Rankings, Conversions and SEO Accountability

When top level management is looking for a scapegoat to “pin to the wall” about deviating sales conversions for your website, don’t blame the SEO guy for merely doing his job.

What the F@$k? Who's at Fault Here?

SEO’s purpose is to deliver traffic – if a new visitor bounces because the page lacked congruence, focus or a strong call to action or action words, then call it what it is (a lack of conversion rate optimization). This is the real reason why most landing pages fail.

For those of you itching to jump into the mix, this post from the past amply named >>> Don’t Blame the SEO <<< summarizes the pitfalls of looking in the wrong place for the right solution. Despite wishful thinking, landing page optimization and conversion rate optimization are each respectively their own animal, which must be tamed prior to reaping ROI consistently.

Why Rankings and Conversions are Unique

Just like you can lead a horse to water and can’t make them drink. Sure, you implement SEO and drive 1000 visitors to a squeeze page or landing page only to have 999 leave. The medium is not infallible. The moral of the story is, make sure you have something worth ranking, before you engage the SEO process, and furthermore, don’t be afraid to change the creative, graphics or layout to split test to “beat the control”, e.g. “find the best combination” to declare an undisputed champion page variation that converts in double digits.

Search share for how consumers find a page is dwindling, this means that conversion cues, relevance, cultivating trust signals and SEO web design must all work together in a cohesive manor in order to create (1) a splendid user experience and (2) translate into sales.

Here are a few additional resources on the topic:

And last but not least, a link again to the post that inspired this brief sprite of an idea – Don’t Blame the SEO!

Enjoy… Comments are welcomed and appreciated.

-Jeffrey