Everyone loves the idea of being number one, to be ‘top of the charts’, to be looked up to. In today’s ultra competitive market place, where you’re now having to battle on a global basis, organisations will invest huge amounts of time and energy on SEO – on competing their way to the top of the search engines.

Maybe you enjoy being top 3 on Google, number one on Bing, or first page of Yahoo. That’s great. Ask yourself though – and answer honestly – are the keywords related to your successes really winning you good quality traffic? Is this real success?

Often you will notice the terms companies use to claim high placements aren’t necessarily particularly competitive terms within their industry at all. Yes, the search engines do act as assessments of a site’s relevance – BUT only against specific search terms. If you’re an SEO or Internet Marketing specialist then first page Google or Bing for the terms ‘SEO’ or ‘search engine optimisation,’ ‘web marketing’ or ‘Internet marketing’ would be great news. You would be reaching exactly the sort of audience you want on highly competitive terms.

Conversely, what’s the point to an SEO company in having a Google top 10 on the terms that can’t genuinely help their business? Would being number one for “carp fishing” or “jam making” really do you any favours? What’s the point in visitors bouncing after 5 seconds because your site doesn’t meet their needs? All you have achieved through badly deployed, ill-focused SEO is to interrupt the browsing of people most unlikely to be interested in who you are or what you do.

When it comes to business profitability and ROI, an unhealthy concern for hitting the top of the search engines might not actually be in your best business interests. Yes, of course high search engine positioning puts you in front of many more people than if your site was languishing on page 14, and yes, being ignored is hell (it’s also highly unprofitable). The question you need to ask yourself, when considering all these new ‘eyeballs’ is, ‘are these the sort of visitors, that I want to visit my site?’ In other words, are you reaching your target audience? Are these the kind of visitors who are interested in what you have to say and in what you have to sell?

Focus your energy on people who do care – your target audience. Be creative in your keyword selection, focus on landing pages and go for long tail terms by deploying a wider, shallower semantic net.

Traffic is vanity – conversions are sanity

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 11:40 am and is filed under SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.