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Loading ...There are times when being at the top of the rankings for your chosen keyword is just not enough for your business. Your traffic rate might be the best it has ever been in your site’s history, but your business is at an all-time low. Something isn’t right.
This is when search engine optimisation seems at its most successful, but somehow isn’t doing its job. Bringing users to your site should be just part of the job of SEO. Although you may employ an SEO firm to boost your site’s ranking and bring in more traffic, if this is done at the cost of your conversions then the SEO work isn’t really done. As victims of black-hat SEO companies know to their loss, SEO methods can easily be used to boost traffic without providing value for users or for the site’s owners.
Experiencing low conversion rates despite a heavy traffic flow is a relatively common problem. It only becomes a real issue when it remains undiagnosed. Many companies get into trouble just after optimising their sites because their eye is on the traffic counter. Seeing a huge number of people going through the site without the site’s profits also rising can be a puzzling situation. The answer is to require more than one type of success from your SEO plan.
A high traffic rate/low conversion rate problem can be caused in a number of ways. The major keywords for the site may be slightly off-focus. The target users for the site may not be behaving in the way predicted when working them into the SEO plan. The internal structure may be putting blocks in users’ paths, making it too hard for them to use the site easily.
This last reason is possibly the most easily detected and fixed. In analysing your site immediately after your initial SEO, you should track users as they move through your site, measuring how long they stay on each page and where they exit from. If your users are clicking past the landing page, but don’t move very far into the site, or you see them backtracking at any point, your site’s structure may be causing problems. At this point it’s important to talk to your SEO consultant about changes you may need to make to the navigation of your site, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about this issue.
The other two problems are slightly harder to deal with. These problems occur when your chosen keywords are the wrong keywords. It sounds like a worst-case scenario situation, but being slightly off-focus with keywords can happen to any business very easily. For example, a computer repair business will naturally turn up ‘computer repair’ as a main keyword. Paired with the wrong supporting keywords, this could turn the site up in searches such as ‘how to repair your computer,’ attracting the wrong kind of user to the site. It might also be the case that target users are using unexpected keywords, such as ‘hardware repair’ in this case.
It takes a little more finesse to both detect and correct misfires with keywords. This is why analysis is so important immediately after your search engine optimisation has gone live. A little alteration to your keywords should not be completely unexpected, but should be done as soon as possible. Talk to your SEO consultant for the best approach to your site’s analysis.
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Tags: conversion rate, Keywords, Search Engine Optimisation, seo, web traffic
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The key point here is analysis of your data so that you can understand why this is happening. Many websites do not have a ‘measurable’ set up on their website and therefore can not measure conversion rates at all and have been misguided into believing that simply increasing visitor numbers will increase sales and the conversion measure being increased turn-over.
A successful website will have a conversion measure in place so you can accurately quantify conversion rates. This measurable can be anything, common examples include: downloading a free trial, subscribing to a newsletter or ideally a visitor buying something on your site. Your site should be designed to filter visitors towards this conversion and analysis should be set up so that you can see where visitors exit your site. If visitors are immediately bouncing from referral sites for example, it could be that some black hat, unethical SEO technique may have been used. However if the visitors are moving along the conversion filter and ‘bombing out’ at a particular stage, it maybe that that particular web page needs addressing. Perhaps the form does not work or it is too long and complicated for example.
Successful SEO is about maximising return on investment. There is no point on an SEO provider increasing visitor numbers if they can’t convert these to sales or strong sales leads.