automaticable

Since my upgrade to lead Organic Search Specialist at BKV I’ve been involved in a number of new business pitches. The most recent I’m a part of is for a new client who has partnered with one of our existing paid search clients.  They are going through a site overhaul and need some heavy duty SEO work. I’m talking a serious overhaul too; the client has over 400 individual domains. While they are working off a newly created template, it is still a beast to manage.

Because the client was a partner of one of our existing paid search clients, our strategy was to project our traffic and sales growth numbers off of our current client. What we quickly found out, however, was that this was not going to be possible.

After working out the numbers–direct traffic, search traffic, sales, leads, conversions, etc.–the figures we were coming out with were not making any sense. Somehow we had projected that with a decrease in traffic we could almost double their sales leads. Obviously something was wrong.

When the conversion rate matters

When we went back to the raw data, comparing our existing client to their partner they referred our SEO services to, we saw what the real problem was. Our prospective client was driving plenty of traffic, both through paid search and SEO. What they weren’t doing, however, was converting. Their conversion rate was nearly 1/4th that of what we were benchmarking from.

Finding this out early gave us a huge advantage, as now we can plan and project off 2 separate strategies, regular SEO and increasing website conversions. Justifying our costs is going to be even easier than we expected.

How to increase organic conversions

Increasing organic conversions is different than improving paid search conversion rates. Instead of calling out deals, adding starbursts, or using any other regular direct response techniques, converting organic traffic takes finesse. Instead of blasting potential customers with advertising techniques, the conversions need to come naturally. This can mean a number of things, but sometimes it’s the simplest techniques that make the biggest difference.

Keep it above the fold

Whatever your conversion method may be, you need to have access to it above the fold. This means the first section a user sees when they load a page needs to include your phone number, address, email signup, web form, or any combination of the above. The client we are pitching had their phone number above the fold, but it was tiny, gray on black text that screamed “IGNORE ME!”  Also, their main conversion metric, web leads through a contact form, wasn’t even available on the home page. After clicking through 2 whole layers the user would find the form…below the fold!

Lesson learned

Increasing the conversion rate for a client like this is going to be a no-brainer. With a few simple techniques, their sales leads should increase 2-3 times what they expected. But what have I learned from this? Most importantly, I’ve learned that SEO is about much more than title tags, descriptions and alt tags. At the end of the day the job of an SEO is to make your client richer through organic traffic. Whether that means #1 rankings, leveraging social media, or increasing conversion rates, the client will be happy if there is more money in their pocket.