Kenneth Dreyer

I recently stumbled upon a new forum here in Australia about business. I’ve been looking for that ever since I moved here. There is a thread going on there where they discuss the importance of SEO compared to the quality of the content – some agree you need to hire a copywriter, while others say you need a kick ass design.

They are actually all correct. The process of getting users to your site and getting a conversion out of them is a four step process.

1. Marketing your site

There is literally an unlimited amount of things you can do to market your website and its products. Banner advertising, link trading, signing up in catalogues’, PR, blogging, email marketing, direct marketing, radio advertising, TV advertising, viral marketing, print advertising and my two favourites: search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (PCC).Within this ways of marketing there are again several ways of doing it, both good and bad ones.

So let’s say you do a good job with SEO and you rank pretty good with your main keyword terms. Alongside with that you’re running a PPC campaign that also brings a lot of traffic.

Good work, but are you doing step two?

2. Analysing your traffic

I can’t stress this enough. Most people fail with their websites already on step two. Having Google Analytics installed is NOT doing proper web analytics. You need to define goals, KPI and much more. How do you know if one of your advertising campaigns is giving you value for money (ROI) if you’re not tracking it? You’re not, unless you do it properly.

Those who are still with me so far will almost always fall out on the third step.

3. Optimize your site

So you have the traffic coming and you know which of your campaigns are valuable to you. Now do you know if you’re making the most of your traffic? Probably not. That why you should consider doing some A/B and multi variations testing. It’s pretty simple once you get the hang of it: You take siteA and put it up against siteB, which is a copy of siteA, just with a few changes. Which of them convert best? Will conversion go up if you change the “Buy now” button? If you make it bigger? Change the colour? If you place it somewhere else? What if you try a new description of your product? Or maybe a new product image?

These methods are about testing changes and comparing it to the older version. If something works, we’ll keep it. If something doesn’t, we’ll throw it away. You might need a copywriter to help you out here. You might need a designer. Unless your expert in any of these areas, they will all carry great importance to you.

4. Get back to basics

So you have a lot of traffic, you are doing a good job in analysing your traffic and you’ve constructed your website into a mean-ass-conversion-machine. Now what? Get back to the beginning again.

Try some new keywords. Maybe you can optimize your SEO campaign even more. Maybe some of your traffic sources that weren’t giving a profit earlier will give you profit now that you’ve made your site more likely to convert. Maybe you should add some more landing pages and do the process all over again on it.

Your site will never be perfect

One thing is certain: Your website will never be perfect. There always some tweaking that can be done to improve in all steps of the process. The questions is, are you the guy/girl to do it? Unless you’re working in a really small niche you should always consider hiring a good SEO firm. A professional graphic designer will always almost give you a good design, but most of them don’t know how to make a design that converts. That’s why you might need a optimisation consultant. And maybe SEO isn’t giving you enough traffic, so then you should consider hiring a PPC consultant. Maybe they can improve your campaign to deliver 30% more traffic for a 30% lesser click price?

My point is, unless you’re an expert yourself in any of these areas, you should always consider hiring someone who is. It will do you business good and you can focus on what you do best.

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