Being #1 Is Not The Be All End All
We all know how important it is for your website to be on the 1st page of search engines for your online success. But is having your website in position #1 better than position #2 and lower in the rankings.
Initial feedback from many of our prospective clients is that they want to be #1. But being an ethical Search Engine Optimisation company we tell them that being #1 won’t suddenly mean that you will capture and convert the majority of online sales/enquiries etc.
Web visitors are very quick to judge within a few seconds if they trust the site in front of them. Just think for a minute what makes you purchase from one site over another, does the site have annoying animations? Perhaps it takes too long to load, unnecessary music? Can you clearly see the contact details of the company on the site ie phone number, email address, quick contact form?
Case Study
Let me give you a real world example, we had a client who was in the luxury service business, their service was attractive but at the premium end of the market. When we took them on, they were sitting on page 2/3 for the majority of keywords which wasn’t too bad for a site that hadn’t been SEO’d in the past. We knew with our techniques we could get them to the top or near the top of the search engines.
The problem was our team strongly recommended the client to change a number of elements on their site to increase their conversion opportunities. Some of the points which were noted to the client were the following:
· Unnecessary music playing in the background
· No phone number listed, yes can you believe it…..you are asking people to pay for a service valued at thousands of dollars and you don’t even provide them a phone number they can call you on to confirm who you are etc if they so wished.
· No contact form, only a booking form, not too sure about you…but if I am contemplating buying something of a luxury nature over the web I would most likely feel more confident in sending them an online enquiry 1st rather than make an immediate financial commitment.
· Not even an email address on the website
· All service prices were posted on the site failing to present the opportunity to the business owners to even engage with a prospect or at least add them to a list of prospective clients for future marketing purposes etc.
When comparing the above client’s websites to its competitors it was fairly certain they would struggle to get an enquiry let alone a conversion.
Despite strong repetitive recommendations the client was hesitant to change any aspect of their website, however they were determined to let us start the optimisation for them. We managed to get them in the top 5 searches for their chosen keywords but unfortunately for them because their site was not what the viewer wanted they didn’t convert any traffic. We learnt a valuable lesson:
Don’t take on a client that is not willing to make common sense proven practice changes to their website.
So what does this mean? Well it is one thing being at the top of the search engines but it is another thing to convert those visitors to real life customers. Take your `I love my site’ mentality out and design your website for the user and not for yourself, after all you can’t make money if you are the only one buying from your site.
Tags: conversion, design, rankings, roi, search engine optimisation, seo