…and more to the point, why does it matter?

So, congratulations. You got to number one in Google for your prized keyword and you’re getting thousands and thousands of visitors a month.

SEO job done, surely? The team can pick up, pack up, pat themselves on the back and go home, right?

Wrong.

The rankings is just the beginning. What really matters is what these thousands and thousands of new website visitors do once they arrive on your website. And that’s where your conversion rate comes into play.

What’s a Website Conversion?

That depends on your website.

What do you want your website’s visitors to do?

Conversions are essentially actions you want traffic to your site to take on your website and commonly include:

• Website registrations
• Purchases
• Enquiry submissions
• Brochure downloads
• Quote requests

Before you even embark upon a SEO campaign, you should have a clear idea in your head of what you want people do to once they are on your site and the site itself should be optimised to encourage those conversions.

Conversion Rates

Your conversion rate is essentially the percentage of visitors who “convert,” and carry out your nominated conversion actions.

Conversion rates vary based on:

• What you consider a conversion
• Your industry
• How easy your site is to navigate
• How trustworthy your website
• Your calls to action
• The keywords delivering the traffic

Why It Matters

What use is a load of traffic that turns up at your website, has a quick nosey around and then disappears elsewhere to buy services or products from your competitors? Not much.

Chasing rankings blindly is pointless. Everything in SEO should be geared towards ROI, which means getting your users to convert to sales or leads. Chasing rankings for poor converting, irrelevant or unsearched keywords isn’t going to help you to generate more leads or sales. By the same token, achieving rankings for great keywords and then sending that traffic to a website that confuses users will deliver equally poor results.

Monitoring Conversions

You can monitor conversions through the free (and incredibly awesome) Google Analytics. There’s comprehensive e-commerce tracking as well a host of other goal types you can monitor. Analytics can tell you not only how many conversions you received in any given month, but which keywords and traffic sources that delivered those conversions.