It might seem odd for someone who leads a company that provides SEO (search engine marketing) to say “Ultimately Better Search Rankings and More Traffic Don’t Matter” but hear me out for a moment…
We have a client…
…who emailed us recently expressing concern that they didn’t think they had seen much of an increase in traffic since starting their latest marketing effort with us. Before we started this marketing effort, we developed a plan to measure ROI. Each month we would report website visitors and online forms completed in a spreadsheet and they would report online leads, total leads and new clients.
After several months, the client has yet to report any new lead or client data. I understand, this can be challenging. It takes time and effort and everyone is already busy. But the result is the client doesn’t have any way to effectively measure the ROI of the campaign.
By definition, a well-targeted campaign reaches just the people most likely to “convert” (to a sale, a new student, or a church member).
For example…
Let’s say your website gets 900-1100 unique visitors a month. If you do a marketing campaign that results in 100 new visitors, you may not even notice the increase in traffic. But if it’s a well-targeted campaign and 20% of those people fill out a form requesting more info and 20% of those people become clients, new students, or a part of your church, that’s 4 new clients/students/members a month!
If yours is a small organization only getting around 1,000 website visitors a month, 48 new clients/students/members a year would huge! And a good return on investment.
(If yours is a larger organization, scale that by a factor of 10, 100 or whatever is appropriate.)
The point is while good search rankings and more website traffic are good, they are a means to an end. Not only do they not tell the whole story, they don’t tell the most important part of the story.
Ultimately, you want more clients, students, volunteers, donors or church members.
If you want to know if your website, search marketing and other marketing are working, you have to track, measure and evaluate how many clients, students, volunteers, donors or church members they are producing.
So, how’s that going? Are you tracking the offline results needed to evaluate your online marketing? Why or why not?
If that’s something you’d like help with, please contact us. But know that while we can help you develop a strategy to get the offline data you need to measure online ROI, ultimately you have to put in the time and effort to get that data.
3 Comments
Very interesting post Paul. Well researched case study. Experimenting new things and measure their results, It is called search engine optimization expert.
This is why going for those "big keywords" is such a folly. Not only are they typically extremely difficult to rank for, but the traffic you get for them often ends up being more or less useless. For the same amount of time and money you spend ranking #3 for some keyword, you could be ranking #1 for 20 long tail keywords that despite sending less traffic, send MORE leads than the big keyword.
Paul , thanks for the comment. I wouldn't necessarily say going for big keywords is a folly or that their traffic is useless. To be honest I don't really know, and what may be true for one industry may not be true for another. The important thing is to measure the actually results that matter – sales, leads or whatever – and not just rankings.