In SEO, Size Doesn't Matter

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If you were a traveling salesperson who sold software to SMEs, would you prefer 10 appointments in a day and no sales or five appointments and two sales? Of course you would choose the latter. Why then do so many people focus on SEO and traffic levels to their website while neglecting conversions?

This makes no business sense. In the scenario of the software salesperson imagined above, the company involved would spend time and resources qualifying leads and ensuring appointments were targeted and set up properly. In other words, they would look to set up the right appointments instead of simply setting up lots of them.

The same applies in SEO and digital marketing: It is not the size of the traffic that counts; it is how you convert it.

In fact, this goes to the very heart of business. Any successful business person will agree with the often quoted cliché that revenue is vanity but profit is sanity. Of course there is a link between revenue and profit, but focusing solely on revenue-and celebrating large revenue resultsâ€"without looking at profits is crazy.

SEO is no different. A website that has 1,000 visitors per month and a highly optimized conversion rate of five percent is better than a website with 10,000 visitors a month and a conversion rate of 0.1 percent.

You just have to do the mathâ€"the low-traffic website gets 50 sales a month, while the high-traffic one gets 10.

Of course the best option is to work on improving both traffic and conversions. All too often, however, SEO strategies ignore conversions. That's ludicrous.

SEO and Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Rate Optimization is the process of improving the percentage of visitors that convert on your website. This could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, sending a contact form, or any other positive action that you can track and that is important to your business.

SEO and Conversion Rate Optimization must work together. Inevitably, that means you will have less time or money to spend on SEO, which could impact on traffic levels, but that's okay. Size isn't everything.

Practical Tips

Here are eight practical tips you can use to modify your approach to SEO to make it more focused on conversions.

1. Search Intent

Review your current list of targeted keywords for search intent. All keywords fall into one of four search intent categories:

• Navigational
• Informational
• Commercial
• Transactional

Transactional are the most important for conversions, so these should dominate your list of targeted keywords. This should be followed by keywords with commercial search intent.

2. Know Your Top-Performing Keywords

You can use Google Analytics and other tools to discover the best converting keywords on your website. In Analytics, it involves setting up and tracking goals.

Once you know the top keywords, compare the list to the keywords that bring you the most traffic. Are they the same? Do you put more effort into the keywords that bring traffic over the keywords that deliver conversions? Is it worth changing this?

3. Know Your Poor-Performing Keywords

Identify the keywords with transactional search intent that your website gets traffic from but that don't have a good conversion rate. Try to find out why the conversion rate is so low. Is the call to action not strong enough? Does the page not offer enough information? Are there other barriers preventing users from converting?


4. Search for New Keywords

Use the Keyword Planner tool in Google AdWords to discover new keywords that have transactional search intent. These are keywords that you are not yet targeting but probably should be. You will probably find that many of the keywords are long-tail keywords, so they will have low search volume. On a pure SEO strategy, they may not factor because of the low traffic potential, but on an SEO and conversion strategy, they are ideal. This is because long tail keywords that have transactional search intent usually have a high conversion rate.



5. Review the Bounce Rate and Time on Page for Poor-Performing Keywords

Following on from the last point, review the bounce rate and time on site for the keywords that have transactional intent but a low conversion rate. If the bounce rate is high or the time on page is short, you should review the page's content.

6. Review Your Website's Bounce Rate and Time on Site

It is also helpful to review the overall bounce rate and time on site figures for your website. When aiming to increase conversions on a website, you almost always need the website to be sticky (i.e., visitors stay for a long time and look at more than one page). Is there anything you can do to improve either of these figures?



7. Analyze the Conversion Rate for Traffic From Other Sources

So far we have talked about conversion rates from organic search traffic. What about traffic from other sources though? How is that performing? You might find that when you run the numbers, SEO might not be the most cost-effective digital marketing strategy for your business. For example, you might get a better return from PPC advertising or social media marketing.



8. Review Your Website's Usability

This is the only one of the eight tips that is not about the numbers. Instead, it is about looking at your website like a visitor looks at it. Is it easy to find the information? Is the order and checkout process as simple and intuitive as it can be? Are the call to action buttons and links in the right place?

In general, see if there are improvements that can be made to your website that will improve conversions. After all, it is not easy getting visitors to go to your website. When they are there, you might as well make the most of them.

If you are familiar with SEO, you will see from the tips above that there is nothing radically different from a traffic-only SEO strategy. Combining SEO and conversion rate optimization simply requires a shift of focus and an alteration in priorities.
#matter #seo #size

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