Search Engine Placement vs. Conversion Rate

Search Engine Spiders Don’t Shop!

Somewhere along the way everyone seems to have forgotten that websites are written for humans, not search engine spiders. You may have heard the phrase “Content is king” in reference to attaining high search engine placement. With this in mind some firms write content only a spider could love or, worse yet, play “tricks” with your content. The logic being, if you gain a high placement and throw enough traffic at a website you will eventually get a sale. Don’t get me wrong, high search engine placement is a good thing (we’re in the business of getting people high placement), but if you lose sight of who your audience really is, your sales conversion rate will suffer.

While content is not only element that affects your sales conversion rate (there’s page load times, navigation, ease of checkout, price etc.), content is a major player in securing a sale, and the first causality of a one-dimensional search engine optimization effort. A myopic approach to SEO, focusing only on how many keyword phrases can be crammed into a single page of content, can not only get you penalized for “keyword stuffing” it leads to clumsy content that stifles sales. Nothing will send a prospective customer packing faster then sales copy that reads like stumbling through a minefield of keyword phrases.

One tactic to employ “spider friendly” copy and avoid massacring good sales copy on the website has been to use “Doorway pages”.

Doorway pages, aka Bridge, Entry, Gateway, Jump, and Portal pages (the name keeps changing to confuse the innocent) are one-way entrances to your website, written specifically for search engine spiders. I am simply amazed that doorway pages are not only still around, but some companies openly extol their virtues even though Google has gone on record stating Doorway pages may cause your website to be excluded from their index (see Google’s comments in My Web Pages Are Not Currently Listed ). The theory behind doorway pages is that you get high placement in the search engine first and worry about making a sale later. This is where the theory is flawed. Even if you manage to sneak doorway pages pass Google, you have to get people interested enough to pass through the doorway.

Keep in mind doorway pages are written specifically for search engine spiders. Now I’m just guessing, but I’ll bet you’ve never sold anything to a search engine spider. Spiders don’t buy products, people do. If the content isn’t compelling enough to hold a person’s interest or generate sales it shouldn’t be associated with your website. If the content does have merit why not include within the website in the first place? Good content and spider friendly content need not be mutually exclusive.

The bottom line is if doorway pages generate a 50% traffic increase for your website, it is a wasted effort if your conversion rate falls by a third1. Your conversion rate is just as important as your search engine placement. Your real objective is to make more money. (Pleases note that some websites do experience a drop in conversion rates after optimization brings more traffic. That’s because traffic was so light before, the only people likely to find your site were those who had stumbled upon it before and, as return visitors, are much more likely to purchase from you than a first time visitor. However, if your website is not logging increasing sales, something is amiss and needs analyzing.)

At Great Plains Internet Solutions, we don’t forget that making more money is the ultimate objective. We monitor not only traffic levels but also time on site, traffic paths return frequency, keywords, referral sources, and, if the website owner provides access to us, sales levels and conversion rates. Empowered with valuable information we can analyze, we can fine tune the website optimization, counsel you on website copy and drive the best return for your investment.

Footnotes:
1.) As a mathematical example, assume that your website’s daily traffic is 100 visitors a day and you can convert 10% into sales. On average, your website is making 10 sales per day. If a search engine optimization project increases traffic to 150 visitors a day, a 50% increase, the website could expect 15 sales a day if the conversion rates stay the same. But a 33.3% decrease in the conversion rate would drop the hoped for 15 daily sales to 10. Thus, the daily number of sales stays the same even though the website traffic is up substantially.