SEO Rankings vs Traffic vs Conversions

At Hush Digital, we have a wide range of digital marketing and SEO clients spread over a varied range of industries. From retailers to engineering to local government and education.

Over the past decade, we have worked with them all. All of the clients we work with are different, their businesses are at different growth stages, and they need different levels of digital marketing support.

More recently, we have noticed a significant focus on “rankings”. Clients or potential clients want to rank higher and want to do it faster. While we work to maximise a clients SEO potential, we always remind clients that SEO is a marathon and not a sprint. If there are any shortcuts, we would take them, but to get a good return from SEO you need time.

Sometimes, this can be frustrating for clients. They want or need to be in that top spot ASAP. However, how far can rankings get you? What means most to their business? If the phone is ringing, emails are coming in, and people are purchasing their product, do rankings really matter all the time?

Let’s take a look at the argument;

Being number 1 on Google is great. You’re sat at the top of the worlds biggest search engine for search terms that matter to you. Absolutely fantastic. But let us have a wild guess, you’re not getting the traffic you think you should be getting. You’re worried that something is wrong, well probably, something is. It would help if you thought like the consumer. Your search terms aren’t going to be what your customer searches for. Your search terms could have a really low search volume, which will mean less competition, leading to your spot at the top of Google. What’s the point in being number 1 if no one will see you? Wouldn’t it be better to work on a more competitive keyword with a much higher search volume? This would lead you to a drop in the rankings, but, means you are getting quality traffic which turns in to quality conversions?

SEO Keywords

Taking that on board, let’s have a think about keywords for a second. How many are you tracking? 10, 15, 20, more? Unless you are a content writing machine, let’s be realistic for a minute. Writing new, fresh, relevant content month on month to service hundreds of keywords spread over various locations is going to be nigh on impossible. How do you know if you’re being effective in what you are doing? One month a keyword could be up 10 places, well done! But because of that, another keyword could have dropped 10 places. You’re basically robbing Peter to pay Paul. The next month this could be reversed and so on. So how do you keep track of your hundreds of keywords? Well, you don’t. We advise that you have a streamlined set of keywords, with good search volume relevant to your business. If you do need to have a bigger list, why not look at grouping your keywords by product or industry? That way, you can give specific areas the attention they need, without other keywords affecting their overall ranking positions.

Conversions

It is pointless getting good traffic from a quality keyword list unless you have some sort of tracking in place. Whether you are wanting enquiries via email and phone, footfall in your stores or online purchase, you need to have a robust method for tracking your website and SEO activities. Without this, you could have the strongest ranking positions possible and the highest level of organic traffic coming to your website. Still, actually, you know very little about how well it is working for you. Do you have goals set up in analytics? Have you got in-store measurement in place? Do you ask your customers the good old “how did you hear about us”?. Some tracking methods need time and skill to set up (that’s why the team at Hush are ideally placed to help), but some are really easy and will help you realise what works and what doesn’t.

The Perfect Model

Let’s be honest, rankings, traffic and conversions all work together, or they should. But one shouldn’t be the sole focus without the other. You need to make sure that they feed one another. So the next time you are worried about your rankings, stop and take a look at all the other info you have in front of you. For example; we have a client who on average ranks on the first pages of Google for about 15 keywords. They get moderate organic traffic to their website, but as we have full tracking in place, we can see how many conversions they are getting. Even better, we can actually add value to the conversion activity. This really helps some clients work out their ROI. If each conversion is worth a value, they can see how much they have invested in getting those leads. If they have e-commerce, even better, we can literally see how much has been generated in sales via organic traffic.

SEO can be tough, that’s why our clients come to us. We work to our clients’ requirements to get them the best possible results month on month. We work with our clients as an extension of their marketing departments to get the best possible results.

If you are looking for a new SEO agency, why not give the HushBots a call today to see how we can help?