Featured advice on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) in Google Magazine.
Having a high search engine ranking for a search term that you know converts can dramatically increase the amount of products or services any size of business will make. But on the flipside, if you’re receiving thousands of visitors from these high rankings but they aren’t the right type of visitors you need to make the sale, the time, energy and expense put into gaining these high rankings can be a complete waste.
There are three main elements when it comes to the success of a website for small businesses. 1; your website must receive visitors. 2; your website must be able to turn these visitors into product or service enquiries and 3; you must be able to turn these enquiries into actual sales.
Before trying to get your website to the top of a search engine, it’s important to first test the market to see what search terms actually give you the best end result, in most cases the measure of a result is a sale.
Once you’ve determined which search terms ‘work for you’, it’s time to chase those high search engine rankings.
For Example:
Let’s say you’re in the ‘residential lawn mowing’ business and you’ve identified that the search term “lawn mowing price” works out to give you 10 enquiries for every hundred visitors to your website. For every 2 enquiries you receive, one of them goes ahead and buys your services. This means on average for every 100 people that visit you for this exact term, you’ll roughly receive 5 sales.
Compare this to the term “lawn mowing”. Although there are more people searching for this, it is far less specific so let’s say for every 100 visitors you receive, only 1 of them make an enquiry. If the same person was selling the service, you’d only end up with roughly 1 sale if you’re lucky. And, because more people are searching this term, more businesses will want their website to rank high for this term making it much harder for you to get to the top.
What this means for your business; find out which search terms give you the best result first then focus your energies on targeting these terms. When you get to the top, maintain your rankings and work on improving your website’s enquiry rate and enjoy a steady stream of business.
