Like many business owners, I’m jockeying for position to be number 1 on the search engines.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a huge buzz topic right now. So much so, I think it’s ‘jumped the shark’ from useful marketing tactic to magical elixir of business success. Everyone’s selling the secret sauce that will take you to the top of the search engines.
I’m making a call for sanity at this point.
Yes. I want to be number one on Google.
Yes. I want a page rank of 10.
But to what end? What’s the outcome again?
Why do I want to be #1?
Does seeing my competitor ranked ahead of me on a search term mean they’re making more money than me? Am I just wanting to beat them because I’m a competitive person? At what point does focusing on SEO become detrimental to the health of my business?
So, let’s go back to the beginning.
The reason I want to be ranked high on the search engines:
I want to grow my Web site’s traffic organically.
By doing this I believe I’ll get more leads which will result in more business which will lead to more profits and a vacation home in Naples, Florida.
Search engines are a huge part of that. And as I’ve started seeing success with having my site grow in traffic over the past year, I celebrate that success.
The challenge now is to convert that traffic into a sale. All things being equal, what can you do to increase revenues from the traffic you’re already getting to your site.
Capture and Qualify Leads
Say you had 1,000 people visiting your site a month. How many leads are you capturing out of those visits? How many of those leads are actually converting to sales?
If you got 5 leads a month out of that, you’re getting .5% capture rate.
If you sell to one of those leads, you’re conversion rate is 20%.
What if you could up your capture rate to 2% and still hold the same conversion rate?
OR what if you kept the same capture rate but increased your conversion rate to 80%?
My point is this — Organic Web site traffic is only ONE part of the sales equation.
To effectively sell in your marketplace, you need to have a deep understanding of how sales funnel into your business.
It starts by mapping all the points where businesses might find you and then monitoring your success at each of the points of conversion. By monitoring your metrics in this way, you will begin to see what parts of the sales funnel you want to focus on and which ones will give you the biggest bang for the buck.
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I’d like to be in the top 10, but I have no idea how to do it.
I’ve heard you can pay per click, but my budget isn’t much. I have a nutritional drink that would help almost everyone but I’m new to this and I can’t even get help from the person that got me in.