SEO Yesterday Was about Ranking, Today is about Conversions
Just came out of weekly SEO meeting at work. Our group consists of representatives from different part of the department including product mangers, marketing managers, project managers, finance department, business justification department, creative team, compliance, and of course web department.
I am the representative of the web department. Where I work SEO is not handled by one department but it’s a committee that handles and is responsible for SEO. My employer has way too many websites, products, and legal and business issues so I can’t just get in front of computer and bust out some SEO.
They also need justification for the time spent because time is money. Traffic, page ranking, and keyword ranking are not enough! They need numbers in terms of dollar. They need to see increase in orders and increase in conversion. But they are not the only company that is so demanding.
Today goal of SEO is not only to drive traffic to your website, but it is increase online orders or leads and increase company revenue by increasing conversion. In order to do those, SEO specialists need to focus on driving targeted and quality traffic to their websites rather than just any traffic because conversion is what your employer or client is looking for. They are in it to make money and get ahead of competition NOW not tomorrow. Of course SEO takes time and it’s an ongoing effort but it needs to translate to numbers in particular into $ so the investment in it is justifiable. Of course it needs cooperation with the usability and design departments, because you can drive the targeted traffic to your site, but if your site is not user friendly, your visitor will leave your site and your effort can get wasted.
That is why an SEO specialist is not a typical geek any more, but it is an important business minded geek who communicates professionally with different members of different departments with conversion in mind as SEO yesterday was all about ranking, SEO today is all about conversion.
January 25th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Thanks alot for this post. It is really nice post as I agree with you on that. Even if you have a small company and you don’t have to meet with everyone, even if you are not selling items onlines, and even if you are a small non profit, the goal is still to bring targetted traffic in that that could tranlate into online leads which is an ultimate goal of a small business or a non profilt organizatin.