So Your Website Is Not Converting … Sounds Familiar

Is it time for someone to RAG - Ready-Audit-GROW on your website? It may be ... you see many businesses have a beautifully designed website that gets little or no buying traffic. There is a reason for this, it's called SEO (search engine optimization) and this is relevant for direct inbound traffic and pay-per-click ads.

Let me give you an example. We just completed an SEO audit for a client where the number 1 ranking keyword for his main website was literally his first name. We don't want to call this client out, so let's just say his first name was John. Now, do you think if your website top ranking keyword is John that you are going to get many customers looking to buy your product unless you sell chotzkies to people with the name John? We would say likely not.

It would not be so bad, if say, their ranking words 2 through 5 were relative to what they sell, but it only got mostly worse for this client from there.

Another example was a client where they were trying to rank for a couple of specialized terms in the psychiatric fields, and once again and at least a little better, their top ranking keyword was their first and last name, and the next 4 were somewhat relative to psychiatry, but certainly not ones that would bring in customers (buying traffic), but more likely their competitors. 

So you see there is a lot that goes into getting your site and content organized for SEO ranking, and/or your pay-per-click ads, to bring the right kind of traffic ... Buying Inbound Traffic. Those potential customers with money in their hot little hands ready to buy. No one really knows Google's search algorithm (other than Google of course), but we feel fairly certain the below list are a few of the key components for getting content ranked.

• Your site's website authority - MOZ score
• Number of backlinks to your site - affect authority
• Quality of backlinks to your site - affect authority
• Where you are in relation to the searcher - local search rules
• And way down the list is actually your SEO site and page scores for Google the targeted keyword(s) you are trying to rank for.

• How much you bid (yes money talks) - but you might need to get your pocketbook/wallet out.
• How well your landing page content/keywords tie back to the keywords for the ad you are running
• Ad title

So here's the thing about content search these days with Google. If you look at page search results you will notice that Paid Ads now appear on the top and the bottom of the page for many keywords. We also do know that still, the number one listed result whether paid or unpaid will command up to 90% or more of the click-through traffic from a search results page.

Unfortunately, it can get even worse, below the paid ads on the top of the site are your Google My Business results for aiding those searching locally. So if you are the best SEO expert in the world and you rank for a keyword for content search as number 1 your result could be as far as 1/2 way or more down the search results page. You will still get some traffic, but it's not like the old days where number one for searched content ruled. Google wants to be paid for most keywords if you want to be at the top of the page. Sorry to be the bearer of the bad news.