Decide on your SEO strategy
Before you begin to develop your own strategy and implementation plan to optimize your website for improved page ranking and more importantly Search Engine Result Page results (SERP), you have to reflect on what is the major objective of your SEO.
Is it your objective to attract more visitors to your site (eyeballs)?
Convert more persons from being a visitor to a subscriber who registers for a free newsletter (lead generation)
Create special pages for existing users to cater to their specific needs (lead management)
Create a loyal stakeholder in your business (a customer)?
The dot com mania period showed a marked change in evaluating a website’s success in terms of number of eyeballs that it could collect, since the model was lacking any perspective as to what these eyeballs or site visits meant to the business.
The attitude was; “If we get enough visits, the money will come.”
That has changed now (to some extent, though I am still amazed at how many people are still traffic focused rather than conversion focused), and most companies realize getting new visitors and making them RETURN visitors is what’s really critical to a business unit’s success.
It is sticky visitors, loyalty and ultimately the financial impact return customers have on its bottom line that really counts.
A business can only go up, down or sideways. In other words, increase, decrease, or stay the same.
A person is only your customer if they take the action you want, ie, buy from you (or perhaps give you their email address in the hope they will eventually buy from you). There is no such thing as ‘they almost bought’. They either did, or didn’t. Eyeballs don’t have wallets.
So you need to have an SEO strategy in place which leads them to the EXACT customer experience you want to create for them, in order to achieve your specific goals (which in most cases is going to be to sell them stuff).
