Every week we meet with business owners from a variety of industries. Ranging from golf courses to consumer goods to assembly line equipment manufacturers. Through our discovery process we want to understand things like company history, competition, unique value propositions and get to know the business as well as we can. The most important thing we want to uncover through this process is their digital marketing goals. More often than not their goal is to be position 1, page 1. In terms of digital marketing this is about as good as it gets and it sounds like a pretty clear objective but… is that really the goal?
Getting to truth.
Don’t get me wrong, page 1 for a Google search is great but what is the real objective? It’s important to ask the question, “why do you want to be on page 1?” Most business owners can’t answer that question. From there we start to dig deeper. Let’s assume position 1 page 1 will get you more traffic. Great! So more traffic is the goal? Nope not necessarily. So why is more traffic important? The more traffic a website gets the more opportunities to convert visitors to leads. More leads equal more sales. So your SEO goal isn’t necessarily page 1… it’s more sales. We can help. Page 1, position 1 may be a milestone to help you achieve your goal but in reality, does it really matter how your visitors find you as long as they’re qualified and they convert?
Drive traffic and convert.
There are two main components that go into an digital marketing strategy.
1. Drive traffic to the website.
2. Convert the traffic to sales or leads.
The tactics used for each component vary depending on a variety of factors but both are equally important. You can increase your unique visitors by 200% but if the traffic doesn’t convert to sales or leads, the number of visitors is irrelevant. On the other hand, if you have the same amount of traffic but increase the conversion rate by 25%, you may be able to see an increase in sales and we move toward achieving the goal. In order to get more sales, we need to increase quality traffic to your website and give them a compelling reason to take action.
A numbers game.
Like sales, digital marketing is a numbers game. We know that if your website ranks position 1, page 1 in organic search results the click through rate is around 25% with the average paid ad click through rate of 2%. We also know that an average conversion rate for a website is about 2%. So we approach an digital marketing strategy to increase one or both of these numbers to help businesses achieve the real goal of more revenue. If there are 10000 monthly searches for your business’s category and you’re page 1, position 1, you would potentially have 2500 visitors to your site that month. Assuming the website is up to par, at a 2% conversion rate, you would generate 50 new sales or leads that month. From there, if take your average internal lead-to-close percentage you can make digital marketing relatively predictable.
Final Thoughts.
Although predictable, the amount of time and effort can vary greatly depending on the industry and competition. It is important to begin the process with research to determine a reasonable time expectation to achieve your digital marketing goals.