It is entirely possible (maybe even likely) that you can have a very successful SEO campaign that proves to be a failure.

I talk to many business owners who speak with hope or pride about the amount they expect to increase -or have increased- the traffic to their website from SEO efforts.

Maybe you are one of these businesses. My challenge to these business owners is to change their metric. They falsely assume that increasing traffic to their website equates to increasing sales. While it is certainly true that having more eyes see your site is likely to result in some extra sales, measurable revenue growth from your SEO efforts alone will typically be very disappointing. Don’t measure traffic, measure website visitor conversions.

I see two problems with an SEO-heavy approach.

PROBLEM #1: SEO alone relies on your website pages to do the selling.
Once the SEO conveyor belt drops a visitor on your site, it will be up to your site to do the selling – and up to the visitor to be motivated enough to take action. Unless your primary business is an ecommerce site, dropping visitors on your site and hoping they will call or fill out a “Contact Me” form is a poor strategy.

PROBLEM #2: SEO alone targets one small segment of the sales funnel.
When you drop visitors onto your website with the expectation that the one’s who are ready to buy will call or contact you, you are missing the large number of people who are at the top of the funnel – still researching or deciding on the who, what, where, when of the possible purchase. SEO that drives traffic to a brochure website only targets those who are ready to make the purchase.

THE SOLUTION:
The solution is that SEO should be the first step in a larger process. The process should involve driving traffic to specific pages that have been created to target people at each place in the sales funnel, capture their lead, and nurture them toward the moment of being purchase-ready.  (And if you are not sure how to set up such a process, we can help.)

SEO is a crucial step in the process, but don’t fall for the error of thinking that increasing traffic to your site through SEO is the solution to your sales woes. Your success at SEO may turn out to be one expensive failure!