High Search Rankings Or Quality Conversions?

To define your SEO/SEM goals for your company website, you first need to know what your main priority is.  Now, I know that to most people when they think of hiring an SEO professional, there first thought is that “they will get me to #1 in google for every keyword that I want”.  While this may be the case, no one can assure the #1 position for every keyword in every search engine.  Also, this should not be the only metric your company is using to determine the value of your SEO program.  The other metric should be Quality conversions—which means more customers and more revenue.  Isn’t that why we are all in business—to make a profit?  Don’t take this the wrong way, high search rankings are a key to achieving the goal of quality conversions, but it is not the only step in your SEO program.

SEO is no longer just optimizing for keywords, it is a marketing strategy for your site as a whole, which can include the following:

1. Keyword ranking.  I think that most of us now know that you have to be on the first 3 pages (arguably the first page now) to be seen by searchers.  This was, still and will always be true.

2. Social networks.  Companies now need to reach out into the online community to join the conversation that viewers (their customers) are having.  If you can successfully accomplish this, you can grow your online word of mouth quickly and effectively.  This is not just Facebook, it can include niche industry forums, industry blogs and the like.

3. Video sharing sites like youtube.com are growing and expanding their social sharing capabilities every month.  Many people are now searching for terms on the video site, much like they are on google itself.  They have friend request features, share this features.  Make sure that you are utilizing these as well to be even closer to your customers.

4. User generated content is also a great way to build content on your site.  The larger your site, the powerful it becomes in the search engines.  This can be anything from customer reviews, to a guest blogger that writes a weekly or monthly column on your site.  Or maybe one of your Top Managers has a blog that accepts comments from your viewers.  All of this will make more pages on your site and give the googlebot more food to eat.

In conclusion and because I love to share Soccer analogies, I would sum it up like this.   I always tell my kids that we need lots of shots on goal (as many high ranking keywords as we can).  But, we also need those shots to be focused and come from as many different angles as possible (see 1-4 above).  The more shots (high rankings) and the more focused the shots (social, video, content), the more goals (customer conversions) that we will receive.

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