Why SEO Needs to Focus on Conversions
[ 📽 Watch the full video for conversion tips]
Deprioritizing conversions for website traffic or worse keyword rankings is like asking your boss or your clients to pay you in hugs and high fives instead of dollars.
Hugs and high fives feel great, but you need dollars to buy diapers and delicious delicacies to feed your family.
Also, Google is your competitor in organic search. They have been designing the Search Engine Results Pages with widgets, filters, searches with in searches and now AI Overviews; to keep traffic on their website. Moving more and more towards a Zero Click experience, which is a term coined by Amanda Natividad who leads marketing at SparkToro.
I’ve seen organic search traffic reductions from Google in spite of keyword rankings growth across multiple industries.
This means brands have to focus on converting as much of the traffic you are already getting as you work to improve your keyword rankings and get new traffic.
Publishers like the New York Times and others, make money off of traffic, but have also started focusing on conversions. Publishers let you read a few articles and then force you to sign up.
Don’t Gate Everything
This does not mean to run and gate all your content. Keep your content open but repurpose your articles into downloadable guides to capture contact information from your website visitors.
Know Your Audience
Work to align your product, pricing and content with the needs of your target audiences. It will help with product market fit (conversions) and keep potential customers from kicking off on you like a young British lass who someone dared to try and sell an ice cream for 9 quid. Audience Development software like SparkToro and Dstillery is perfect for this kind of work.
Build Conversion Basics Into New Websites
If your website is new, then conversion considerations should have been built into the website so it can convert traffic as you grow it.
Waiting for your website to get traffic is not an excuse for not having the conversion fundamentals built into your website from the beginning.
Waiting to get website traffic before building the site to convert, is like waiting for your baby to grow teeth before you feed it. Babies are built to eat and your website should be built to eat traffic and convert it to leads and revenue.
Make sure to buy your own products, book your own demos, and sign up to your freemium offering so you can audit your conversion paths and improve them.