What SEO isn’t
The purpose of SEO is to drive high quality, relevant traffic to your website from search engines, with Google being the primary one.
Once the user is on your website, it is your product or service, along with the design and usability of your website, that should help the user take the desired action. This could be reading information, signing up to your newsletter, making an enquiry or making a purchase, whether that is during their first or returning visit.
SEO isn’t a silver bullet
If you have a website with a confusing page layout and navigation, where the user simply can’t find what they want and leave, that is not the failing of your SEO strategy per se, that falls under user experience (or UX).
SEO and UX are closely related disciplines, and there is an overlap where best practice for both are the same thing – for example, descriptive headers, fast page load and a clear navigation.
However, a lot of SEO consultants are not taken on board by clients to do user experience work.
Therefore, if you have employed an SEO agency or freelancer on the premise that they are there to get you higher rankings and more traffic, making sure visitors actually convert is dependent on more than just that.
Worry about more than just rankings
If your competitors have a better value proposition than you – cheaper prices, better customer service or simply a better product – then the fact that your website isn’t making you money is not due to bad SEO work either.
High rankings are great, but if you have an eCommerce site and a competing site just below you in search rankings is selling the same product for 20% less, then why would anyone buy from you? Looking at your competitors sites and value proposition is something you should be doing often.
Fix the leaky bucket
So before you embark on an SEO strategy for your website, ask yourself this – if you were your target customer and you landed on your website’s homepage, would you be willing or able to undertake the desired action? This can sometimes be harder than it initially appears, as you, as a website owner or marketing manager should have a fairly good idea of how to navigate your website, and know your business’ product or service offering. Nonetheless, really try to pretend you are seeing your website for the first time and have no knowledge of where any of your key pages are and need to get to your desired destination by simply clicking your way forward.
If you realise that your customers aren’t willing or able to undertake the desired action, it is time to invest in a new website or at the very least add new content before starting any SEO strategy in earnest.
To use a simile, imagine your website as a bucket, with visitors being drops of rain entering the bucket. Unfortunately for you, your bucket has holes and visitors are falling out of the bottom of the bucket almost as fast as they are arriving. Taking on an SEO agency or freelancer at this stage simply turns a hose of water on, increasing the amount of water coming into the bucket. As you’re losing a great deal of these visitors, you are putting your efforts in the wrong area. Instead, fix the bucket first and then think about SEO.