SEO and Conversion

                                                                       Paul Speese

SEO-It is now all about conversion.  So over the last 4-5 months we have written blogs, assembled FAQ's, continually added new content to the website, created Keyword and search term lists over and over.  After all of that work and time invested we are somewhere on the continuum of what I would call success.  We have reached a level where the majority of our keywords and search terms put us on page 1 of Google.  We are less successful on exact match part numbers, which is frustrating but my sense from watching the activity very closely is that most people search part number families, part number roots, or the overall specification.  So, without fooling myself I think we are in a good place at this point.  So, we get anywhere from 20-40 people a day searching for something relevant to what we sell and they land on one of our pages.  Now what happens?  Do they fill out a quote request?  Do they send an email?  Do they pick up the phone and call?
The answer is no, or more accurately not often enough.  We get a small fraction of visitors actually contacting us, at least that we are aware.  This week we had 3 companies search the exact same part number, an unusual part number that we happen to stock in volume.  All 3 companies hit our website multiple times within 24 hours, did they call us?  Did they send a quote? Did they reach out and ask the obvious technical questions?  NO, NO, NO.  Interestingly, what did happen is that we got an order for the part from a small US based company that had never heard of us.  They must have received information from one of the 3 large companies to buy from us.  You could say that was successful conversion, but our goal is not just a sale but customer acquisition as well.  The 3 European companies searching the part were all in our sweet spot and selling to a proxy here in the US doesn't provide the inroads we desire.
So, again the question arises.  If only a small fraction of the companies who land on our site convert that search to action of some meaningful type, if only to tell us who they are, email address or name, then is this all a waste of time?  We sat around Friday brainstorming on how to increase conversions.  Do we need more and better content?  Maybe.  Do we need to offer free freight?  Maybe.  Do we need to offer discounts for new customers?  Maybe.  I think we will try all three of those ideas over the next couple months and see if that improves our conversion rate.  I would welcome any suggestions.

Paul Speese

Brave new world of SEO

Paul Speese-COO

Part of my responsibilities in my latest assignment are to create a new web site and to generate as much new business from it as possible.  The best way for me to accomplish that objective is to have the largest number of Keywords important to the client land on page 1 of Google, Bing and other leading search engines.  I am about 2 weeks from launching the new web site and I can tell you that I have spent a lot of time and effort to understand the dynamics of Google's search algorithm and through hit and miss tactics we appear to have some success.  There are 3 important elements in successful SEO that I have learned.  The first is to have the content that you want found prominently displayed and searchable in both dynamic and static pages on the web site.  The second is to use Blogging to reinforce the most important content.  The third is to continually update and add new content to both the web site and Blogs.  Using these simple but time consuming tactics we are now on page 1 of Google search results for approximately 75% of our top 200 keywords.  Not bad for 4-5 months worth of work.  We are also on page 1 for approximately 65% of about 45,000 part numbers that are important to the client's core business.

The next challenge is conversion.  We are getting approximately 35 hits per day on the site.  Almost all of them are relevant to the business, we get approximately 5 per week to reach through and contact us for  a quote or other questions.  How do we increase that conversion rate?  That is the key question and will be the subject of my follow up post.

Paul Speese