In the world of Search Engine Marketing, many companies have been led to believe that it’s enough to know the proper keywords and hold a high ranking for them. If your company’s goal is simply to get masses of people on the site, SEO may be enough.
But most companies want to sell or persuade their website visitors to follow through with some course of action, whether it’s making a purchase, calling, signing up, making a donation, etc.
Think of it this way. You’re throwing a party. So you make the Facebook event and invite all 1,478 of your friends, who in turn invite their friends, and people they knew from high school, and people from work, and the random weirdos they added to get more lives on Candy Crush. You send some texts and tweets, make some calls, and print out these super legit invitations and throw them from the top story of a downtown skyscraper during lunch hour. Suddenly, news of your party has made it to local newspapers and you’ve got at least half the city on your confirmed guests list. All of this is equivalent to what we call a high-click through rate. Your SEO has given your website an excellent online presence and tons of web traffic.
But now what?
It’s finally the day of the big party and guests are lined up at the door. But the second they walk in, your house is in complete disarray, there’s no music and the free food and booze you promised on your invitation is nowhere to be found. In other words, you may have been successful in leading prospective customers to your site, but if they’re not finding what they came for quickly and efficiently, there’s no guarantee they’ll stay and you can bet they won’t be buying into your product or idea.
This is the fatal mistake many companies make in their websites. They ignore the conversion funnel. They become so obsessed with being visible on the internet that they completely forget about why they wanted to be visible and what they want their websites to accomplish in the first place. The result? Great SEO combined with user experience so bad it makes site visitors want to do this:
In the party scenario, your goal in sending the invites was more than just getting people through the door. You wanted a great night with some great people (and, of course, it definitely wouldn’t have hurt to go down in history for throwing the most epic party of the century). As company, the goal is to sell or persuade in some way, and while gaining awareness and exposure is the first step, it’s definitely not the only one.
So, now you’re standing at the door looking like a loser, as your long line is dwindling as guests file out, grumbling in disappointment. Fear not; there’s hope.
The first step is to figure out what’s causing the unfavorable ratio in click through rates to conversion rates. It could be a number of issues. If your site has poor navigation, guests are more likely to move on than spend precious time trying to figure out how to get to your contact page. A messy site with poor design or low-quality images can also be incredibly damaging to your credibility. Even the best SEO can’t save a site that’s literally painful to look at. Another issue, and arguably the single most frustrating one from a user perspective, is not being able to find the correct information. Whether it’s contact information, registration forms or pictures, most people just aren’t willing to do the extra work to find elements on the site that should be clearly visible. And let’s face it; you want their business more than they want your product.
This is where doing web development with a trusted SEO company can help. By not only optimizing your site with keywords, links and meta-descriptions, but also making it visually appealing with great user experience, you can turn that high click through rate into a high conversion rate, dramatically improving your business. Then you can throw your own epic party to celebrate, just be sure not to leave out the music and booze.