Figure 6
SEO is a very challenging investment to put your money into. If the SEO campaign you invested in returned a negative ROI, then it is considered a failure. What’s the purpose of initiating SEO if you are not getting a positive ROI?
Before blaming SEO, however, make sure your website is adding value for your customers. Consider SEO as just part of your overall sales pitch.
Improving your website’s value is hard. Especially when you have to come up with great headlines that visitors will notice and get them enticed. Some guidelines to creating website copy that will increase the value of your website for your visitors include:
Relevance is one factor that increases website value and depends on if the visitors to your site find what they are looking for. They won’t find your website valuable if you don’t provide what they’re trying to find.
One of the things that matters to consumers are the benefits they will get from you, so state them. As opposed to the traditional method of stating the features of your services, stating the benefits is effective marketing. Save the features for later.
Is there a problem that your business will help your customers solve? Write it in your website copy. The users that reach your website are probably looking for a solution to the problem they need help solving.
Key takeaways:
Figure 7: Image source from consummo.com
Conversion optimisation and search engine optimisation are different concepts. In order to see the fruitful efforts of your SEO campaign, you need to optimise your website for conversion. There’s a very thin line that separates SEO and CRO. One will optimise your website to drive more traffic to it, and the other one optimises your website to convert those visitors into customers.
As industry expert Kate Morris said in her post, “CRO and SEO: SEM Civil War”: “Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is simply focusing on the conversion as the core metric when optimizing any particular page.”
A search engine optimiser will usually know how to optimise your website for conversion if they are truly experienced. Nonetheless, it’s hard not to judge the effectiveness of your SEO campaign without optimising your website for conversion.
Failing to do so leads to false judgement as to whether or not your SEO is effective as some faults may lie with how the website treats its visitors.
Key takeaways:
Figure 8: Data source from chitika.com
According to online advertising network Chitika, having the top position in search results will give you 33% of search traffic.
This research proves the value of SEO for online businesses. Just imagine your website ranking with a keyword that is highly searched, resulting in say, 18,000 searches per month and your website receives 33% of that traffic every month.
While this provides great value to online businesses, ranking in top search results is not guaranteed.
As an SEO, traffic is one of my main goals as it opens the floodgates for conversions – assuming that your customers are satisfied with your services and you have great reviews, along with several other factors.
With that said; our main goal is to generate more traffic and then achieve rankings. It might sound in reverse but it’s true, and that is what makes our career more challenging.
The only way to do this is by adding value with each link we create. Remember that value is also quality, and in today’s SEO, quality is better than quantity.
Getting 12 links per month that drives traffic is more important than getting more links that only aim to improve rankings. Again, no one can guarantee you top rankings because of unpredictable algorithmic changes, but increase of traffic is always possible.
Key takeaways:
2014 has been an exciting time for SEO and it is now much more about quality than ever. Apply these tips and make the most of your online presence.
What are your thoughts about SEO in 2014? Add a comment below.
Scott Donald runs CreativSEO and has worked with successful start-ups and established businesses alike, helping them succeed online.
