What Is A Result In SEO Terms? Part 2 – Conversions

Let’s dive straight into Part 2 by defining a couple of different types of conversions. Generally from an SEO standpoint I tend to use the word conversion to mean lead, so an email or phone call which is a direct result of the SEO work. This is when a potential customer searches a keyword, finds your website because you rank for it, spends time on your website and then either calls or emails you. The reason I call this a conversion is that the SEO has done its job and from there it’s up to the business to convert the lead into actual business.

Once this happens you have a successful SEO campaign and your salesperson does the rest, but it’s important to understand the difference there because you’d be surprised by the amount of businesses who have a successful SEO campaign but blame the SEO when they don’t convert their leads for reasons as simple as not picking up the phone when it rings, not responding to emails promptly, or not having the right person to pick up the phone and make that sale.

Some of the most important things you could possibly have in place are a good salesperson, an available salesperson and an informative auto-reply to email enquiries letting them know that you have received their email and will get back to them as soon as is humanly possible with a phone number in case their matter is time sensitive. If you don’t have these things in place in conjunction with a successful SEO campaign then don’t blame (and subsequently ditch) the SEO campaign! If you have traffic and leads coming through but no business, look elsewhere for the problem!

Obviously it’s possible to pick the wrong keywords and receive irrelevant leads, but if you’re following the process in part one of this blog series then you’d be hard pressed to do so.
You might be asking yourself what the best way to get an idea of conversion rates for keywords before spending all that time and effort on SEO however, as you should be. Diving blind into something as substantial as SEO can be a very bad idea if it’s not obvious what the best keywords for your business are.

Hands down, the best way to do this is to run an AdWords campaign for a while in order to get exactly this information. AdWords conversion data is extremely valuable because you don’t have to wait to get to the front page and see how traffic behaves in relation to particular keywords. You’ll have to pay for the clicks, but that data is perfect for basing an SEO campaign on.

So once you have great conversion data and you have an SEO campaign converting into leads what then? Stay tuned for Part 3 where we’ll deal with exactly this!

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