what they wanted, while the SEO page was just pulling in random lookie-loos. Lower traffic that converts better often beats heavy traffic that leaves fast. Did you check session duration or pages per session between those two groups?
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