CU Innovative Marketing

Turning Browsers into Buyers with Increased Conversion through SEO
By: Aaron Howard

Do you have a lot of traffic to your website, but not a lot of buyers? Many business owners think that if they can just get floods of traffic to their website than all of their problems will be solved. Unfortunately this is not normally the case; traffic alone will not equal an increase in sales. It is important to take into consideration the type of traffic you are receiving. If your website sells garden hoses and you are getting traffic looking for gardening information, the likelihood of your making a sale is not very high. There are other factors that come into play as well, maybe your traffic is looking for garden hoses but when the come to your site they still do not make a purchase. This could be due to many factors, is it easy to find your products? Do the pages load quickly? Does your shopping cart appear safe? These are just some of the questions you will need to ask yourself before you can understand why your website may or may not be converting.

The first thing that your SEO professional will do is look at the inner workings of your site by running a series of reports. They will gauge the effectiveness of your keywords, your site design, and the tags within your site, the navigation, your shopping cart and the offsite promotion methods that you’re currently employ. It is only after a through analysis that a plan to repair the things that are impairing your conversion that you will see a raise in the ratio of buyers to visitors. Often times the content on your site may need a tune-up as well, having too little content or content that is not optimized for the search engines can hurt your conversion also. Many times your professional will use split testing, this is where two versions of content are rotated each time a user visits your site. Through careful testing it can then be determined what page makes the visitors want to buy your products or give you their information. Better response to your content leads to higher quality traffic and more revenue; this makes it easier to justify further promotion of your site and gaining additional traffic. It will then become more important to continue to test the elements on your site and track the results so that your revenue can grow.

SEO is a multifaceted endeavor with many variables that come into the overall picture. It is very important to use the proper methods, tools and testing to gain the most return on your investment. Proper implication of a long term plan can increase overall traffic, profit and ranking which all contribute to greater returns for your business.