How Effective is SEO in Increasing Sales?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an effective marketing strategy that goes above and beyond traditional advertising. The problem is that, unlike the other areas of your business, it can be difficult to understand just how SEO adds to your revenue stream. While your individual products and your paid advertising campaigns will have a clearly defined ROI, your SEO strategy is driven by data, and that means technical jargon and confusion are all too common. However, the link between SEO and your sales figures can be clearly defined and proven, and it mostly just means knowing where to look when assessing your revenue and discovering improved ways to increase those sales.

Traffic Generation

Of course, the number of people that visit your website (your website traffic) is not in itself an indication that you will be making sales. Just having plenty of website visitors does not mean that your sales will increase. However, traffic is a vital component of your SEO strategy, and will be one of the measurements of your ROI. That’s because by having low traffic numbers, you are clearly making it harder for paying customers to find you when they have need of you. You will make it more difficult to sell to someone if they cannot find you, so traffic is a key data-set that needs to be prioritised. By becoming more visible on search engines, you can increase traffic, meaning that you have a prime opportunity to drive a sale.

The Right Audience

All of the traffic to your website will be for nothing if you’re attracting the wrong audience. If you want to generate sales, then getting visitors to your website through an improved SEO marketing strategy is only part of the battle. You need to make sure you are encouraging visits from:

• The target audience of your brand
• People that are likely to engage with your brand in the form of shares, comments, reviews, and purchases
• Impulse visitors that are looking specifically to make a purchase
• Repeat customers who buy

If your SEO is optimized to actively encourage these site visitors, then the ROI on your SEO strategy will start to improve in ways that are reflected in your bottom line. Of course, knowing that you need to attract the right type of site visitors is very different from actually achieving it. In order to ensure that you get the right people visiting your website, then you need to:

• Conduct in-depth customer and competitor research. For customer research, this means more than collecting data from existing customers of your brand, but your overall industry customers as well.
• Network with industry leaders and news sites in your sector.
• Making sure that your website works on a technical level, with key areas such as loading speed and the customer journey to the shopping cart as easy as possible.
• Using your on-site content to provide the value that site visitors need, when they need it. By giving them the right value at the right time, you will be making the most of your digital presence and improving the chances of making a sale.

Ongoing work is essential for fully optimized SEO that converts into sales. Failing to keep up with the changing demands of search engines and customer expectations is the fastest way to see your SEO strategy fail to land, and for those learning how to increase sales through improved SEO, keeping up to date on new and relevant trends has never been more important.

The Streamlined User Experience

While the customer journey has been mentioned, as part of the customer experience your technical SEO needs to be as flawless as possible. Never underestimate just how much search engines will track and reward (or penalise) your result rankings based on the experience that a customer has on your pages. This comes down to Google Analytics, which is a useful tool to get used to using. Of course, Google wants you to use this tool because they want their users to be satisfied with the service that they provide, and they know that the more you know about the existing impact your website has, the more likely that you can make tweaks and changes that will positively impact the user experience. This works for you as well, because the better experience that a visitor has on your website, the more likely that they will:

• Buy a product
• Let their friends know about you
• Try something new from you
• Return to your pages again in the future
• Leave positive reviews

If your website is providing a negative experience because you have failed to optimize your SEO and understanding of customer needs, then your revenues will suffer. That’s because SEO improves the customer experience by:

• Making users and search engines understand what each page of your website is.
• Creates a more seamless navigation process for the search engines to trawl through in order to provide the best page of results.
• Taking advantage of your knowledge of your target audience means that you can optimize the tone of voice and content types that you use to communicate.
• Highlighting just what information a consumer needs when they visit your site, meaning that you can make more use of data when it comes to knowing how to increase sales
• Provide a more professional (and therefore trustworthy) website

By using your SEO strategy to improve the customer experience, you are also making it easier for search engines to understand your pages and how they provide value to search engine users.

SEO = Time = Profit

The more time that you can keep a customer on your website, the more chances that you have to encourage and promote a sale. Having a high bounce rate means that site visitors are not getting the value that they are looking for, and having a high bounce rate also negatively affects your search engine performance. By designing your website around the SEO fundamentals, you will improve your sales figures because:

• You will encourage micro-conversions that may lead to a future sale
• Websites with strong SEO are better able to guide and direct users to those all-important calls to action that can help build up a loyal customer base
• They make it easier to understand the analytics of your customer journey and identify any potential roadblocks that are affecting your sales
• You are narrowing down the options that visitors have on each page so that you can more easily guide their journey

A well-designed website that has been optimized for search engines can improve conversions considerably. By reducing your customer churn, you can have a very real impact on your sales figures.

As much as SEO can increase sales, it can also reduce the costs of other marketing strategy options. While costly marketing strategies like PPC can have a more immediate impact on your revenue, they are not as effective in the long-term when it comes to building a loyal fan base and improving your performance on organic search results. That’s because paid advertising is like throwing out a wider net with larger holes, whereas SEO marketing means pinpointing the right people at the right time throughout every touchpoint on the customer journey. Prioritizing SEO marketing means that you will have a much firmer foundation on which to build your brand and your profits.

Article originally posted on www.clickintelligence.co.uk