You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. I can't remember who coined that phrase—pretty sure it was Socrates or perhaps Groucho Marx—but I do know that Search Engine Marketing (SEM) was probably the furthest thing from their mind.  

But not mine. This month I'll talk about how to lead horses to water—or in the case of web marketing, how to lead visitors to your site and then encourage them to use your products or services.  We'll do this by focusing on some basic, yet important SEM concepts that can easily get lost in the day-to-day hustle and bustle of site management.

Conversion, Conversion, Conversion

Remember, the ultimate goal of your site is NOT to garner a ton of traffic--it is to convert visitors from browsers to buyers. But conversion doesn't only mean a sale. Just because you don't sell something directly on your site doesn't mean you can't have a conversion. Conversion can mean that your site generates a lead or a phone call--maybe it's a visitor filling out a form for signing up for a newsletter. Whatever it is, a conversion occurs when a visitor does what you hoped they'd do once they land on your site.

As you plan your site changes make sure that your conversion goals are front and center, and that everyone on your team knows the importance of them.

Getting Top Ranking in "Natural" Or "Organic" Listings

So you've got to get your site 'optimized' in order to get those top results. You roll up your sleeves and dive into your site, making sure you follow all of the rules. All of your pages have optimized title tags. You've taken painstaking measures to ensure that every bit of content has that perfect percentage of keywords and you have appropriate text links within your content.

After lovingly hand-tooling your pages, some questions still remain: Did you overdo it? Are your title tags so long that anyone who has bookmarked your site gets stuck with a title tag that's nonsensical *and* three miles long? Is every other word in your content an out-of-context keyword that actually makes your site difficult to read? Are there so many text links in your content that it hurts to look at it?

These questions all speak to good old fashion usability. An answer of 'yes' to even on of them could result in high numbers of human visitors bailing out of your web site. Achieving great position in natural search rankings is important, but not to the point of sacrificing visitor satisfaction. It all comes back to conversion; without it, you're losing revenue.

You've Already Paid for that Click!

Paying for clicks magnifies the need for optimized usability and the all-important conversion. One effective approach used with PPC campaigns is to send a PPC visitor to the page most relevant to his/her search term. In order to get the most bang for your PPC buck, SEO should be the last thing on your mind when using this tactic.

Think about it. You already have the click through to your site--which, by the way, you paid for--so why not put them on a page whose sole purpose is to convince the human visitor (not a search engine spider) that your site speaks to exactly what they were searching on? This is the concept of landing page optimization.

The more relevant your landing pages are to the keywords you're buying and the text in the ad that got the click, the more likely you are to get the conversion. In short, making the best first impression you can. 

A Parting Tip: Learn From Your Efforts

Conversion doesn't always happen during that first visit. It often happens at some time in the future when the visitor returns--a term known as latent conversion. Don't make the mistake of relying on just the basic ROI metrics to judge your SEM success. Keeping an eye on your site within ClickTracks will keep you abreast of your visitor's actions and satisfaction.

A metric like Average Time on Site (ATOS) highlights conversion issues when segmented by campaign, search engine or other criteria. The longer visitor stays on your site, the higher the interest in your offerings.

You can also look for behavioral differences between different search engines, or compare your PPC and natural search traffic. Armed with this knowledge you can more effectively optimize your site for conversion.

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