When someone types in a product or service you offer in to a search engine, you want to appear the #1 position-or at the very least the first page. In a way, having high search engine placement is like a receiving a free but qualified endorsement. If Google or Yahoo! ranks your webpage high, people tend to assume it’s because it’s what they’re really looking for. That’s why companies spend thousands of dollars optimizing their websites, creating back links, and writing SEO friendly copy in hopes of capturing and retaining a high search engine ranking.

The problem is that sometimes companies become too focused on their SEO efforts and not their online conversion efforts.

The result? Decreased conversion rates.

When optimizing your site for search engines meta tags and backlinks that help improve your SEO rankings and website description. Because they’re invisible to your visitor (unless they search for them), they don’t affect website conversion rates. However, SEO wrong copy can dramatically decrease conversion rates if not done right.

Marketing and copywriters often make the mistake of writing content for search engines instead of people. When writing copy for your website it’s important to remember that search engines don’t read websites. People do. You can write all the great SEO copy in the world, but in the end if the copy isn’t selling your product or service, your high search engine ranking is worthless.

The solution is to write great copy that sells. Yes, it needs contains the key SEO phrases but it must also be very conversion centric. If visitors can’t understand your company, what it offers, and see a call to action in about 15 seconds, they’ll leave. And odds are they won’t be back.

When focusing on SEO and SEM strategies, don’t let your efforts get in the way of converting visitors in to sales and leads. Without customers, your business won’t last long-not matter how high it’s ranked in Google.

As mentioned in Tuesday’s post, it’s difficult to guage the effectiveness of PPC and other online adverting and marketing efforts if you have no idea whether or not visitors from these campaigns are entering your sales pipeline.

One of the new features of our HookTour is the ability to integrate with Google AdWords and other ad sever systems (MSN, Yahoo!, etc.) for closed-loop marketing conversion tracking. Instead of pointing your campaigns to a static, text-based landing page, you can now send prospects straight to a page energized by your HookTour, tracking them from impression to conversion.

But why stop at ad campaign integration? All leads from your HookTour can be sent in real time to any CRM system, including Salesforce, Sugar CRM, Eloqua, and others. We’ve also enhanced client-side and server-side data pass-through options so that you can integrate the tour with your website, affiliate systems, and other custom data-collection engines for more robust call-to-action handling and tracking.

Installing the HookTour and Sapha tracking code on your website is as simple as copy and paste.  Embedding the tour right in  one of your webpages, or creating a link that will open the tour in a modal, stylized window is as easy as designating which HTML tag you want affected — the Sapha system does the rest!

Just think. Prospects will go from an ad, to your HookTour to your sales pipeline all in one smooth process. And, you’ll have the data to see  how effective your marketing efforts really are.

Earlier this week, Google announced a new service it’s beta testing called Google Ad Planner. According to Google its Ad Planner service will help media professionals to “search for websites relevant to your target audience, access unique users, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.”

Essentially, it’s going to give advertisers access to data so they can locate their target audience better. Right not the service is by invitation only but it is free. That could open the door smaller advertising agencies who can’t afford the pricey subscriptions to this data through other services.

Not everyone is happy about it. According to an emarketer article, “some experts wonder if Google’s Ad Planner service may be a conflict of interest. Will advertisers trust data from a source that sells them online advertising.”

Of course the only way to decide if Google Ad Planner works and that is to give it a try. Internet metrics don’t lie. If the service truly does help advertisers find their target audience, they’ll see an increase in sales, leads, or both from information supplied and Ad Planner will become another Google hit. If not, it will probably go the way of Google Video. (Anyone remember that service?)