By Tim Giles
As published on Sitepronews.com September 2007

It’s the website stupid! This is what is important. You can dump as much traffic as you like on the home page but in the end if your content loads slowly, your pitch is stale or the message is confusing you might as well not have bothered. Attracting visitors is the start of the game not the end. Traffic does not monetize itself.

In order for a website to justify its existence it needs to be tied to an outcome. “No sugar Sherlock!” I hear you say, sanitising my Aussie potty mouth for young ears. “Surely that is obvious?”

You would think so but this is one of the most common mistakes web site operators make. It is not a web “business” until it is tied to an outcome, and in the fickle world of the web you generally need more than one outcome to make a consistent buck.>You would think so but this is one of the most common mistakes web site operators make. It is not a web “business” until it is tied to an outcome, and in the fickle world of the web you generally need more than one outcome to make a consistent buck.One of the advantages of cutting my teeth in the internet backwaters of Australia is that I learned good habits. Here you generally cannot coast on flawed systems targeting a niche demographic of a huge vertical market. You are defined and limited by who you can sell to. In OZ if you are not one of the top three you are dead.

Such pragmatism regarding your mortality helps anchor expectations and shield you from the clouds of bulldust that blow in from the wild west from time to time. A business website is a shop front not a theatre. Unfortunately many online foyers encourage loitering zombies rather than customers.

People visit a business website for a variety of reasons however you can guarantee that whiling away a few hours meandering through unstructured content is generally not one of them. Sure Facebook, Myspace and YouTube are huge but they also struggle to make a dollar from their traffic tsunamis. These are entertainments not businesses.

In my experience the successful business websites generally have a handle on the key four bottlenecks that impact on online marketing. These being…

• Exposure – Getting the right people to the site in volume. If you can’t sell to them they are useless.
• Interest – Getting those people to see your core offers
• Engagement – Getting interested parties to commence a desired activity (eg. View catalogue, conduct search etc)
• Conversion – Capturing the interest in a tangible way that has a dollar value (eg. Buy from cart, submit enquiry, book seat etc)

One of the most common mistakes made online is to only focus on the Exposure component. Budget is spent on delivering traffic but outcomes stall on convoluted processes, clumsy navigation or undersold calls to action. The key is not just to get people to the site it is to get them through it to the sales team.

When you think about all this it really is just common sense. Most good ideas are. Simplifying analysis down to these touch points also provides clarity and generally provides opportunities to consolidate resources and kill multiple birds with the one stone. Consider the following…

SEO has spin off benefits.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not rocket science. It is however a pain in the butt to implement well and this is why there are so many business models built around it. SEO is all about the little fiddly time consuming tasks above and beyond building a functional website and writing good copy. Web development companies tend to operate on low margins as sites effectively have become a commodity. Therefore much SEO gets sold as an optional extra or an afterthought post launch.

Paying attention to SEO detail during construction, rather than trying to bolt it on afterwards, has considerable benefit above and beyond simply achieving accurate search listings.

1. Exposure:
   Attention to detail regarding SEO ensures the site has a chance to perform well against the search terms specifically relating to the products and services sold. It also provides data that can be pumped into paid search campaigns (and vice versa)
2. Interest:
   Much good SEO technique is simply good organisation, consolidation and writing nice clean code. This tends to improve cross browser performance and loading speeds. Using templates, trimming out all the legacy code and referencing common items via include files can save seconds on loading time which could be the difference between capturing customer interest or having them abort to a competitor.
3. Engagement:
   Having nice clean ordered content built around themes helps encourage progression deeper into site to the desired outcomes. Good SEO is built around multiple entry points to a site directly targeting specific products or service offerings. This also helps boost the likelihood that someone will engage with the site in a desired way as the pitch is tied to their search request.
4. 4. Conversion:
   70% of visitors wont get past the page that they arrive on from a search engine. The tighter the match of the content to the search the more likely someone will progress deeper towards a desired outcome.
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This way of thinking also has relevance on the micro level relating to individual decisions. For example an individual search engine listing…

Exposure:
- Are we attracting viewers we can sell to?
Interest:
- Is the content of the listing (Title, description and link) enticing enough to stand out from all the others on the page? To be successful you don’t necessarily have to be number one just more interesting to the searcher.
Engagement:
- Is there a call to action to encourage a click? The search results page is a point of sale. If you don’t pitch here you miss your best opportunity.
Conversion:
- After clicking is a person successfully delivered to the page most closely relating to their search (with a means to directly engage with the business) or are they just dumped on the home page or some 404 error page because you deleted the old article that got listed originally?

The point of all this is simply to illustrate that giving some thought to what happens after a click through will deliver better returns than simply boosting click volumes. Often the biggest problem with web businesses is not their search strategies it is the sites themselves. Some common sense can lead to uncommon outcomes.