SEO Not Working?
“If someone is going down the wrong road, he does not need motivation to speed him up. He needs education to turn him around” Jim Rohm
Why SEO Improves Traffic But Not Sales
Business Owners Perspective:
First, you thought you needed to get more traffic to your website and so you found a SEO company to help. You hired the SEO consultant because, as an entrepreneur, you thought that if you get more traffic to your website, you will get more sales.
You recognize the importance of “optimizing” your website so that you show up at the top of Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines but later realize that something with the SEO is not working.
If your website shows up higher in the rankings, that should mean more visitors and more profits…
First page rankings will not help you unless your webpage can monetize the traffic and convert them into sales. If your website has not first been tested and proven to convert the traffic into sales, SEO will never work. The same is true with keywords, not all keywords generate conversions.
This is the stage where most people begin to think that SEO is a scam.
The SEO Side
The SEO side of the story often puts the blame on you, your brand, marketing, website or some combination in between. But as the SEO “expert” they never mentioned any of that when they were trying to sign you up for their services. Often times, the SEO will tell you that you only need to
“Give it more time”
As a business owner, when you hired the SEO firm to help you build an online presence and paid them to market your business, you expect the SEO to tell you how to do it correctly with a realistic time frame to see a return. SEO however is not really marketing, at least not marketing to humans.
The perspective that an SEO firm can provide is typically from a very limited view point. They know how to make your website look good to computers that run off of algorithms such as Google, Yahoo and Bing spiders.
What looks good to computers is not necessarily what looks good to people.
People are the customers. Not computers.
Therefore, SEO begins to increase traffic but you see no improvement in sales. You may be lucky and have your website on the first page of Google with lots of traffic and yet still no customers to show for it. The SEO reports look great, yet there is no ROI or increase in your bottom line.
How doe you get people to buy or contact you online?
Before humans buy something, they first experience a need or problem, this is when they first enter the sales cycle. First, the customers researches and evaluates their situation to find a solution to their pain point. Your customers are looking for specific information called “buying criteria” and once this criteria has been satisfied, they will make the purchase. However, before they pick up the phone or complete the transaction, they must trust they will get what they need to solve their problem and that your business is the best solution.
On websites, there are 5 actions that must happen before your website visitor will convert into a customer:
Those actions are tracked through conversion metrics and must be achieved in this order:
1) Click-thru-rate (CTR) – CTR represents people clicking to your website. You must have some traffic to your website that are from qualified visitors that are looking for a solution to their problems or buying motives.
2) Bounce Rate – This is how quickly your visitor hits your website and then leaves your website. The quickest way to improve results is to focus on the visitors that are leaving your site without taking action.
3) Time on Page/Site – These 2 metrics determine how long your visitor stays on your website. A website that has at least a 5% conversion rate will have average time on page/site starting at at least 2.5 minutes.
4) Steps into Website Sales Funnel – these are the steps users must take right before they will do one of the following: complete a shopping cart purchase, submit a lead form request/signup, or pickup the phone and call your business.
5) Completed Calls To Action (CTA) – These are the actions of completed goals.
Funnel Science MY SEO
All SEO campaigns first start with the selection of keywords. But what if you choose the wrong keywords? How will you know if the keywords will be from actual customers or from sales people looking for businesses to call on?
What if you get more traffic from links that bring visitors that are only information seekers and never result in a sale?
What if your customers don’t use social media to buy your type of services; should you also be spending time marketing your business on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn?
There are many other “what ifs” that must first be answered before your SEO will increase sales. These “what if’s” are addressed in the intial planning and strategy phase as you profile your customers.
If you feel that your SEO is not working and need help, give Funnel Science a call. Funnel Science specializes in helping SEO companies increase their clients website conversion rates.
Through a process of scientifically testing your brand, marketing, and website, Funnel Science is able to determine and predict the path that results in more sales.
Deploying analytics, multi-variate testing and statistical modeling, we continuously test and analyze how your customers engage with your brand, respond to the marketing and interact with your website. Then we build a better sales funnel that increases online and offline purchases.
