Why SEO is not the only issue
After a recent enquiry which is resulting in some work for us (hurrah!) I felt it necessary to write to expand people’s thinking a bit. Well, quite a lot actually.
Sometimes, people’s perceptions of SEO is simply about getting higher rankings for keywords (hopefully you’ve chosen those people are actually using?), maybe a bit of link building (but are they the right links) and getting visitors.
But is that it? Well, no. What matters more – getting 3000 visitors or getting 30 visitors to place orders, to buy, or to enquire into your services? It’s what we call Conversion Rate. I don’t intend to go into Conversion Rate Optimisation, because that’s not my area of expertise. For that see this excellent article below:-
http://www.deepripples.com/blog/a-taxonomy-of-optimization-from-seo-to-cro
What I do intend to do is make you realise that SEO can only work to increase sales, conversions, enquiries or whatever you measure the success of your web efforts by if you know your own business or organisation, so here’s some pointers.
- What is your core business? What would you like it to be?
- What is your target market, or desired group of people who will be using your site or your services?
- Does geographical position mean anything to your business or organisation? I.e. where will you be selling or where is your target market based?
- Do you know your competitors? Who do you think they are? How are you different to them?
- What is your Unique Selling Point – why should people come to you as opposed to your competitors?
You need to understand your own business or organisation before a website or SEO can ever do its job – else all you’re possibly going to achieve are visitors and not customer or enquirers.
It’s about getting the right visitors not just any visitors to you. And also it can help direct how you will go to your potential customer base, but that’s a post for another time!
