Question: I’m winning at web marketing. My site does great with search engine rankings and I’m getting a decent amount of traffic, but I can’t seem to get anyone to convert. What gives?
Answer: You’re losing at web marketing.
At first glance, it’s kind of hard to see how someone can be both winning and losing at web marketing at the same time. But when you consider all the various aspects of marketing, the picture becomes more clear. Web marketing has become a very broad spectrum of strategies all geared at helping you succeed in various areas.
For years, businesses have focused on search engine optimization (SEO) as a means to improve their rankings and traffic. But there is more to marketing than traffic from the search engines, to say nothing about traffic from social media and other channels.
All that traffic does you no good if it’s not turning into customers. Therein lies the problem.
You’re winning at getting traffic but losing at getting customers. We call that win-lose scenario. What you want may be a cliche, but that makes it no less valid. Go for the win-win.
The fact of the matter is all web marketing has to be win-win in order to be successful at all. If you win at traffic and lose at conversions, you lose. If you win at conversions but lose at traffic, you still lose. You need both.
If you’re facing a situation such as this, you’re not alone. Its actually quite a common problem. Focusing on exposure and getting traffic to your site is an important part of web marketing. But failure to generate conversions means that somewhere along the line, the entire website is failing.
This is where usability issues come into play. Where SEO and social media often focus the potential visitor or prospect, usability and conversion optimization focus on the true visitor. More specifically, they are focused on turning each visitor into a customer. Evaluating your website against the Conversion Optimization & Usability section of the Best Damn Web Marketing Cheatsheet will give you a good idea of where your issues are and how to fix them.
The question is, which comes first? I would argue both. It makes no sense to drive traffic to your site while your conversion numbers are low. On the other hand, it’s near impossible to improve your conversion numbers without traffic. You need that traffic to test changes in the user experience. Without that traffic, you can never know if any change is a valuable change or not.
So go for the win-win. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=”@StoneyD”]Get your marketing team focused on improving traffic and conversions. Both are essential for your success[/inlinetweet], because a win in one is still a loss for both.