50 Million Visitors – 5 Sales? Having lots of people find your website is a good thing, right? It means you’ve succeeded at this “SEO” thing, right? Wrong! It can be easy to get found on the search engines and generate traffic. As easy as inserting (intentionally or otherwise) a controversial word or phrase, or something related to a certain three-letter word that begins with “s” and ends with “x”! But, if the traffic you’ve generated is the wrong traffic, it is of no benefit to your business. What you really want are “qualified visitors”, visitors who are truly interested in your product, and might actually generate revenue for you. You’ll hear this referred to as “improving conversion rate”. You want to “convert” those website visitors into sales, and the only way to do that is to begin with “qualified” set of visitors.

How do we find qualified visitors? Simply by doing more thorough research to learn what people who are interested in your products are actually searching for. Not just what “everybody” is searching for, but what “your target market” is searching for. It’s not as easy as it sounds, and sometimes it takes careful review of the statistics of the website itself over a period of time to learn about how visitors are actually finding using the site.

Website statistics. A quarterly website review can tell us an awful lot about how a site is working and how to improve it. What terms are people finding the site with? Which terms are resulting in visits that “bounce” (immediately leave the site because it wasn’t what they were looking for)? Which terms result in visitors that spend a lot of time on your site and view a lot of your pages? And lastly, which terms have the most visits that end with either your “contact” or “checkout” page, achieving the ultimate goal of conversion? Learning which terms work will help us to make them work better. Learning which ones DON’T work (especially if they are terms that “should” work) helps us to learn which areas of the website content may need improvement to better meet the needs of your visitors.

What you should do. To maintain awareness of the effectiveness of your website, keep up with the latest trends, and strive for continuous improvement, we highly recommend a monthly or quarterly Website Performance Report.