What are you optimizing your pages for?
By Mike Moran. Filed in Organic Search, Web Metrics |Tags: Google, Promotion, Search engine optimization, Web search engine, Website
Image by liewcf via Flickr
SEO, as you know, stands for Search Engine Optimization, and you might rightly expect that SEO is about optimizing pages to appeal to search engines. And you’d be right. Increasingly, however, I am finding that clients believe so fervently in SEO that they aren’t actually optimizing their pages for sales. If you are falling into the trap, you’ll likely regret looking so narrowly at SEO.
This was all brought to mind by interactions with two different people the last few days who each are concerned about the same thing—search traffic dropping to their sites. When I dug into the situation further, I found that neither had any idea what kind of sales they were generating from their sites. One, in fact, knew that the page that had recently dropped in search rankings had an extremely high bounce rate, so they couldn’t have been selling very much.
Now, for both of these people, the lack of sales was not a crisis, but the drop in search traffic and the drop in search rankings was a crisis. It was hard not to chuckle at how times have changed.
I guess you’ve been in the search business a long time when you can remember when you had to prove every nickel that would come in because we did this new SEO thing. No one believed it would work and no one wanted to do it.
And look at us now. Now there are people walking around that have such a rabid belief in SEO that they think it is an end in iteself—that high rankings or even high traffic is some kind of magical elixir. It’s not.
Getting people to the front door of your Web site isn’t the end of the game. Unless you are optimizing your pages to actually sell things, online or offline, you’re not ready for SEO. In fact, if your Web site stinks, you should probably try to have as few people find it as possible. If you don’t know why you want people coming to your site, then figure that out first. Once you know your site can sell stuff, then it makes sense to use SEO and any other means at your disposal to drive as many people there as possible.
Wednesday, June 23rd 2010 at 4:47 pm |
Exactly. I hate how the internet has turned into a fight for page 1 Google result instead of competing for having the best website with the best content. A lot of the results now are just garbage and spam.
Wednesday, June 23rd 2010 at 6:37 pm |
It is so true. Most buiness (or more likely people in them) have no clue what they are selling, who they are selling to, or even why they are in business. Many would say for the money, but in that case, they won’t last long :-) SEO is so much more than a website, and now people are starting to understand, because the competition is getting tuffer.
Wednesday, June 23rd 2010 at 7:00 pm |
Interesting stuff. Mike makes a lot of sense…
Thursday, June 24th 2010 at 10:24 am |
Exactly. I hate how the internet has turned into a fight for page 1 Google result instead of competing for having the best website with the best content.
Saturday, June 26th 2010 at 4:16 pm |
I don’t get it. Why do people wanted to be number one in PR in any search engine? I am just curious. Does it really help in your business? Or what?
I think best website content is better than having a high PR but the site you have is not so good.
Saturday, June 26th 2010 at 6:51 pm |
Hi, ikyaton. Sorry you don’t like the content on this site. Thanks for holding your nose to read it and comment. :-)
PR is short for PageRank, so no one does want to be #1 in PageRank. They do want the #1 search result, because the assume (usually correctly) that more people will click on the #1 result. Having high PageRank generally helps you get that top result, because it is the sign of a high quality page, usually one with many links.
So, you have few concepts mixed up, but the bottom line is that people ought to optimize for sales more than search engines.
Monday, June 28th 2010 at 8:44 pm |
I you get a high PR, then you can get more people visiting your website and learning more about the services your business has to offer.
Friday, August 13th 2010 at 7:26 am |
I don’t like how the internet has turned into a fight for page 1 Google result instead of competing for having the best website with the best content. thank you for your good article
Friday, July 1st 2011 at 11:12 am |
I optimise as a means to develop my makreting and have a better chance of getting new leads to my website
Also, if the optimisation is correct, the page will make sense