“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.”

You’re all familiar with that famous quote, but I propose that from a web perspective we can bring the horse and ensure it quenches its thirst.

Not satisfied with merely delivering traffic to your website, the modern-day digital agency or SEO should concern themselves with converting traffic into sales/enquires/goal completions, thereby positively impacting the bottom line and subsequently justifying their continued portion of a business’s marketing budget.

It’s a model that seems obvious when you see it written down, but you might be surprised to hear that conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is not necessarily commonplace in digital offices around the country.

Problem being that some agencies are stuck in an archaic way of thinking, focussed exclusively on organic search rankings and visibility, engaging in offsite activity with the sole aim of boosting search positions and traffic.

Bully for you!

Don’t get me wrong, visibility and traffic are still vital cogs in the wheel, but those who content themselves with that are missing a trick and short changing their clients.

That’s because it’s widely accepted that Google now incorporates user experience (UX) data into its search algorithm for both desktop and mobile sites alike. So it’s time for online marketers to stop burying their heads in the sand.

In practise, this means metrics such as pogo sticking (immediately bouncing back from your site to the search results), overall time on site and page views have become essential measurement tools for business owners and search marketers alike.

In my eyes, it’s a step forward for the search space and will ultimately reward the websites that best satisfy user intent, one day resulting in a first page with only relevant sites that offer a smooth user interface and clean conversion processes.

A guy can dream!

And that’s where the challenge for us marketers lies. It’s our responsibility to educate clients to ensure they’re focussed on the correct KPI’s from the campaign outset.

The old adage of “the customer’s always right” doesn’t really stack up in this instance.

That thought process would only result in an awkward conversation 12 months down the line, at which point all the organic ranking improvements in the world counts for nothing when the marketing manager isn’t renewing your contract because they “just didn’t sell enough staplers”, despite increased traffic.

In its simplest form, a great cliché exemplifies the SEO mind shift that is required in 2015 and beyond.

It used to be said that:

Ranking is Vanity, Traffic is Sanity

Meaning that a focus on ranking number one for certain key terms may be folly, and businesses would be better served targeting users further down the buying cycle through long tail search while also concentrating on diversifying their traffic sources – thus reducing reliance on the mighty Google – through all manner of means, be it social, email marketing or content surfacing.

But today that should go a step further:

Traffic is Vanity, Conversion is Sanity

Not content with an increase in traffic, SEOs need to work with clients to ensure they’re funnelling relevant traffic to the key pages of client sites and ensuring they complete a desired action. Through deep analysis of user behaviour, search marketers should be working in tandem with clients to continually fine-tune the conversion process, regularly testing and optimising until we reach the desired performance levels.

We preach this to any clients who’ll listen, and some who won’t!

Those who buy-in enjoy improvements not only in search engine rankings and traffic but also in conversions.

It’s really a beautiful thing!

 

By Donald Macgregor, Director of Strategy at ATTERCOPIA. 

To hear more from Donald, join us at the Digital Marketing Show 2015 where he will be speaking about The 3-Step Process for Modern SEO! Book now for free! 

PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.

comments powered by Disqus