“Get to the top of Google!”
How many times have you seen an SEO firm promise that? And for just $49?! Where do I sign up?!
Business owners have been inundated with the jargon of Web marketing, but it’s easy to get the wrong idea about what a lot of it means. (Hint: SEO does not mean “getting to the top of Google,” whatever that means!) So, I’d like to go through some of the tools available to us when marketing online and talk about what they are, who they’re for, and so on. By the end, you should have a handle on the most common jargon in the field, and you’ll be ready to understand articles on specific topics, like whether putting keywords in bold/italics is good for SEO.
Search engine optimization (SEO): The mother of all confusion
There is so much misinformation about what SEO is or isn’t that I’d like to just push the Reset button and begin with this:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your site’s visibility in (you guessed it) search engines.
Who cares, you ask. Why would you care about your visibility in the search engines? First of all, the more your site shows up in the search engine results pages (known as the SERPs) for your potential customers’ queries, the more likely they are to a) know your company exists and b) actually buy from you.
Second, the closer a site is to the #1 ranking for a particular query, the more users will visit it (generally). SEOMoz studied nearly 15,000 queries and found that in general, the top result for a query will be clicked by over 50% of visitors, while the 10th result will be clicked by only about 10%. So, in theory, if you could move your site from 10th to 1st place for a particular query, you would see about 5 times as much traffic from people searching for that.
Results from the SEOMoz study. Moving from 10th to 1st results in about 5 times as much traffic for a query.
In this way, a Web site that’s really strong in the search engines gets “free advertising”—high rankings for terms that you might otherwise have had to pay to advertise on! (This is known as your “organic traffic”—visitors from a search engine page that you did not pay for advertising on.) Furthermore, if you have a lot pages that rank well for a lot of queries, you’ll have a high “domain authority” score. That just means that (in the absence of contradicting evidence) the search engines assume your content is good. That’s a big deal, because it’s very different from the default assumption, which is closer to “who the hell is this, and why are they creating Web pages?!”
What SEO is not
In the definition above, I emphasize that SEO is a process. There are too many misconceptions here to rebut them all, but this means SEO is not:
- a plugin for WordPress (or any other content management tool),
- a set of HTML tags to apply to your Web pages,
- a black art focused on manipulating Google’s algorithms, or
- a one-time act that someone did for your site five years ago.
Instead, the process of SEO consists primarily of getting more people to visit and like your site. This is something that you’ll need to do continually, but if you do it, the rest will follow.
What is “the rest”? When people visit and like your site, they are more likely to:
- link back to your site from a Web site that they control (known as “link building” and historically one of the biggest determinants of ranking in Google),
- share your page on social media sites, and
- come back to your site in the future.
Providing the content that gets visits, links, and ultimately revenue
Now, if you want to have people visit your site, you need to have content there that is worth visiting. Generally, that means having lots of content (articles, blog posts, white papers, or whatever else “content” might mean for your site) that is relevant to your would-be customers.
This is known as “content marketing.” The idea goes something like this:
Suppose your company sells mattresses. You want to attract people to your site who are interested in (duh!) buying mattresses. You know that a common thing those people search for is something along the lines of “how to choose the best mattress.” Content marketing is all about giving people what they’re looking for, so you write an article entitled (creatively) “How to Choose the Best Mattress.” At this point, Google will analyze your page, see that the content is all about choosing mattresses, and show it to people who search for your targeted phrase.
The more those people read, the more they link back to your site, and thus the better you rank in the search engines.
So, that’s a 50,000 foot overview of what search engine optimization is, and how it’s done.
To learn more about what goes into SEO, take a look at the Search Engine Ranking Factors from Moz.
[Hint: Did you see that? That content from Moz was so great that I had to share it with you. Google will now raise its estimation of that page by a tiny bit because it saw that someone else (me) liked it well enough to share it on their own page!]
Jargon review
- Search engine optimization (SEO): the process of improving your site’s visibility in search engines.
- Search engine results page (SERP): the page that Google (or others) display when a person searches for a particular query. Thus, the SERPs for the queries “build a hot air balloon” and “chocolate chip cookie recipe” are completely different. If your company sells mattresses, you probably want to improve your position in the SERP for the query “best queen mattress.”
- Organic traffic: The number of visitors that a search engine sends to your site without you paying for advertisements. This is the total traffic from a search engine minus traffic from your paid ads.
- Domain authority: a measure of how “trusted” a site is, based on the number and authority of other sites linking to it.
- Link building: the process of getting other sites to link to your own (to improve your rankings). Often this is accomplished by “link bait”—content designed specifically to get others to link to it. (This leads us to my favorite bit of jargon… It turns out that the majority of links on the Web are controlled by a very small percentage of users, since not many people run their own Web sites. This select group is known as the “Linkerati.”)
- Content marketing: using content on your Web site (like blog posts, articles, etc.) to appeal to Web users who are not necessarily interested in your brand, but are interested in your area of expertise. The idea is that you can attract customers who otherwise wouldn’t have been interested in your company. This is as much a pure marketing strategy as it is an SEO strategy.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO): It’s not just for televangelists
All this talk of content marketing brings us to the second major tool in the Web marketing toolkit: conversion rate optimization.
Here, we define a conversion as something that occurs whenever a visitor to your site takes some action that you wanted them to. We can talk about both major conversions (like buying your product or contacting a sales agent) and minor conversions (like signing up for your email list). Thus, your conversion rate is the portion of your visitors that convert (calculated as the number of converting users divided by total number of users).
So, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of improving the likelihood that your visitors will convert.
What factors affect your conversion rate?
Nearly any feature of your Web site can influence your conversion rate. A few of the most common are:
- Design—does your Web site as a whole convey the brand you are trying to establish? Is it clearly professional? Is it visually appealing?
- Usability—this includes both general usability (Is your text readable? Do you have broken links?), information architecture (Is your site structured in a logical way?), and usability with respect to sales (Is it easy to figure out where to buy your products? Is your checkout process simple?).
- Quality of content—do people who read your content (like blog posts, articles, etc.) come away feeling like you are an expert in your domain, and someone worth trusting?
- Quantity of content—do you have enough content to appeal to your potential customers through all stages of the purchasing process?
- Quality of sales copy—when you deliberately ask people for a sale, do you do so in a way that is persuasive and effective?
As you can imagine, any one of those factors could be covered in a book of its own. We’ll tackle a few of them in future articles in this series.
Using the funnel metaphor
In addition to thinking about the specific aspects of your site listed above, we can think about which stage of the buying process a visitor is in when viewing a particular page. To this end, we like to visualize visitors as passing through a funnel, as seen below.
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| A visualization of the conversion funnel for a generic product |
At the top of the funnel are people who are only sort of interested in products similar to yours; some portion of those people move to the next stage in the funnel, where they’re interested in your product in particular. People “fall out” of the funnel until the final stage where some portion actually end up buying your product. (Note that your business’s funnel may look totally different than this example!)
The insight this metaphor provides is that if you increase the number of people at any stage of the funnel (e.g., by persuading more people who are interested in similar products to become interested in your product), you’ll directly affect your bottom line. That is, if you previously had 500 people per month in a particular stage and made $500 dollars, increasing that to 600 people per month in that stage will (generally) result in making $600 per month—more people in any stage of the funnel results in more people at the end of the funnel (the buying stage).
In general, if you see a sharp drop-off at any stage of your funnel, that’s probably your low-hanging fruit as far as improving your conversion rate goes.
Test before you change!
Now, suppose you had some ideas about how you might improve one of those factors influencing your conversion rate, or about how you might improve a particular part of your funnel. Do you just make the change and call it good?
(Don’t you hate leading questions?)
Of course not! Because on the Web, we can gather huge amounts of data on how visitors interact with your business. Using an analytics tool (like the free Google Analytics), you can measure all kinds of things about your site, but most importantly, you can measure how they convert.
Using split-testing (otherwise known as A/B testing), you can essentially flip a coin each time a visitor comes to a particular page; if it’s heads, you show them the old (and, you believe, sub-optimal) page, and if it’s tails, you show them the new (hopefully better!) version. Then, your analytics tool will see how often people convert after seeing each version. If the new version is significantly better, you can decide with confidence that it will improve your revenue, and then make that version of the page the new, “official” one.
(Note that there are a lot of messy statistical details relating to actually making this decision. Look for a future article on A/B testing.)
The good news is that tools like Google Analytics make this testing super easy, so you have no excuse not to use them!
Jargon review
- Analytics: analyzing data to draw conclusions.
- Conversion: an action taken by a visitor that you encourage. This might be a primary goal of your site (like selling a product) or something that only supports your primary goals (like signing up for an email list).
- Copy: the text on your Web site. Copywriting with conversions in mind is focused on persuading (or “nudging”) users to take some particular action.
- Information architecture: the organization of your site into sections and subsections. For instance, if you sell retail products, you need to give a lot of consideration to how you categorize and display those products to make sure that people can find what they’re looking for.
- Conversion funnel: a metaphor for visualizing how people go from being “cold” leads to actually purchasing on your site.
- Split testing (a.k.a. A/B testing): a means of determining statistically whether a new version of a Web page results in a higher conversion rate than the existing version of that page.
The big picture
Conversion rate optimization and SEO are opposite sides of the same coin. Suppose you somehow had an awful Web site that nonetheless had fantastic standing in the search engines for many queries. You would get a huge amount of traffic from the search engines, but once people actually got to your site, they would never be persuaded to buy from you!
Your site’s overall revenue, then, will be defined by this equation:
Visitors × conversion rate × average conversion value = total revenue
The number of visitors will be influenced by a number of factors, but your organic traffic should be one of the biggest components. Your average conversion value (how much a single conversion is worth to your business, on average) is influenced by the price of your products and the relative popularity of your expensive products compared to your cheaper offerings. (We’ll talk about pricing and such in a future post in this series.)
So, if you want to improve your revenue, you can focus on improving the number of visitors to your site (for instance, via SEO), on your conversion rate (CRO), or on your average conversion value (I wish I had a nice acronym for this).
Now, it’s important to note that these factors are not independent. If you could increase your visitors ten-fold for 24 hours (by hitting the front page of CNN, for instance), your conversion rate would almost certainly drop—your audience would have changed dramatically, and it’s unlikely that they will purchase in the same way as your normal audience. Likewise, your average conversion value would change, since different products would appeal to that new market.
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