SEO is Dead: Ringing the Death Knell
May 28, 2009, 10:16 am
Search Engine Optimization is dead. The folks charging thousands of dollars a month to place your site in the top ten search results are vultures desperate to prey on your lack of knowledge and empty your pocketbook to fill their own.
If you run a website, you’re already getting the emails promising pie in the sky traffic by associating your site with certain keywords. The truth is, it works – it’s not that difficult to drive thousands of visitors to your website, even without using so-called “gray” tactics that threaten to blacklist your site with the major search engines. But what kind of traffic are you getting? And how many of those visitors are becoming customers?
The metric used to figure this out is called the “conversion rate”. You calculate this number by taking the number of goals your customers have completed on the site (making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, calling your special toll-free number, etc.), dividing it by the total number of unique visitors, then multiplying by 100 to get the percentage. So, if you get 5,000 visitors, and 500 of them signed up for your newsletter, your newsletter signup is converting at a fairly impressive 10%. If you don’t know the conversion rates for the goals on your site, now’s the time to break out the calculator (and if you don’t know what goals to measure… we need to talk).
SEO is a great way to get what I call “serendipitous traffic”. You’re competing directly with every site doing SEO at least as well as you are, leaving the customer with little else to use for comparison. It takes a lot of effort to visit each site, shop around and do the research. For big-ticket items, the effort is worth it to assure the customer is getting the best product or service at the best price. For smaller items, however, it’s a crap shoot.
Search engines are not good at figuring out precisely what a user wants. An example: a local company I have worked with specializes in performing pre-employment screening services for companies great and small to secure their hiring process. One of the keywords they targeted was “Background checks.” The volume of calls and emails they received from individuals seeking to run background checks on potential dates, cheating boyfriends, etc. far outweighed those they received from legitimate businesses. You could argue they should consider offering personal services like these, but doing so would take their focus from their core business, which remains successful. Though they haven’t measured the cost incurred in taking these calls and following up on these misleading leads, it was clear they were losing money.
Their solution to this problem was two-fold, and presents an ideal model for you to follow. First, they focused less on “background checks” and more on “pre-employment screening”, “human resources” and other business-related keywords in order to winnow out those visitors not looking for business services. To complement this, they changed the contact and lead generation forms on their site to ask specific questions about the kinds of business security services visitors were looking for, further driving home the point that they did not offer personal background check services. While this strategy has reduced the number of distracting calls and emails, it has not eliminated them completely.
Their next step has proven to be the most successful: they formed partnerships with large trade organizations representing their target industries, receiving prominent links on those sites in exchange for offering discounts and other special offers to the members of those organizations. These members are already highly qualified leads – they’re business owners with a pain for which the employment screening company has a solution. Since focusing less on SEO, the site’s traffic has dropped, but the number of converting leads has risen dramatically, generating far more revenue.
It’s an age-old marketing strategy – get your company in front of the audience most likely to buy from you at the time they’re most likely to purchase your product or service. In theory, search engines are supposed to do precisely this, but until they figure out a way to read the user’s mind and exacting preferences, the best they can offer is a bunch of suggestions. Associating your site with companies and individuals your customers trust is the best use of your time and online marketing budget. Forming such partnerships can also help you enhance and expand your business in ways you can’t anticipate.
Another additional, somewhat ironic side effect of forming such partnerships is improved search engine optimization for your site. Many of the major search engines place a great deal of weight on links posted on popular, highly-targeted sites, which can raise your standing in the results for related keywords. It’s SEO through the back door! Serendipitous traffic is still a good thing if it converts into paying business.
Subscribe to our blogs using either our 