Where to start? SEO or CRO to increase conversions

You have a website and want more conversions. Do you start with SEO or CRO?

I use the following model, especially when working with start-ups:

Do you have less than 1000 organic visitors per month? Start with SEO. Write blogs (about 20 to 50) and get visitors to your website. This way you create a baseline of traffic to your website, without having to spend a single euro on it. In the meantime you do also focus on making the journey to conversion work well on all major browsers (Safari, Chrome, IE, Firefox) and different devices - mobile and desktop.

More than 1000 visitors per month and a few (dozens of) conversions? Then you can start tweaking for a healthy conversion rate. Conversion Rate is 80% research and 20% experimentation. Easy research initiatives you can start with are installing a program like Microsoft Clarity (free!) to see session recordings and heatmaps and understand your users better. You can also verify designs with User Testing before you implement them (or try an A/B-test). It will still be interesting for you to do SEO or think about SEA.

More than 1000 conversions per month? Then a CRO experimentation (A/B test) program is possible. You can test what changes improve the visitors behavior and what doesn't.

Conversion ratio optimization (CRO) is something you start with when you've got all your basics right.