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.

Tags: conversion rates, search engine rankings, SEM, SEO, SEO copu

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 4:12 pm by abelk and is filed under Lead Generation, PPC, SEM, SEO, google, search engine marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.