Let’s just be clear here: high traffic without conversion is wasted traffic. The common discussion regarding online traffic and search engine marketing, in general, is that as long as people know how to get traffic, then everything will fall into place. According to this thinking, as long as the traffic is present in sufficient volumes, somehow, someway, the website will make money.

Unfortunately, the whole idea of blind conversion is the kiss of death. You have to remember that driving traffic is no joke. It takes time, effort, and in many cases, money to drive a decent volume of traffic. If conversion is left out of the picture, then that traffic is, for all intents and purposes, just wasted.

You can hire the best SEO provider on the planet and target the wrong keywords or set up the wrong site. You may get a huge flood of traffic, but your website would not know what to do with that traffic. You’ve just wasted your time and money. Unfortunately, most SEOs are clueless to this. Newbie or unprofessional SEOs spend a lot of time and effort finding keywords.

They’re focused on setting up the right website. They spend a lot of time producing awesome content, and getting great backlinks. All this, of course, leads to driving a lot of traffic. They do all of this, but at the end of the day, there is very little to no sales. What’s wrong with this picture? Unfortunately, this situation is all too common. If you pick the wrong SEO company, this is going to be your situation.

 

You know you’re dealing with the wrong SEO company if they think conversion is not their job

One of the reasons why many SEO companies focus on traffic and not conversion is they think that there is some sort of a fixed wall separating conversion from traffic generation. Since they want to specialize to conserve their resources, they focus primarily on the traffic conversion side. There’s no shame in that game. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but the problem is they should also pay attention to the context of traffic.

Traffic, just for the sake of traffic, as mentioned above, is completely worthless. Real effective SEO is all about engineering your whole website to work seamlessly. This “whole” means whole. Meaning, all the different functions of your website must work hand in hand. We’re not just talking about pulling in traffic, but we’re also talking about turning that traffic into cold hard dollars. And there has to be a tight theme established with solid keyword integration and quality onsite content.

If you were able to pull this off, then you would have solid onsite SEO. Once this is out of the way, there has to be a tight integration between the backlinks being earned by your website and your website’s actual content. Once that is done, there has to be a solid integration of the navigation components of your website so that regardless of which page visitors land on, they eventually would be pushed to convert.

These are all interrelated and unfortunately, too many otherwise highly professional and highly competent SEO companies put up arbitrary and limiting barriers between SEO on one hand and conversion optimization on the other hand. Make no mistake about it, SEO doesn’t stop at traffic. Real professional SEO goes all the way to conversion.

 

Results oriented SEO is crucial to conversion

If you think about it, SEO that is done for results is integral to conversion. Results, of course, must be defined as conversion. This is important to note because keywords are not created equal. Some keywords have a general intent. Other keywords are very targeted because they are often used by people looking to do something like buy, sign up for more information, etc.

You have to optimize keywords with the right intent. This means that you have to be clear as to the kind of behavior you’re looking to attract with your website. Highly professional SEO companies understand that there are many different types of keywords with many different intents. What they would do is they would lay out the different user intents all over your website and structure these so that your visitors can get pushed further and further into the site until they’re converted into buyers or customers.

 

The K-LT process

The core of a conversion based SEO strategy is the K-LT process. The K in K-LT stands for Know. These are keywords that people use when they’re trying to know about a particular subject in general terms. They just want to figure out what the keyword is about and what the topic is about.

Many people looking for your service start simply trying to know the general problem that your service or store solves. Effective SEO lays out Know pages and feeds them to the next tier of pages—the Like pages. Like pages involve keywords that people use who have liked a particular type or class of solutions. They haven’t drilled down to a specific brand or model. They just like a particular category of solutions.

You need to set up content that appeals to people who have developed a liking to the category of merchandize or solutions your local business offers. You then tie in these pages to pages on your website that feed on trust. Trust stage in the K-LT process targets high trust keywords. These are people who already trust the particular type of service you have or the particular merchandize you sell.

This is crucial because these people are the easiest to convert. They are almost there. You just need to give them a little bit more information and they would then be eager to set up an appointment, whip out their credit cards, and buy stuff from you and pick it up or otherwise engage in behavior that puts more dollars in your bank account.

 

Conversion elements

The typical conversion elements on a small business page include contact pages. This is where people can enter their information and your company can call them for a consultation or a visit. You can also set up a squeeze page. This is where you collect emails so your visitors can give you permission to constantly send them updates. Eventually, they may convert. Eventually, they may show up physically at your business.

Finally, you can also feature ads. These ads can ask for payment information so they can pay for something and show up for an interview. Whatever it is you want your target audience to do, you can use pages that get them to do that as conversion elements for your website.

Solid SEO is all about optimizing SEO to optimize conversions. There is no imaginary wall between driving traffic and converting that traffic. It all involves proper keywords, proper page behaviors and traffic flow, and optimizing conversion pages to process this traffic flow. If you’re dealing with a company that is clueless regarding this, then you are going to be leaving a lot of money on the table.