Quote:
Originally Posted by moonviper
I work with a company that is relatively new to the internet (just over a year) and was hired on to facilitate their expansion. In the course of this year, we've built over 170 different sites for this company. We've gotten really good SEO results, and have managed to get top ten placement on literally thousands of keywords that actually matter (and several, of course, that never get searched).
Now that I feel we've got a pretty good handle on the SEO aspects of this company's business, I'm finding that doing more optimization only brings small results. (I'll get another search term to the top, and get maybe 5 more visitors per day, etc) I feel we've pretty much reached the limit, as far as the SEO aspect of promoting this company's sites, and I'm trying to convince them to undertake some other avenues like, affiliate programs, newsletters, and other such things, but am having a very difficult time.
The answer I get from the owner of the company is that he just wants "a few more" things done, which are SEO related. I've been working with this company for over a year now, and have a partnership stake in it. I've got over 10 years experience on the internet, while the owner of the other company couldn't even send an email a couple of years ago.
In short, the question is: How to you convince a client that there are more than one ways to promote a website, and that sometimes, a certain type of promotion has achieved it's maximum potential?
Thanks
Eric |
GREAT QUESTION!!!
Somebody that looks beyond
SEO, I like that a lot.
However, I don't agree too much with your choice to go for newsletters and affiliate programs. Those can be a dissapointment. Since you have so many visitors, if I were you, I would focus on conversion rates first.
Newsletters don't always work, it depends a lot on what you sell and pretty much always you need to give it a personal touch which means you spend a lot of time on it. Not saying here that it is a bad idea, but it wouldn't be first on my list, and it is a hard sale to your business partners (believe me, I have that experience too.) Affiliate programs are also a lot of work for a relatively small chance of success. You'll find you have a really hard time to find enough affiliates interested to get enough sales from it to justify the investment ($$ and time).
But you have the luxury, an asset, from which you can get much more results. It's your current visitors.
I don't know what your current conversion rate is of course. Perhaps you don't know your self either. Do you measure it? How many visitors on average per sale?
Let's assume you have a conversion rate of 0.25% (i.e 400 visitors per sale). If you could do something to your website that turns that 0.25% into 0.75%, what would that really mean? I know it seems obvious, but many businesses never thought about it untill it's presented to them. It means an increase of 200% in sales. That tiny half % of increase in conversion rate actually represents you sell 3 times as much as before. Keep in mind that even if you just manage to turn that 0.25% into 0.3 %, you already have an increase of 20% in sales.
Now the most important question is: How difficult is it to increase the conversion rate?
Learn everything you can about split testing, try different versions of pages, different locations in pages of certain content, simplify the checkout process (if you sell online), make sure your phone number is easy to find, reduce the number of fields in contact forms. Add trust marks (logos of what ever you´re associated to, well known suppliers, etc.),.. there are so many things you can do to increase conversion rates and the advantage is, especially with the fact that you already have so many visitors, that it is not expensive to do and you probably know after a couple of days already what works and what doesn't,.. then just repeat the process again, try to every time do a little better.
And this you can easily sell to your business partner(s). More sales without extra costs is always interesting.