Traffic is Not the Most Important Thing!
When we get a new marketing client, the first impulse is to dig in and put together an overall plan to fix all of the search engine optimization issues their website has and build a powerful social marketing plan. You could spend many hours reviewing a website and coming up with dozens of changes about what words should be used, titles, layout, navigation as well as blog, Facebook, video and Twitter strategies, etc. But, that often begs the real question of “Can the site be effective?” The simple and often overlooked question is, “If I had traffic, would I accomplish my goal?” If you can’t answer “yes” confidently, then some testing is in order.
I’ve worked with a number of sites over the years where the answer was no. Maybe their product was priced too high or nobody really wanted what they were selling or wanted it in the manner they were selling it. In my opinion, those issues really need to be addressed before spending a lot of time and money on a search engine optimization or web marketing plan that will bring in a lot of visitors that you won’t convert.
The days of “build it and they will come” have mostly gone away. Now, with few exceptions, there are a number of providers of most services and products on the web, and differentiation is more and more difficult and challenging and requires a much more skilled approach than in days past. Driving traffic to a site today requires a good understanding of the on-page rules such as titles and keywords as well as the off-page rules such as anchor text and link quality. It also requires a strong attention to detail since computers don’t usually understand what you meant to do.
The real trick is conversion and this requires experience and technical skills. There are several web testing tools that work to evaluate multiple variations of a web presentation and track the results for each (such as Google Website Optimizer). Very often, the results can surprise everyone and I’ve yet to meet anyone who could consistently guess the results. Experience and rules of thumb are great and necessary for helping determine what needs testing and some likely variations to start with, but it is rare that the final results don’t come in different than expected or have a much larger or smaller impact than thought. We’ve seen simple things like brightening a link color or changing the color of a button double the conversion rate. In one case, moving a search box to the middle from the right side and removing a border increased conversion by over seven times (Google blog article).
It is pretty simple to put together a pay per click campaign to evaluate how a site will perform. While not perfect, you can certainly get enough information for a go/no go determination. If your conversion rate is unacceptably low, then that should be the primary focus rather than building traffic. If it appears the conversion issues can be easily solved, then a parallel effort at SEO and social marketing is worthwhile since those always take some time to be effective. If the conversion problems don’t have a clear solution, then that should be your only focus.
One additional reason to focus on conversion first is that your conversion rate can impact your SEO effectiveness. The search engines measure how often your link in the results is selected and how long a visitor stays on your site. If you have a high bounce rate, then SEO is going to be tough.
Related Articles:
Conversion Rate: What’s Your Website Tracking As A Conversion?