SEO alone does not increase profitability!

[greggaskill]

Whether you have a new website or have had one for some time now you need to get some traffic to it so you can start to see some revenue and get profitable. Good idea! The first thing to recognize is: increasing traffic does not increase revenue - those are two related but very different endeavors.

Getting good rankings brings more visitor traffic to your site, but turning those visitors into customers and making the site profitable is something more complex. Often we are approached by a potential client wanting us to perform Search Engine Optimization services, believing this will be the magic bullet to their success. In our initial conversation they realize their success online involves much more than just SEO.

Although there is much complexity to get things right, overall it’s really pretty simple when you think about it. Prior to getting any traffic to your site, you must clearly know who you want to come there, what you want them to do, and adjust your site to meet the needs of your visitors from their perspective. Once these steps are in place, then should you put the effort forward to attract the right visitors to your site.

Adjusting the website to meet the needs of your visitors is called Usability Analysis, and is where we look at your site from your visitors’ perspective. To help us better understand, we look at your site statistics for some clues such as -do visitors currently leave within 10 seconds? Where are the visitors coming to your site from and what website pages are they delivered to upon arrival? How relevant is the site to their needs? Next, we want to improve the interaction with your visitors in ways they feel valuable. Here it is important to pick two or three goals and then make them measurable such as a download, a purchase, or a subscription to a newsletter.

Once these steps have been taken, our SEO work will produce much better results as much of this work feeds into the keyword selections, choices of social networks to utilize, and Search Engine Marketing efforts.

Here’s to your success!

[DannyKelman SoW]

I agree.
I think the most effective way to generate revenue from having a site fully optimized is pairing that with a solid sales process. Such as:

free item: capture lead. then the upsell (large ticket item) then the down sell (small ticket) if they still don't purchase you always have their email to go into your database for promo offer or even for selling to them a second or third time.

That process is the key to generating revenue from selling products online.

[latinahottie]

great tips greg! my success formula: SEO + clever branding and marketing + a little perseverance.

[flnazrael]

Case in point... one of my SEO clients has seen his traffic increase by about ten times what he had when we started - with NO increase in sales. I told him to take a break with me and hire a usability/conversion rate guru.