Why "SEO conversion rates" for B2B probably don't make sense anymore

The death of "conversion rate optimization" for SEO traffic is upon us.

My client wants to do conversion testing on SEO pages 🤔

Here’s why I am against it

Because traffic intent is more important than running conversion tests.

I work with B2B SaaS companies selling expensive products. The purchasing paths are complex and “last touch” conversions don’t happen often.

Client request:

"We currently have a 0.5% SEO conversion rate. Let's run some tactical conversion testing. Increasing to a 1% SEO conversion rate would make a huge impact for us."

Every executive thinks like this. But here's why it's flawed:

You can't "create urgency" for enterprise buyers.

The "book a demo" CTA button is not hard to find.

If they wanted to book a demo, they would do it.

So why don’t B2B buyers convert directly on SEO pages?

1. They are not ready yet.

2. They don't convert on upper funnel content.

3. Majority of conversions happen later on the homepage or demo request page.

4. Bonus: In this new AI era, they won't even be visiting your SEO pages.

And that's why there's no such thing as an "overall" SEO conversion rate.

You can't lump all traffic intents together and call it a channel wide conversion rate.

Experimentation on BOFU pages could make sense

Instead, isolate your BOFU pages and see how those are performing.

Then, run experiments catered to BOFU traffic. This focuses on buying intent.

Otherwise, you are wasting time doing "conversion testing" that will never work.

AI will decrease the effectiveness of traditional landing page testing

And let's not forget about AI... as SEO traffic decreases, CRO becomes less effective.

If the answers are being provided to shoppers without them visiting your landing pages, you won't have much traffic to run experiments on.

True landing page optimization will therefore soon be relegated to paid search only

I think high intent PPC traffic is really going to be the only place that makes sense for vigorous testing against search traffic.

Homepage optimization will matter more than it used to

I’ve gotta shout out Siege Media’s homepage study here.

While AI Overviews and LLMs may be eating top-of-funnel search, they’re quietly boosting traffic to your homepage.

So if homepage traffic is positioned to grow, it makes sense to focus conversion optimization efforts on your homepage.

---