There’s a phrase that has stuck with me over the last decade. It’s a philosophy that I picked up during my days managing a sales team that has carried a lot of weight through to my days of internet marketing and search engine optimization.
Plug the holes in your bucket before pouring more water into it.
In essence, it doesn’t matter how much traffic you get if that traffic doesn’t convert. It’s an important message for most small business owners. Whether you get 100 or 1000 visits each month, if your sales don’t increase proportionally, then there’s something wrong with your site’s conversion path. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz predicts that 2010 will be the year of conversion rate optimization, and I tend to agree that it’s a critical step for any business relying on a website to generate sales leads.
Arguably, one could say that a conversion is made every time someone performs a desirable action on your website. If that action is visiting a certain page, or clicking on a certain link, then you could make the argument for conversions over traffic. The next steps down this road involve crafting links, focusing on calls to action in your content and tweaking your copy to drive visitors to different areas of your site and increase saturation of certain pages in search results.
This is fine for a full time webmaster, but it’s essentially micromanaging your content. You could spend hours making subtle changes and not see that much of a difference, certainly not enough to justify the amount of time you’ve put into it. In addition, if your site is driven by impression-based advertising revenue, focusing on conversion too early in the game is a waste of time. You’re better off creating traffic channels, building links and, to some degree, improving overall usability.
What you should be getting now.
If you run a small business in Nanaimo, or any region of Vancouver Island (such as greater Nanaimo, Comox Valley, Cowichan Valley etc…), a well optimized website with a moderate, organic link portfolio should be getting about 1000 unique visitors each month. From those 1000 visits, you should be getting anywhere from 5 to 30 contacts per month. 30 would be exceptional, 5 would be slightly below average, but it also depends on your product line.
Without question, I would target the unique visitor benchmark first. The qualifications of your visitor will go up as your traffic and ranks increase, so it’s important to have those visitors landing on your site before you make any judgments about the quality of your conversion process.
Once you have sustained traffic for at least three months, you should target a contact rate of 2%. That means for every 1000 unique visitors to your site, you should be getting 20 emails, contacts, phone calls and/or walk-ins.
Where are you now.
If you don’t know what your stats are, most hosting plans include at least one analyzer. If your web host doesn’t, you should switch to one that does. If you don’t know how to check your web stats, or aren’t sure what to look for, you can contact your web host for help or, contact me at Harbour City SEO directly for a free evaluation on your site’s current performance.
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on December 28, 2009 at 12:15 pm, filed under Search Engine Optimization and tagged Web Design. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.