You Don’t Really Want To Rank #1 In Google
… or maybe you do, so you’ll need to check that idea at the door before reading this post.
This post really shouldn’t take long to write because it’s pretty simple – you don’t want to rank #1 for such and such term what you really want is your site to perform better for your business/organisation etc doing the job you built it for.
I’ve said for a long while (ask anyone in the office) that ranking reports are a really one dimensional way to look at the success of SEO activities on your site. This is only becoming increasingly true as the WWW changes the way we find businesses online.
Don’t get me wrong, I want your site to rank for your “trophy keyword” too but I want you to come a step further with me. Come onto the site and take a look around at what you find. Then I want you to come a step further and ask yourself what do I want my website to do for my business? This is where we start.
Your website is your newest employee. Hire the wrong website and you’ll waste a bunch of money throwing traffic at it but not seeing much in return. This is where you start before you even build a website – what do I want my new “employee” to do?
Here’s a list of skills your website might have:
- Collect enquiries from potential customers/clients.
- Sell my wares and services online.
- advertise my products/services and acquire customers cheaper than other advertising channels.
- Engage with potential and existing customers more.
- Troubleshoot customers issues and provide ongoing customer support.
- Convince people to sign up to your email mailing list.
- Educate people about your brand and it’s corresponding activities, services and products.
- Encourage people to download digital files from my site which may in turn save me from having to send them to them OR serve to promote my brand by offering a free value add.
I’m sure you’ll have a more specific set of “skills” (goals) that you will want your site to have and it’s important to start at those goals rather than from the other end.
There is a name that we give optimisation of a site to better fulfill the goals that you define – it’s called Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO). This topic has a whole lot tied up in it. Try some of these on for size:
- User testing: split tests, multivariate tests (Google Analytics Experiments).
- User experience including navigation and easy of use.
- Conversion funnels
- Psychology of colour, page location, wording, images etc.
- Landing pages and visual layouts.
- Call To Action (CTA)
- Creating trust and legitimacy.
- Target Audience: demographics, geography, customers “pain points”.
- Unique selling proposition (USP)
Now some of that list probably didn’t make a lot of sense right now but the point is that this stuff is an art in and of itself and it’s something you or your SEO company should be doing on top of optimising your site to bring in a flood of traffic.
There are more than enough stories of sites which have increased their profits/conversions by exponential amounts just by addressing conversion rate in their inbound marketing strategy. Have you considered CRO?
I’m not going to rabbit on much longer suffice to say that we’ll try and follow up with some more posts on CRO (A topic we’re very passionate about but haven’t blogged all that much about). In the meantime here are some helpful links to help you get started addressing CRO on your site (all in the one article):
The Ultimate Conversion Rate Optimisation Reading List
UPDATE
This guy just came sailing through my inbox so I had to share:
