Why Do SEO?

Most business owners start of with the right intention. More rankings, leads to more traffic, leads to more sales.

Unfortunately, some where from the beginning some decent traffic to the middle stages of an SEO campaign the initial reason for doing SEO is forgotten. And that is making increased profits.

Why does this happen? The most common reasons include...
Being so happy about the increased traffic, the business owner over extends themselves rather than sticking to their initial SEO planning.
Trying to achieve high rankings on too many keywords for a single web page. This decreases target-ed traffic and sale conversion rates.
Deciding to take short cuts with there off site optimization campaigns. Not constantly testing to improve conversion rates on each and every sales page whether selling a product or service.
So here are some rules I tend to apply when getting any type of traffic to my sales pages. This too would include any pages where you want something to happen.

1. Define the goal of your pages.

It sounds very simple but very few businesses do it. What is the intended purpose of the page that you are putting work and effort into get it ranked?
Make a sale.
Sell a service.
Acquire a lead, subscriber, etc.
Sell advertising, Adsense, banner, etc.
Pre-selling and clicking through to an affiliate program.
General information/content pages for branding and building client relations.

2. Test to increase results.

SEO can increase traffic to a website however if the intended goal is not being achieved the task is pointless. Therefore testing must be carried out to make sure that your pages are achieving the goals at an optimal level that they have been built for.

Some averages on pages are...
Sales - 1%
Subscriptions - 20%

If you are not achieving such results, either your sales copy needs improving or you are targeting the wrong keywords for your page.

So how do you know which culprit it might be? Simply check your sites statistics.

Most hosts come with statistics packages although I do highly suggest installing google analytics on your website as is it comes with some very useful features.

By checking your statistics you can easily see what keywords potential customers are using to find you on the search engines. If most of the keywords suit that pages content then the sales copy and funnel must be reviewed.

If you are interested in testing software, shoot me off an email and I will give you the name of some good split testing software.

Reach For Return Of Investment (ROI) And Profits Not Traffic

In stating all the above I am trying to impart on you a mind set of income over traffic.

If you had the following two choices of tasks, which one you take?

a) 300 customers to 3 individual pages > stop SEO tasks to test > test until at a 2% sales rate is achieved on each page > $50 product x 2 (%) x 3 pages = $300 income > resume SEO tasks.

b) 300 customers to 3 individual pages > no testing with each page delivering a .5 % sales rate > keep doing SEO tasks > $50 product x .5 (%) x 3 pages = $75 income.

Yes, a forgone conclusion but amazingly enough the majority of online business owners would continue to carry out task b rather than fixing up their conversion rate.

In wrapping up... Set out clear goals for web pages that you are being search engine optimized, test to improve the pages goal and always remember that profit is the major goal overall, not getting more traffic.