Website Conversion Rate: The Elephant in the Room

It is quite refreshing to hear leading online marketers talking about SEO’s contribution to the business bottom line.

Seth Godin, in his post “How to Make Money with SEO”, narrows SEO’s contribution to: Get rankings on a very popular, highly competitive keyword that exposes new visitors to your website Get rankings for your branded search terms that bring traffic using the engines as a primarily navigational device

Rand Fishkin responded quickly “against surface-level analysis of our beloved profession” with There's Way More Than 2 Ways to Make Money with SEO.

I was very intrigued about the fact that the leading online marketers continue to re-hash old and dry arguments while at the same time they were completely ignoring ‘the elephant in the room.’ It’s called website conversion rate.

Rand’s visual explanation of how SEO’s can help you make money is represented by the picture below:

 

In reality this picture looks more like the one below:

SEOs are limiting their engagement only to traffic generation while leaving the responsibility for web page conversion rates to clients. In reality, clients are ill equipped to deal with the conversion issue and as a result, a lot of good traffic is wasted. As a matter of fact, FireClick reports that 98% or general traffic is wasted.

Optimize web pages for increased conversion rates and the business value provided by SEO to clients changes dramatically.

And yet, all the money and effort are still dedicated to generating traffic.

We should not be surprised.  Dancing with the big and slow elephant is not as sexy as planning the next big social marketing gig. The thing is that more and more clients are becoming aware of the issue and demanding conversion rate optimization as a standard part of the SEO service.

We see many SEO vendors smelling money in the conversion rate optimization opportunity. The business case is quite compelling:

• SEO growth is slowing down: no problem, we do not have to sign as many new customers, we can grow by offering conversion rate optimization services to the existing customer base
• SEO prices are declining: no problem, conversion rate optimization premium prices

If you are wondering about where you can learn about conversion rate optimization we can gladly point you to series of posts published at www.maximize-conversion-rate.com.

 

Comments

[Kennith Nichol - Conversion Expert]

I could not agree more with this post. SEO is a traffic generating industry for most of the companies. Clients of SEOs rarely are informed that conversion opimization would boost their sales even further. It's all about what people do when they get to your website, not how many get there. Websites should be built to sell, sell, sell. This means making the prospects think as little as possible all the while trailing them to your checkout/contact page.

Great article, while I hope SEOs wake up, at the same time, if they don't it means less competition for those of us who know better.