Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - A Misunderstood Topic
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Often when meeting new clients I ask them about their goals with SEO. Typically I am answered with something along the lines of "I want to be ranked number 1 in Google under the category Alaska (insert your company service here)". Now that's a lofty goal, and yet in all honesty probably not attainable.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which in the internet world simply means making your site readable by the search engines. Less challenges in their ability to read your links and deep links means that you will more success being indexed by those search engines. The perfectly executed site however does not guarantee placement. In the days gone by perhaps, but in today’s world, you will find yourself hard pressed to compete with others in your field based on keyword alone. You need a niche concept which is searchable by the public, trendy and current, and a clean site, structurally speaking. Even with all of these, your site needs tenure, relative content and great title tags. The rule of thumb is this "Design for your client first while keeping the search engine spiders in mind". So a basic text site although spider-able by the search engines is probably not going to win you any new clients. Remember that bad content is NOT better than no content.
Being number 1 in your preferred search engine isn't a goal in the current SEO market. Not only is it short sighted, but it lacks what you are really after. In our world, we use the term "conversion" as often as any other, and your goals should directly relate to those conversion rates. Consider your business plan for a moment. You probably didn't write a business plan which says "I want to make a million dollars" right? You simply wouldn't have received any real interest if you tried to present that to a loan officer because it lacks focus, method, and relative information. You probably presented something more along the lines of "I want to provide a specialized service in a niche market while still serving the greater market in general". Conversion is a lot like this.
Conversion is a focus of visitor interaction to achieve a specific goal. So if your ultimate goal is to make more money, then your focus conversion might be something along the lines of creating a funnel from your pages to the final processed checkout in your shopping cart. If you are a service company, the focus might be to funnel them through your site with the intention of having them either call or fill out an online request for services. The point where they do this end item becomes your "conversion". So the next time you talk with your SEO company, keep these in mind when telling them what you want from your experience.
This raises the question, how do you go about judging your return on investment with a SEO company? In short, analytics. Analytics will tell you the story, but one must remember that analytics can also be misrepresented to make bad things sound good and vice versa. To provide an example, If I said that you had 10 visitors, and 2 of them purchased goods via your website, it might sound great right? But your goal was not only to just sell things, but perhaps sell certain things (those T-shirts you've been storing for summer sales) or perhaps expand your market. A 20% conversion may be how a SEO company presents this, but if you were after a 20% ROI on NEW clients (absolute new), and the clients purchasing were in fact repeat customers (shopper loyalty), then your ROI was 0. So just remember that statistics can tell you a lot, but they can also be misleading. If you don't understand what you are being presented with, ask the questions before assuming things are working the way you hoped.
I'll present more on Search Engine Optimization in future articles to help you make the most out of SEO and Analytics. |
