Today's Myth: The ultimate goal of search engine optimization is getting as many visitors as possible to my website. The more visitors I get, the more successful I'll be.

This is the fourth post of a 5-part series on search engine optimization myths.

• Part 1: The myth of the magic formula
• Part 2: The myth of the quick fix
• Part 3: The myth of paying your way to the top

The Myth: All Visitors are Good Visitors

The ultimate goal of search engine optimization is getting as many visitors as possible to my website. The more visitors I get, the more successful I'll be.

The Reality

If visitors come to our website but don't do anything that we value, then they are just wasting bandwidth. The success of an SEO campaign should not be measured by raw visits, but by the number of successful actions taken by users.

It's very difficult to know if an SEO campaign is successful without web analytics - we generally recommend Google Analytics for our clients. But even if you are using a powerful analytics tool, it's easy to focus on the raw number of visits you are getting to your site. With Google Analytics, the first graph you see when you log in is the number of visitors to your site.

While this may be a useful metric in it's own right, without diving deeper it tells us very little about the success of your search engine optimization efforts.

Where are these visitors coming from? What are they doing on your site? Are they completing goals you want them to complete, or are they hogging your bandwidth?

To measure the real value of these visitors, we need to know the conversion rate. The conversion rate is the number desirable actions taken by visitors, divided by the number of visitors.

An Example

Let's take a simple example of an e-commerce website that sells one product - Widgets (what else would an imaginary website sell?) If we want to know the conversion rate, we divide the number of visitors who bought a widget by the total number of visitors over the same time period. Let's say that during the month of August, 15 visitors bought widgets, and there were 100 visitors to the website. Then we have;

15 Conversions / 100 Visitors = .15 = 15% conversion rate.

The reason an e-commerce website will undergo a search engine optimization campaign is so they will get more conversions (i.e. sales). An SEO campaign could increase the number of visitors but fail to increase the number of conversions, and then it is clearly a waste of money.

What if you don't have an e-commerce shop? In this case, what counts as a conversion for you may be less obvious. But if you think about it, you are sure to recognize that there are some conversions you want people to complete. Here are some examples of common site types with common conversion actions;

1.) Corporate Website

If you are a corporate website but you don't sell products directly online, these are some common conversions that may matter to you;

• Visited the "contact us" page.
• Submitted a question via the "contact us" page.
• Signed up for the corporate newsletter.
• Visited the online support desk. (It's much less costly to the company for people with a question to visit the online support desk, rather than for them to call the company. There might be a good economic value here.)

2.) News Portal or Blog

If you are a newspaper, magazine, or other type of content-heavy website, the following may be some conversions to look for;

• Subscribed to the site or to a section of the site via RSS.
• Visited more than 10 pages.
• Commented on an article.

3.) Social Media Website or Forum

If you have a social media platform, a forum, or some type of website that requires significant user contributions, then the following may be some conversions to look for;

• Registrations.
• Active Users (measured by 10 posts, or some other metric determined by you).

4.) Small Local Business

If you've got a very small, very localized business like a restaurant, the best conversions to track may be;

• Clicked on "Get Directions" link or visited the "Directions" page on your website.
• Printed off a coupon you posted on the website and brought it in to the store.

These are just some basic ideas, and your individual use will vary. The point is simple - whatever type of site you have, there are certain actions you want users to take. To measure the success of your search engine optimization campaign, you need to measure how many people are coming to your site and doing these desired actions.

That said, what are some ways we can ensure that our SEO campaigns are delivering true value rather than just increasing the raw number of visitors? Here are two suggestions.

1.) Use Web Analytics

The most important step you can take is to actually measure your conversion rates. Good analytics software makes this fairly easy. Google Analytics, like most good analytics packages, allows you to actually specify your conversions so you can view them easily in your reports. Once they are set up, most of the graphs allow you to look directly at your goals and easily track your conversion rates.

Granted, some goals may be a little trickier to track. Earlier I suggested a local business could allow customers to print off coupons and they could try to track the number of visitors that came to the store and used the coupon. This will require a little ingenuity and hard work to track but hey - who ever said anything worthwhile would be easy? If you want to take your SEO campaign to the next level finding some way to track conversions

2.) Ensure Continuity in your Campaign

The back button is one of the most frequently used tools in the browser - it's imperative that we don't give visitors a reason to use it! That's why ensuring the continuity of your message is so important. When people start a search on Google, they usually want to find something quickly. Making sure you optimize for the right keywords is critical here.

As an extreme example, let's say that you are a luxury hotel. In the course of your keyword research, you find that "cheap hotel" is an extremely popular keyword (no surprise there!), so you decide to optimize for it. One problem - you aren't a cheap hotel. Once visitors arrive at your site, they are sure to see your prices and immediately hit the back button. In this case there is simply a lack of consistency between the site offering and the visitor expectation. Trying to optimize for the wrong keywords can be devastating to your conversion rate.

Another important example is found in the meta description. You can write custom meta descriptions for each page of your site, or you can simply allow search engines to create them. Most SEO experts believe that keywords in meta descriptions have little or no effect on ranking. However, they may have a big impact on visitor expectations. The meta description can appear on the search engine result pages right underneath the link - note this example for our own website;

You can easily see that the meta description can quickly set visitor expectations. If we wrote "FREE ENTERPRISE-CLASS WEB DESIGN" in this description we may increase our click-through rate, but any visitor who came to our site would be sorely disappointed to find that we do, indeed, charge for our website design services.

Conclusion

Make sure that you are tracking your site conversions. Remember that all of the other metrics you track in SEO campaigns - PageRank, visitor numbers, number of indexed pages - are all simply means to an end. What you are really interested in is conversions. Through an intelligent use of web analytics and by developing campaigns that deliver a continuous message from start to end, you can make big strides towards your goal of increasing the number of conversions on your website.