It’s easy to get wrapped up in an Search Engine Optimisation campaign, paying more attention to keyword ranking and traffic levels than to the actual reason for an Search Engine Optimisation campaign – increasing traffic levels to improve profits. As a symptom of this, some pages tend to concentrate more on whether they appeal to search engine spiders than whether the visitors produced by your Search Engine Optimisation campaign will find your site as useful.

Profits And Sales

The visitors to a page are the people that will ultimately determine how profitable it is. An appealing design, well written and informative content, and interactive features will naturally help to increase promotions and improve profit potential. Yes, it’s important to drive traffic to the site in the first place, but it’s equally important to optimise a page for human visitors.

Combining Search Engine Optimisation And Conversion Optimisation

Strictly speaking, Search Engine Optimisation pays no heed to visitors and their online experience as long as they arrive, and instead concentrate on bots and spiders. A good Search Engine Optimisation campaign, though, will never lose sight of the fact that human visitors are the eventual population of your website. Search engines aim to ensure that they provide links to pages that offer a beneficial experience to visitors, so there is certainly no reason why the two cannot be combined.

Don’t Forget Your Human Visitors

Search Engine Optimisation is a beneficial method of generating traffic for your web pages, however, it’s important not to forget that humans are your ultimate visitors. Combining Search Engine Optimisation and content that is optimised for human visitors is certainly achievable and should always be encouraged to improve conversions. As a side effect, the better the quality of the content, the more likely that you will build organic links too.

To businesses, the bottom line is everything and improving profits, revenue,
and positive brand awareness are the most important goals in SEO or any form
of marketing; be it online or offline marketing. While it’s impossible to guarantee
results or even to give a pinpoint accurate prediction of the effect that an
SEO campaign will have, it is possible to benchmark, set some viable Key Performance
Indicators, and then measure and track the performance of an SEO campaign.
From there it is also possible to accurately compare this to any other marketing
that a business might employ.

Generating Traffic

The immediate goal of an SEO campaign is to generate traffic and while many
marketers and even SEOs get hung up on measuring how high a site ranks, the
ranking is not where the profit lies. Being ranked top for an uncompetitive
keyword is useless if it generates no traffic. In contrast, being ranked second
or third for a highly competitive keyword can still generate a large amount
of traffic and of course it means that you’re only one or two places off having
the top position in the search results.

Business Goals

While traffic is the goal of SEO it’s unlikely to be the ultimate goal of
the business or website owner. This traffic needs to convert into hard sales
and generate revenue. Search engine traffic has the advantage that it can generate
very active and highly targeted visitors to a website but only if a site ranks
highly for the right keywords. For this reason it can certainly prove beneficial
to take a hit in traffic figures if it means more conversions, a greater average
visitor spend, and improved overall profits.

Determining SEO Efficiency

To determine whether an SEO campaign has been truly effective, you should
not only track the total amount of visitors to a website but also the activities
of those visitors. Websites that are built around directly making profits by
selling advertising or offering affiliate links have the luxury that they can
change their “products” or serve different links in the event that they drive
traffic. A business website is quite different and keywords need to not only
ensure a good level of traffic, but they need to be targeted to the business
and the product itself.

Measuring Business Success

SEO is one part of measuring the success of a business online but it isn’t
the only indicator of that success. It will help to drive traffic when done
well, but it can also improve profits and generate greater revenue if it is
done well and integrated into a business plan properly. It can also be used
hand in hand with other marketing techniques to generate even greater sales.

Many Internet marketers get easily wrapped up in how highly a page ranks for
a particular search term when they should, in fact, be looking at the bigger
picture. If the traffic is unresponsive and fails to make any money for the
business then it is pointless even having the visitors in the first place.