Are you like so many other business owners, suffering from SEO tunnel vision?
It's a common ailment, something I run into on almost a daily basis - where business owners understand that there is a reason, and a really good one at that, to hire an SEO consultant for the purpose of driving more traffic to the website - BUT, and this is a big but, and why it's an ailment... focusing on this one piece alone can actually be deadly - to your bottom line, your sanity, and your ROI.
Here are 5 reasons why you need to do more than increase website traffic to acheive your performance goals.
Professional SEO Services will only get you halfway there:
I get why you do it... why you insist on focusing so much time and energy on increasing traffic to your website. It's an easy goal to measure, and sales is a numbers game - always has been - so the more traffic you drive, the better you do at the end of the day, right?
But what if I were to tell you that thinking along those terms is actually counter-intuitive? ... that increasing traffic in a vaccuum could actually hurt your bottom line?
It's true, and here's why.
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1. Not everybody visiting is ready to buy... today
I challenge you to think of a time when you were on the market for a service or high-value product, and after a simple Google search, you were hitting the "buy-it-now" button or signing up for a consultation that led straight into the sale. It doesn't happen all that often, if ever, does it? We're smarter than that... We've also been burned a few times, and recognize the value of due diligence.
A lot of the time when we're still in the Google phase today, we're looking for answers to our problems... in a sense, we're still trying to diagnose what's really wrong with us or our business, so we turn to the internet to find answers. That doesn't mean we're not good candidates to buy from those who help us solve our quandaries - it just means we're not good candidates to buy at that specific moment in time.
So, instead of letting those traffic blips fade off as nothing more than... well... blips - why not spend some of those marketing resources on setting up lead-capturing mechanisms?
I recently had a client try to box us in and focus 100% on increasing traffic, so they could reach their goal of generating 100 leads per month. At their existing lead conversion rate of 1%, that meant we'd have to push their monthly traffic from 1,000 visits to 10,000 visits or 1,000%... And they wanted to do it in 12 months. - a tall order, right? Given the budget constraints, it was a REALLY tall order, so I started talking about ways to capture leads outside of the Contact Us form or the "buy-it-now" button. What if we could convert 3% of our visitors into leads? ... or 5%? That would mean we only need 2,000 visitors to the site every month to achieve our goals - a MUCH more attainable target, especially in 12 months... especially with their budget constraints.
2. Numbers on a report don't actually guarantee that human beings were there
There are bots out there trying to scrape your site for data, so you can be cold-called (ugh), and they may show up as traffic. There are also bots out there clicking on your PPC ad campaigns.
The point is that a traffic report delivered in a silo doesn't tell a full story - just one aspect - and it may be grounded in falsehoods.
What's more important... blips or cash?
3. Visitors need more compelling reasons to convert these days
Your "buy-it-now" button and contact us forms are pretty low in the sales funnel, so getting there can be daunting if you're not nurturing your prospects at a much earlier stage. And it's hard to nurture folks who don't become leads, so we must find ways to convert our website traffic by way of content offers that the public finds to be valuable and interesting.
These types of transactions will earn you the lead while engaging them to your process and business philosophies.
4. It's possible to do more with less
It's also possible that less is more, because if you stop spending so much time and resources on the sole goal of driving more website traffic, you may end up pushing away some of the riff-raff in the process.
5. Unreasonable traffic goals often lead to short-cuts that bite back
How do you suppose we could boost traffic to a site from 1,000 per month to 10,000 per month in a year? Blogging and social media come to mind, but they would have to be at a pretty high rate to make that kind of progress... certainly higher than what this budget allowed.
How about link farms or other black-hat methods of SEO? Yep, that's usually what folks resort to when nothing else seems to work. And it can be "effective" even with the algorithms Google and friends have in place to penalize mechanisms like that... that is, if by "effective" you mean, the blips show up on your report. But again, if you want human beings on your site, this may not be the best way to go. Also, when Google finds out what you're doing, you may end up on THEIR DNC list, wherein you'll watch your traffic go from hero to zero in the blink of an eye.
For your sake, please stop the madness!
SEO is important. Traffic is important. Yes, yes, yes... but when we look at this as purely a numbers game, you're approaching this with a very old-school mentality. It reminds me of my years in B2B sales, wherein I cold-called businesses every day. Management would have us focus purely on volume, and as the economic landscape became more challenging and the digital landscape became more prominent, cold-calling became harder and harder.
Through all of that a new breed of salespeople emerged as the top performers - remember? And suddenly, it was less about making 50 to 100 calls in a day, but about making quality calls to quality sources - sources found and connected to in social platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. (I know some of you still struggle with this, so check out this post to learn more about why you need to get social with your selling).
Maybe the problem is that you're still thinking in those terms - that it's purely a numbers game and not one of quality or connectivity.
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