Don’t think that SEO alone will provide the solution to all your online business problems. SEO is great for driving more traffic because more visitors will find your website in SERP’s and will therefore reach your sales pages. But once those visitors land on your page, your next challenge is to convert them to customers. The exciting thing is that with today’s advanced online web tools, understanding how to convert prospects into customers is easier to do than with just about any other advertising medium.

With web analytics, you can track just about every action that visitors take on your website. You can discover your conversation rate—i.e., the percentage of visitors that take your desired action once they arrive on your page. If you know how many leads you need to make a sale and you know your conversion rate, you can easily achieve your online sales goals. As your site becomes more visible through SEO, your revenue will grow as well.

There’s nothing essentially wrong with the approach of focusing energy on driving more and more customers through SEO in order to increase sales. However, relying on SEO tactics alone you miss on other great opportunities that are just around you – to improve the conversion rate of your website!

The basis for increasing conversion depends on how well you interpret your visitor’s needs. Take a look at the example below that illustrates this concept…

Let’s assume that your website has a one percent conversion rate, which means that 10 visitors out of every thousand buy your product. Your first thought may be that in order to boost sales, you must increase the number of visitors to your site. The problem is that if the conversion rate stays the same, you’re spending more and more time and money driving traffic to your site while still turning away 99% of your leads. At the same time you’re building a growing number of frustrated and unsatisfied potential customers.

Why not focus your time and money on improving the conversion rate before bringing all of that traffic to your site? By increasing the conversion rate from 1% to 2% you could double your sales with the same amount of traffic. Perhaps what is turning away potential customers is a poor SEO strategy like silly sounding keyword stuffed content. Perhaps it’s that the ordering or checkout process is so confusing that many people just leave rather than buy. There are countless reasons why people don’t buy—which means plenty of opportunities to improve your conversion rate.

The recipe for success in online business lies in your ability to interpret your prospect’s needs. Successful online businesses optimize the sales process first before driving traffic and then continue to analyze visitor behavior and make changes to the sales process in order to achieve the most effective results.

Why should they care about your products? How do you convince your prospect to buy your product today, tomorrow, or next month? Think of special scenarios for your visitors. Have some people to review your website and ask for feedback. Find out why they chose to buy or not to buy. Optimize each sales process page with regard to the things discussed in this article.

You’ll want to find ways to increase your visitor’s motivation to buy as well as establish a long-term relationship with your visitors. Your goal is to communicate with visitors throughout each stage of sales process. You must also have a good understanding of your customer’s demographics etc, their needs, wants, buying patterns, hot buttons, etc.

In short, you must be well prepared for receiving those huge amounts of qualified traffic or your SEO is just a waste of time and money. Good luck with your sales process optimization!

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 9:46 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.