I’ve written briefly before on why the practice of SEO should be viewed as a double edged sword but I’ve been asked to expand on the subject and so I thought I’d share my most recent thoughts while trying to respect the requests from my readers to “keep it simple”.
What is Your Business Website For?
Let’s begin with asking our selves some pretty straight forward questions. The answers are also pretty straight forward but in the endless pursuit of increased web traffic it’s easy to loose sight of these truths.
Question: What is the purpose of your businesses website? – What is it for and why does your business even have one?
Answer: It’s likely that the whole reason for your website to exist, is one or more of the following.
- To engage with your websites’ browsers effectively (BTW I prefer to call these people, “potential customers”) which results in them making a purchase.
- To engage with and provide information to potential customers in such a way to reach out to your company and make contact regarding a potential purchase
- To engage with existing customers, highlight new and additional purchasing opportunities or in other ways service their ongoing needs
Which ever of these three applies to your business model one thing becomes immediately clear, the primary purpose of your business’ website is to engage with people.
Think about this for a moment. That means it’s job is to reach out into the void of cyberspace and make connections with real people, your existing and potential customers, to effectively make the case for why you are the answer to their individual needs. And so it follows that everything we do to and for your website should be in an effort to better achieve these goals.
What is SEO?
OK I know we’re doing this in baby-steps but stay with me for a moment. SEO or search engine optimisation is the practice of making alterations to your website in order to achieve a higher rank in the search engines results pages (SERP).
You’ll notice that definition above makes no mention of “customers” or “engagement” or even “increased sales”. SEO is exactly what it says on the tin, it’s Search Engine optimisation. In other words it makes your website more appealing to search engines.
The Logic Seems Simple, But It’s flawed
The trouble is that search engines don’t buy garage doors, commercial photography, vehicle blinds, PA services, same day couriers or any of the other services that are offered by my customers. (This is SEO in action, see the explanatory footnote below)
And so making changes so to appeal more to search bots can be counter productive, because often those changes make the website less appealing to real people.
As a result the newly SEO’d website can become less effective at connecting with the people who view it. It’s true that the overall numbers of organic visitors may be increased, but when this is done in ways that compromises your website’s primary purpose, fewer visitors are inspired to connect with your company and eventually become customers.
Conversion Rate Not Visitor Numbers Is The Key To Commercial Success
The ratio between the numbers of visitors who browse your site and the number of people who then go on to become your customers is known as your site’s “conversion rate“.
The conversion rate is king! Apart from perhaps profitability, conversion rate is the only measure of success that should concern the owner of a business website. I’m of the opinion that you can get everything else right, but if you get the conversion rate wrong, your business will not thrive.
Understanding this helps us to put the role of SEO into perspective.
Keep in mind that Organic traffic is not the target. When people say to me that they want more web traffic, I remind them what they’re really looking for, is more customers. Traffic levels are a means to this end.
I suspect that an increase in sales and lead generation is the real commercial goal for your company and this can be most effectively achieved, (particularly with small and medium sized firms working with limited budgets) by employing a combination of tactical measures, traditional heavy handed SEO techniques such as keyword driven content changes are just one way of skinning this particular cat.
Total Website Optimisation – A New Approach To SEO
Lets now talk about how things should be done. Strategic measures that can be employed that will not put your current conversion rate at risk.
For example, in many case improvements could be made to a website just by re-ordering the way that pages are stacked and sections of content are arranged in relation to one another. This improves the end user experience because most people prefer websites that are laid out in a naturally intuitive and logical way. It makes it easy to find things and so it’s less likely that they will move on elsewhere. Importantly, search-bots behave a bit like this too – When we make a website easier for search bots to crawl, they spend more time doing it and so there’s a greater chance that a higher portion of your site will get indexed.
Further benefits can be delivered by harnessing the power of social networks. Today, proper integration with and association to business pages on social networks are a ranking prerequisite. Social measures also increase your company’s overall reach and compliment your other forms of marketing and the potential traffic gain for your website, grows exponentially with each new share on social media. Be imaginative with you postings, because creating new and unique content is not only good for your social presence, it’s great news for your website too. Search-bots love new content.
If changes do need to be made onsite they should be undertaken with the lightest of touches so that the readability and presentation remains virtually unaffected. Too often page content is blindly hacked into, on the recommendation of a SEO analysis program. Smart as they are, these programs have no appreciation for the concept of salesmanship.
When everything’s in order onsite, some off-site measures like back-linking can help a website to rank higher but be careful because only the right type of linking will help and the wrong types can actually cause you to fall down the rankings. Backlinkng is most effective when deployed as part of a wider and co-ordinated effort on several fronts.
Choose your battles carefully and understand your sites visitor flow.
Within the numbers, there lies your website’s story so take some time to try and understand it properly. A detailed examination of your site’s analytic will help you to identify areas of current strength. This is useful because instead of a scatter gun approach you can concentrate your resources to those areas which need most. Couple this with reliable keyword research and it’s possible to make pretty good predictions on the return on investment.
Understanding your site’s visitor flow will also help see any problems if they exist, such as pages where browsers exits your domain on mass. This tells you something is wrong here, something is turning them away. Often this hints at something minor such as a link not being prominently enough but could suggest technical problems or even hacking issues.
By better managing the traffic that you already have instead of chasing a false promise of high rankings above all else, you will help your business to get the most from your business website.
Written by Jon Odley Web designer & SEO strategist
You must be logged in to post a comment.