Search Engine Optimization - High Quantities of Site Visitors May Not be Enough

The primary goal of most new web site owners is to get their site registered with as many search engines as possible in hopes of getting as many site visitors as possible. The idea behind this is "the more visitors my site has, the higher my sales will be." Surprisingly, however, this is often not true.

The e-commerce industry is leading the way with a new discovery that applies to all site owners -- e-commerce or not -- and this "new discovery" is something that Marketing people have known for years: When it comes to site visitors, your best bet is quality, not quantity, and there is no substitute for using good, old-fashioned targeted marketing methods to attract high quality visitors to your site.

People in the e-commerce industry study every aspect of the online shopping experience in detail, and they have created statistics for just about everything -- number of visitors, time on site, shopping cart abandon rate, number of page views -- you name it. But one of the most important statistics is turning out to be conversion rate, as in "how many site visitors convert into actual, paying customers?" By studying this, the e-commerce industry has discovered that higher quantities of visitors often do not translate into higher sales -- what is more important is attracting high quality visitors to your site: Visitors who have a higher chance of actually wanting to buy what you are selling, rather than just lots of random visitors.

To attract higher-quality site visitors, you should consider using a combination of targeted marketing methods, including online ads, pay-per-click schemes, personal referrals, print ads or even direct mailers to appropriate mailing lists (I am talking about legal snail mailers sent to carefully targeted customer lists, NOT spam).

I wanted to share this information with you because I believe that the concepts of "conversion rate" and "targeted marketing" do not apply only to e-commerce sites -- I believe it applies to all of us who want to attract paying customers to our sites, no matter whether we're selling goods or our own services. Happy selling!