Read this on Kikabink.com and thought I would share with the group... any thoughts?
Okay, so that's a pretty dramatic headline, but it seems to me that too many search engine optimization consultants and their clients are focusing on the wrong things. It's not necessarily intentional, but many companies have bought, sold and swallowed several SEO lies...
The first lie is that search engine optimization is all about getting high rankings in the search engines for the most popular keywords or keyphrases in a particular market. Technically, that may well be what “search engine optimization” or means... but does a company really want higher rankings... or does it want to make more money?
Is getting a number 1, 2 or 3 for the most searched on terms in your market really what you want? Or is it getting a high ranking for what Dan Thies calls those "wallet out" keywords - those keywords most searched on by people who are likely to buy from you?
The second lie is that search engine optimization (SEO) should be about increasing traffic to your website. Does getting more traffic matter... or does getting more paying-customer-traffic matter? It's possible to use several techniques to bring a whole lot of traffic to your site... but whether those visitors are interested in – or likely to buy – your products is another question altogether. Again, certain keywords – including keywords that are searched on by people in your target market – may bring a lot of traffic to your site... but are they really buyers?
Finally, building on the first and second lies, the third lie is that, when it comes to search engine optimization, your focus should be on increasing your search engine rankings and overall website traffic.
Um, if you are in business, shouldn't your focus be on making more money?
Okay, okay. There may be a clear relationship between increasing your ranking in the search engine result pages (SERPs) for the most popular keywords and generating more traffic. But the point is that this is not necessarily the case. In fact, identifying what relationships exist between given keywords, types of traffic and money will generally require a good deal of analysis and experimentation.
Case in point: I know of a company that is very pleased with its high ranking for a highly-searched on phrase in their market. But the money they are making from their SEO efforts is appalling. Could it be that the phrase they have spent so much effort achieving a high ranking for... is not the phrase used by most “wallet-out” search engine users?
In any case, what surely can't be disputed is that the key metrics a company should really use to measure the effectiveness of their online marketing – including search engine optimization – are visitor value and overall online profit.
Visitor value equals revenue per visitor less the costs of acquiring that visitor. In SEO terms, it's the revenue per visitor derived from organic search engine results less the costs of search engine optimization.
You can actually use more precise measures of visitor value. You can work out the visitor value per search engine, per keyword, and per other kinds of variables. Ideally, you will have different visitor values for each distinguishable type of marketing you carry out - e.g. visitor value per paid search, visitor value per a particular banner campaign, and so on, in order to work out the effectiveness of each kind or activity. In each case, though, the visitor value metric essentially tells you how much money you are generating from an average visitor less the costs of acquiring that visitor.
Online profit is how much money, overall, you are making from your website less the costs of maintaining and marketing that website. Depending on how you define “costs” your online profit may be different to your overall gross profit, which may take into account various “off-line” costs.
Online profit is important because, depending on the types of products or services you sell, your visitor value may be relatively low, but your online profit may be considerable.
But what matters is not so much what your visitor value and online profit are now... but, rather, the extent to which they are growing. In other words, when it comes to measuring the return on investment from your search engine optimization activities you want to know if, and by how much, such activities are increasing your visitor value and online profit.
Consequently, when considering the performance of your SEO firm, you are wise to focus less on whether they are getting you higher search engine rankings or generating more traffic, and more on whether they are improving your visitor value and your online profit.
The same is also true of paid search engine marketing. I've found that many companies are so intent on lowering their cost-per-click and increasing their click-through-rate that they lose sight of the big picture, which is to increase visitor value and online profit. In fact, in many cases, by working out which keywords best convert into sales in a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, you can find out which are the best keywords to optimize for in terms of SEO.
Of course, your methods for converting visitors are integral to raising visitor value and online profit. And these may well be outside your SEO company's control. On the other hand, it's important to recognize that search engine marketing and conversion activities are highly interdependent. What keywords you optimize for will not only impact on the traffic your website receives, but the degree to which that traffic converts into customers. Fortunately, it's possible to hold all variables constant and identify which keywords are more highly converting. So, in this respect, you can see how effective your search engine optimization consulting firm is in identifying and optimizing for those wallet-out keywords.
All in all, your online success depends on recognizing and focusing on improving those bottom-line metrics that really matter – visitor value and online profits. Getting better search engine rankings and more traffic may well be essential for increasing visitor value and online profit... but they are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. That's our view as an internet marketing services provider, as well as the operator of a portfolio of money-making websites.
Topic: Lies, Damned Lies and SEO (Read 4780 times)