I was recently talking to a local small business owner
. They were proudly telling me about how many visitors they attract to their online store. They'd apparently hired an SEO consultant to improve their search engine rankings and were now seeing the benefits. They were getting thousands of extra visitors each month.
It all sounded fantastic and I was keen to discover what sort of increase in profits had been seen as a result. The answer to this question was, however, considerably less impressive. It soon became clear that there had hardly been any increase in sales and that the profits generated weren't even covering the costs associated with hiring the team of SEO experts.
Unfortunately, this situation is typical of that associated with so many small businesses. They often have great websites that have involved investing a large amount of time and money. Those websites may not receive too many visitors, often because they've simply not been optimised correctly. The best web design teams often know suprisingly little about search engine optimisation.
The small business owner may become frustrated by the lack of visitors. It may soon become clear that the website is worthless if it's not contributing to the business. At this point the decision may be made to hire an expert. This makes sense. SEO is a specialised skill and there's clearly value to be found in making use of someone else's expertise.
Some SEO companies are better than others. Some may produce very few obvious results. Others will lead to a dramatic increase in visitor numbers. But if you can't convert those visitors into customers then you still won't be able to make very much progress. This is the reality of search engine optimisation right now.
You need to be sure that your website is set up correctly, ensuring that you can convert visitors into customers. Is your website great at helping you to make sales? It really needs to be.
But you also need to make sure that your SEO strategy is effective. A high quality consultant will be looking to help you generate more customers and more sales. Receiving more visitors to your site will add relatively little value unless those visitors are going to be spending money.
This is a simple point but it is one that's worth remembering. Focus on getting more customers, more leads and more sales. Forget about visitor numbers. You'll rather have less visitors and more sales.