“Huh? I thought you did SEO for a living? Why are you telling people not to do it?”

There’s on really simple reason I say this: because it’s true in a lot of cases. For many businesses, SEO isn’t going to help them. Why? Because they don’t think about how it should be done, and, in fairness, there are a lot of companies that are happy to take your money to “do some SEO work” on your site without telling you what the REAL problem is you need to fix before even thinking about search engine optimization.

Let’s face it. Almost all websites get SOME traffic. What your website likely struggles with is convincing the people who take the next step to doing business with you. That’s nothing to do with how well your site ranks. It has to do with how well your site CONVERTS.

Conversion Rate is Key

Pick a page on your website that offers a product or service. How many visitors does that page get? How many purchases or inquiries can you track from that page? In short, that’s your conversion rate.

If you get 100 visitors to that page and none of them buy or inquire, your conversion rate is ZERO percent. SEO doesn’t fix that. If you invest in SEO and double your traffic to a page that has a ZERO percent conversion rate, you’ve wasted your money.

5 Simple Ways to Improve a Page’s Conversion Rate

• Provide relevant content to your site visitors
• Design so your page loads quickly
• Choose fonts and colours that make your content easy to read
• Use clear language that is easy to understand
• Have multiple, clear, Calls to Action (CTA)

Chances are you’re not the only game in town. Your website needs to clearly convey the benefit of doing business with you. It doesn’t matter if you run a bar, a butcher, a garden center, or a music shop. Visitors want to have confidence they’re making the right choice. If the content they are hoping to find isn’t obvious, if the page loads slowly, if the design is hard to read, if your language is unclear, and there’s no obvious call to action, you’ve wasted that visitor’s time AND your money.

I hope you’ve found this useful. Do you have a page that went from sub-par to stellar with its conversion rate? Share your success story with me below! I’d love to hear about it 🙂

Thanks for reading!