Todd Friesen (aka Oilman) has written a new column in MediaPost’s OMMA Magazine (registration req’d - try BugMeNot for a reg code) in which he articulates something we’ve also realized for the past couple of years: that SEO is no longer just about driving more traffic to a site; it’s also about helping the site owner get more of those visitors to take a desired action. Todd sums it up nicely:

I propose that we redefine SEO. Rather than merely driving relevant traffic, I think SEO should be the practice of generating and converting organic search engine traffic, measuring it by raw traffic, ranking numbers, conversion rate, and new revenue year over year.

In other words, we need to lead the horse to water and convince him he’s thirsty.

NSI started increasing clients’ thirst several years ago, when we were approached by a local-entertainment provider who wanted to increase traffic to his site. Actually, he wanted to increase booking-leads from the site, but in his mind that just meant he needed more traffic. More traffic = more leads, right?

We were interested in helping, but a quick review of his website raised warning flags. The home page consisted only of images (graphic logo header and no text), the site was unattractive, poorly organized and had a muddled call-to-action message. I knew that if we took this project on, we could be successful at increasing traffic - even relevant, targeted traffic - to the site, but he wouldn’t get any more leads because few people would stay longer than a few seconds.

And NSI - not the crummy website - would get the blame. As Todd writes:

You can be the world’s greatest at SEO, but
if your clients aren’t getting a decent return on investment from what
they spend on you, I almost guarantee they won’t renew for year two.

That’s what was in the back of my mind, as we talked about this prospective clients needs.

What we did was propose something different for him: no organic SEO - just a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign - until the website was redesigned into a visitor-friendly site, with clear navigation, inviting graphics, helpful copy and a call to action on every page. The client agreed, and we helped redesign the site, making it both visitor- and search engine-friendly. In the meantime the PPC campaign provided targeted traffic, and yielded valuable market-research info in terms of real-world search terms (which were plugged into the new site).

By the time we conducted organic SEO on the redesigned site, leads were already up and analytics showed us that although traffic hadn’t increased very much, search-generated traffic had become much more targeted on important keyword phrases. What’s more, visitors were staying longer and visiting more pages. Analytics also helped us show the client what sites were providing the most referred traffic, which helped him direct his ad dollars to those sites rather than spreading money around and hoping for the best.

By looking at this client’s needs holistically, as Todd Friesen recommends - rather than just through an SEO lens - we helped our client far more, and got the renewal, as well. Since this experience, we ask prospective clients a lot more questions than before about their overall marketing goals and needs, instead of just taking their word when they say they need to improve business via SEO. And, we find most are open to accepting us as an online-marketing solutions provider - not just “the SEO guys.”