SEO Blog

Before the days of analytics and accurate methods of measuring success, the only way you would know how popular a site was would be through its hit counter. The more hits you had, the more successful your site was deemed.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with a few stray clicks onto your site, it might bump up your bounce rate but it shouldn’t do any lasting damage. The only trouble is, it is also highly unlikely to produce any meaningful long-term benefits either. Aimless traffic is nothing, particularly without conversions.

The definition of a conversion will invariably alter from site to site. Ecommerce is all about getting people to buy your products, charities might be looking for donations and businesses might just want visitors to fill in a contact form; but however your conversions are measured, these are the measure of your site’s relative successes.

In most instances the only way that you can encourage more conversions is by ensuring a good flow of targeted traffic; to get this, you need SEO. With the biggest source of visitors being search engine results pages, it is here that you need to achieve your visibility and get yourself seen in the right places. This is achieved through targeting your keywords.

Whilst some words and phrases might be popular, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they will relate to the people that you’re looking to attract – i.e. customers. You need to research your target audience, see what they’re looking for, get phrases that will get people in purchase mode, not just research and widen your net a little to incorporate more phrases – albeit with the same level of focus.

By just gaining hits, rather than improving your targeted traffic levels, you are leaving a lot to chance. Whilst we are all looking to get as much exposure as possible and want to be at the top of Google, this has to be balanced by the end result. This is why search engine optimisation remains such an essential part of any website’s development.

A shop full of people not buying anything isn’t fulfilling its most basic of functions. The same is true of a website. You have to find your customer base, which means pre-empting their intentions and search patterns. Not easy, not by a long chalk, but it is possible – particularly with appropriate levels of research.

Your conversion rate will ultimately say a great deal about how well you have optimised your site. If you want to be profitable and get people seeing your pages that are more likely to use your services, then you have to work hard and get your site seen where those people are looking. Conversions are what will drive you to success, getting the traffic to achieve this is the challenge that we all face.