Conversion is often overlooked in the world of SEO. Professionals spend more time worrying about placement than what to

do with that placement. Many times people forgot about what the true purpose of SEO is; to make money. Let’s face it business pay to get their websites ranked because it increases traffic and in theory conversion rates.

What good is strong consistent traffic without converting it to sales? The answer is none. Except in the rare occasion where someone desires traffic or readership and they perform SEO for this reason, most SEO is done in the name of greater bottom lines. If you work in SEO you need to understanding conversion metrics and how to use them to advance you and your clients’ goals.

Evaluating Results

One of the ways you can determine results is through analytics. Google Analytics is the most common program used because it is free, powerful, useful and internet based. All you need is a Google account and an internet connection to use this analytics program. Using analytics you can measure a variety of statistics such as traffic, bounce rate, traffics sources, page views, visitor loyalty, new visitors, average time on the site, most popular content and much more. You can create reports of these various statistics and export them to excel or whatever file type you wish. Once you become familiar with analytics you will see how an effective search marketer could use it. Figuring out how your users are getting to your site, which pages are most popular and how often they return is a huge advantage. Start using it and you will quickly be able to use it to your advantage.

Blogs & Conversions

While blogs are an important perhaps even necessary aspect of creating additional traffic their conversion rates are historically low. Blogs are most useful for obtaining long tail search traffic and reputation management. Corporate blogging is becoming the absolute standard and can do wonders for your credibility both online and off. Simply having a soapbox to defend your company and its positions can mean the difference between being loved and hated on the web.

One thing that many SEO’s forget is how much long tail traffic can benefit you. Sure only a few people a month may search for your terms but if you get hundreds of those ranking you will see amazing traffic. And generally since the terms are so obscure and precise they have very high conversion rates.

SEO vs. PPC

For years there has been a heated exchange regarding the effectiveness of PPC versus the effectiveness of SEO in terms of conversion. Recently there was a study performed by WebSideStory Inc the average conversion rate of PPC was 3.40% opposed to the average conversion of 3.13% for natural search results. While marketers are still in the paradigm of demonstratable results the benefits of natural search are often hidden. For one there is the plain and simple cost. A website could rank for a major term with almost no cost but that same keyword’s PPC cost could be 6 dollars for every click. Often times (thanks to increasing competition) the cost of the keyword outweighs the profit that click would bring in. Assuming only a small percentage of your total clicks will bring you profit then the conversion rate is pretty irrelevant. Additionally for any given search term somewhere between 80-90% of users click on the organic search results instead of paid advertisements. In this case the argument that PPC has better conversion rates therefore its more effective is ridiculous. SEO has higher conversion rates because users believe your site is the “most relevant” to what they are looking for. People inherently distrust advertisements.