People spend a lot of time and money getting their sites ranked highly in the search engines, but give little or no attention to converting their visitors into paying customers. Why? Usually because they wanted to get their rankings in place before working on their conversions.
This approach really does not make much sense – not only have they probably missed out on a number (maybe a lot) of sales while they were focusing on SEO – but the SEO and Conversion Optimisation processes and activities have a pretty high degree of overlapand working on them together is usually a much more efficient option.
People mistakenly think search engine optimisation is the one-step process of getting ranked highly on search engines. You “do” SEO and when you’re finished, like magic, your site is ranked highly.
In reality, SEO has numerous steps, all of which interlink with the foundation of your marketing plan. For instance, if you were creating an online marketing plan for a brand new site launch, your activities would almost certainluy include (amongst others) the following :
Good design
You would want a design that instills trust and confidence while reducing anxiety. Your site needs to promote a professional image
Effective Navigation
Clearly, you want it to be as easy as possible for visitors to find what they’re looking for. If they aren’t able to navigate the site quickly, they’ll get frustrated and very likely leave.
Good Copy
Just having words on your pages isn’t enough to connect with your visitors. You want specific copywriting about each product or service that entices, explains, convinces and converts.
Interestingly, these same three steps are also critical to developing a solid search engine optimisation strategy. If you complete the steps with SEO tunnel vision — without giving any thought to your visitors along the way — you may need to repeat everything you’ve already finished.
Creating an attractive, user-friendly design.
Often, sites designed strictly to rank highly in the engines skimp on the design process. You can have a site that’s at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) and gets a ton of traffic, but causes visitors to immediately click away due to lack of trust. If this is the case, you’ll need to change some or all of your design elements, which could possibly have a subsequent impact on your rankings.
Organising an effective navigation structure.
Some companies develop navigational structures specifically for the engines. They tell their clients to avoid cross-linking between certain pages or areas of the site so as not to “confuse” the search engines. Whether it confuses the search engines or not, if you want to make more sales, cross-linking and up-selling are excellent strategies that make it easier for your visitors to find — and buy — what they need. If you’re ranking highly but not making sales, it may mean you need to improve your navigation.
Writing persuasive copy that informs and sells.
Keyword-stuffed, third-grade-level copy that is repetitive and boring won’t make sales. If you’ve slapped up any old copy thinking you would improve it later, you may be in for a shock. Copywriting is a fundamental (but often neglected) element in search engine optimisation. Unless you’re having great success with a massive linking campaign, copywriting will play a major part in your rankings. Changing copy can (and almost always will) cause a
change (negative or positive) in positioning. If your copy is preventing your site from converting, it needs to be changed immediately even if that means a temporary drop in positioning.
Keep in mind that the search engines do not make your site successful. The search engines don’t buy anything from you. All they do is send traffic your way. Your site is what makes you money and it needs to be developed for your visitors first. By focusing strictly on SEO, it is likely you may be forced to change much of what you’ve built in order to improve conversions later on.
That means spending more time and money on something that could have been turning a profit much sooner.