Let’s face facts: our clients only care about SEO if it brings them business.
There are many times that we SEOs get hung up on search engine position and the ensuing traffic that should come from a top spot. This is all fine and good and is great for our own personal satisfaction, but what does position and traffic really do for our clients? The answer to this question is simply, absolutely nothing.
I have worked on many sites that I was able to get listed is some really choice positions in several large search engines. This position also generated quite a bit of traffic for each one of these sites day in and day out. The only problem with this comes with the client’s question, “If I have all of these hits, then why doesn’t anyone buy from me?” This is the point that I had a revelation; SEO doesn’t mean squadoosh without appropriate marketing strategies being implemented on the site.
There are a few important things that we forget when going about our SEOing on a client’s site.We forget that if the site is not appealing then their clients are not going to click to buy. We need to use a little psychology when helping a client out. Don’t be afraid to do a little research about the specific type of business that you are trying to promote. (other than just keyword research) I do this by asking myself a few questions.
· What colors drive the behaviors that this business needs? What I mean is red incites passion, and blue drives calmness, green sparks a thought of money. What does this business need to happen? A particular color scheme will really help drive the point of the site home.
· Have I made full use of a call-to-action in the title? I have found that the greatest response for a site is if the site title is set up as a call-to-action. If I can spark the interest of a potential client from the search engine content then I can definitely get them interested in the home page content.
· Does this business need products up front or would they benefit from a more detailed description of their service? Many businesses need to feature their products up front to drive a customer to an order section of the site, while other businesses need to properly describe their service to merely pique the interest of the reader.
These basic questions provide the opportunity to really focus concentrated efforts on conversion and SEO at the same time. Let’s be honest: our clients don’t really care about how many hits they are getting. They may ask about hits because it’s what we have trained them to ask, but the real issue is “How many customers are buying from me?” This is why focusing SEO in a way
that also touches customer conversion or marketing will ensure that your client will end up with a solid position in search engines and will be pleased with the number of conversions that they
receive from their site.
Once this is out of the way, I can start my normal process for SEO. Now, I know that some people may think that some of this is antiquated or more of the same but it does work none the less. I work the content to ensure that I have enough keyword saturation (and no, I don’t mean blast the page with keywords). Revising the content then leads me in to alt tags, text links, reciprocal links, and the same old stuff that we do day in and day out. To be honest I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel, I am only trying to make sure that each and every client becomes successful on the Internet and I think that many times we lose sight of that fact.
Now, I’m not saying that we all need to focus only on doing this or guarantee a certain amount of conversion for a client, but what I am saying is that by improving a client’s conversion rate we are simplifying the daily conversation, “You have blah, blah, blah, number of hits and that is great!”
At the end of the day, positioning in a search engine takes a backseat in our clients’ mind as long as we can bring them revenue from their sites.
There are many times that we SEOs get hung up on search engine position and the ensuing traffic that should come from a top spot. This is all fine and good and is great for our own personal satisfaction, but what does position and traffic really do for our clients? The answer to this question is simply, absolutely nothing.
I have worked on many sites that I was able to get listed is some really choice positions in several large search engines. This position also generated quite a bit of traffic for each one of these sites day in and day out. The only problem with this comes with the client’s question, “If I have all of these hits, then why doesn’t anyone buy from me?” This is the point that I had a revelation; SEO doesn’t mean squadoosh without appropriate marketing strategies being implemented on the site.
There are a few important things that we forget when going about our SEOing on a client’s site.We forget that if the site is not appealing then their clients are not going to click to buy. We need to use a little psychology when helping a client out. Don’t be afraid to do a little research about the specific type of business that you are trying to promote. (other than just keyword research) I do this by asking myself a few questions.
· What colors drive the behaviors that this business needs? What I mean is red incites passion, and blue drives calmness, green sparks a thought of money. What does this business need to happen? A particular color scheme will really help drive the point of the site home.
· Have I made full use of a call-to-action in the title? I have found that the greatest response for a site is if the site title is set up as a call-to-action. If I can spark the interest of a potential client from the search engine content then I can definitely get them interested in the home page content.
· Does this business need products up front or would they benefit from a more detailed description of their service? Many businesses need to feature their products up front to drive a customer to an order section of the site, while other businesses need to properly describe their service to merely pique the interest of the reader.
These basic questions provide the opportunity to really focus concentrated efforts on conversion and SEO at the same time. Let’s be honest: our clients don’t really care about how many hits they are getting. They may ask about hits because it’s what we have trained them to ask, but the real issue is “How many customers are buying from me?” This is why focusing SEO in a way
that also touches customer conversion or marketing will ensure that your client will end up with a solid position in search engines and will be pleased with the number of conversions that they
receive from their site.
Once this is out of the way, I can start my normal process for SEO. Now, I know that some people may think that some of this is antiquated or more of the same but it does work none the less. I work the content to ensure that I have enough keyword saturation (and no, I don’t mean blast the page with keywords). Revising the content then leads me in to alt tags, text links, reciprocal links, and the same old stuff that we do day in and day out. To be honest I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel, I am only trying to make sure that each and every client becomes successful on the Internet and I think that many times we lose sight of that fact.
Now, I’m not saying that we all need to focus only on doing this or guarantee a certain amount of conversion for a client, but what I am saying is that by improving a client’s conversion rate we are simplifying the daily conversation, “You have blah, blah, blah, number of hits and that is great!”
At the end of the day, positioning in a search engine takes a backseat in our clients’ mind as long as we can bring them revenue from their sites.
Aaron Smith
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