Large amounts of traffic are not enough
A few years ago I helped a business save thousands of dollars on an SEO service that wasn’t working as well as it seemed. In order to protect this business and their privacy, I won’t tell you who they are or get into specifics but I will share the story with you.
This cautionary tale is one of many similar cases I have encountered in my career.
High traffic can be deceitful
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it refers to the optimization of a website across search engines. When a site is optimized online, it is more visible and shows up in more search results. As the largest search engine, Google SEO optimization is the most coveted by business owners. So logically the business I will refer to as ACME Services, was very excited when they were showed that their website was getting a lot of traffic on the Google search engine. On the surface this is a great thing but when I asked ACME how many customers they were getting from the website and the couldn’t tell me, I saw it as a red flag. You see the whole point of SEO is not just to be more visible, it’s to be more visible n order to get more customers. So what’s the point of high visibility without conversions?
I knew exactly where to look to uncover the truth
ACME services was paying thousands of dollars a month for what they thought was valuable SEO optimization work. In theory there was work being done. The website was showing up online and there was a steady increase and traffic. So what was the problem? Well, I knew exactly where to look to find out the root cause of the problem that ACME Services didn’t even know existed. When I analyzed the top ranking pages on the website, that were driving the bulk of the traffic, I noticed that the topics of the top ranking content was absolutely irrelevant to ACME Services’s target customers.
I showed them how the supposed valuable SEO was driving mostly poor quality traffic to their website. Not only was the traffic irrelevant to their target customers but it was mostly relevant for their competitors. So the SEO was actually ranking their page as a top resource for their competition. ouch
The moral of the story
The moral of the SEO story is this. If your SEO is driving traffic to your page that does NOT consist of your target customers, then it is not adding value to your site. The numbers are important but the content has to be relevant in order to drive quality traffic. In this case ACME Services would have been better served by less traffic to pages with content that was actually relevant to their target customers.
A huge red flag for me in this case was the fact that they had an SEO services provider that was not tracking the number of conversions from the work they were doing. That is usually an indicator that they are inflating the numbers with low quality traffic or even bots that make it appear like SEO is working, when it’s really not.
Quality SEO can be put to the test
When your SEO is on point, you can test the quality by tracking conversions from it, not just traffic. You will see an increase in visitors to your site that is also correlated to an increase in leads. It may take some time to really pay off but when it’s done right you can expect to be visible online to the right people at the right time and in the right way.
It’s part science and part art. Creativity matters. When high quality prospects search a topic, question, keyword or phrase related to your products and services, your site can show up on top using key words, tags etc but the content must also be relevant, interesting and convincing enough to inspire them to take action.
If you are not sure, ask
Having a third party consultant that is not trying to earn your SEO business can be extremely beneficial. My agenda will never be to get you to hire me to work on your SEO instead so any insights you gain from me in an audit will be solely for your benefit.
You can get in touch with me here or a FREE SEO analysis of your website. You can also shop my store for recommended resources like SEMRUSH and books like Marketing Made Simple
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