When you hire an SEO company, or contract the services of an SEO consultant, what is the most important thing you’re hoping they can do for you?
If you said ‘to increase the ranking of your website in the search engines’ you’ve missed the point of search engine optimisation.
Now yes, SEO is about optimising websites so that they appear higher up the search engines. This is obvious. However, this doesn’t necessarily help your website to receive more traffic, or more sales. Your website ranking higher in the search engines is akin to your company increasing its advertising reach so that more magazines and newspapers carry your adverts; it doesn’t necessarily mean that more people will see them!
First of all, you need to get it right from the start and do your homework on your keywords so that you and your SEO company are optimising your website for keywords that people are actually searching for. Secondly, you need to make sure that the people searching for those keywords are doing so because they need your services. Thirdly, you need to make sure that your website is set up to capitalise on any traffic that it receives, so that you have a decent ROI (return on investment).
Your priorities should be, in this order:
- Sales and Leads
- Traffic
- Search Engine Rankings
Your rankings are merely a means to and end, not an end in themselves. If you place all of your emphasis on attaining high rankings for the keywords that you have chosen, then what?
Never lose sight of what’s truly important, as a quality SEO company will include your website’s traffic statistics in your monthly reports, as well as your rankings, and will work with you to improve conversions on your website.
