Why should I optimise my website for search engines?
“Only an effective website is a successful website”
This is one of the questions I am asked most often by clients and prospective clients.
I always answer by saying that optimisation is important in attracting visitors to your site - after all, if people can not find the site they are not going to visit. However, more important is to optimise the site to attract potential customers rather than just visitors.
If you think about it, you could attract 1,000's of visitors to your site by appearing at the top of the search engines, but if the visitor is the wrong type or your website does not satisfy their needs then it's a wasted visitor. In my view I would rather have 10 visitors to my site that converted into a sale than 1,000 that didn't.
The case study below shows the problem with the idea of "getting 1,000's of visitors to my site"
Case Study
In early 2007 I was contacted by a prospective client who wanted Website DNA to get his site to the "top of the search engines" for a number of different phrases that summed up his business. This was because he wanted to sell his company’s services on the web to a wider range of people than his off-line marketing was reaching and he saw internet sales as being "free".
The company provided targeted sales leads for a wide range of trades in the property maintenance and service industry. I looked at the phrases that they wanted to rank well for and researched whether people actually use these phrases in their search engine queries. Many were used very infrequently and some were so vague it could apply to a whole range of services, many of which the company didn’t supply. Furthermore the company focused on trading in London and the south east of England yet none of the terms had any reference to a geographical location. On checking the website performance statistics it was plainly evident over 50% of the visitors were from the USA!
On producing a revised list of search phrases the client reluctantly agreed to include them in his optimisation of his website. I think he was worried that I may understand his business better than he did! After rewriting the company’s web pages and optimizing each of the key web pages on their website we relaunched the website.
Three months later the profile of the website visitors had changed considerably and whilst the number of visitors had risen by 35% the number of leads and sales online has increased dramatically. As you can imagine the client is extremely happy and his company is growing steadily.
For Website DNA he has become not just a one-off customer but an ongoing client. And where did he originally find out about Website DNA? On the internet of course by using the search engines. After all Website DNA needs to practice what it preaches and that’s why the above client is not just an old client but still an existing client
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