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Re: How hard is SEO?

Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2008 12:01 pm
by matthijs
VirtuosiMedia wrote:Testing in SEO is tough. You can't do straight A/B testing because there are too many factors outside of your control, so isolating a single one is almost impossible and plus it takes a long time. However, iterative A/B testing for conversion rates is what I personally would concentrate on. At the end of the day, it isn't necessarily how much traffic you get, it's what you do with the traffic you do get and how that traffic benefits you through sales and conversions.
That's very good advice. It's easy to get lost in dumb numbers like traffic and page views, but in the end those are often worthless. It's about your business goals. It's better to have only 2 pageviews, the first one the homepage, the second one the contact page ("Yes, I'd like to work with you"), then 10 pageviews of someone clicking around being in doubt and then leaving.

I remember recently reading about a redesign of the Wordpress.org front page. Making the sign up button bigger and more noticeable increased their conversion by 10-20% or something.

With smaller sites only consisting of a few static pages with little text, I think it's difficult to compete SEO-wise, if you're competing with many bigger sites or in a competitive market. Maybe some of the effort spend on SEO is spend better optimizing some on-site elements, so that the few visitors you do get get converted to clients. Or maybe focus your SEO efforts on a more niche area. Maybe trying to get traffic for local customers for example. Instead of trying to score high for "cheap mortgage loans", try to score for "mortgage advice {insert city name}".