Why SEO is not about positions

Posted by Mercury Thread | Posted in Internet Marketing, SEO, SEO Research, Search Engine Optimization | Posted on 21-07-2009

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It may seem a little strange to say that Search Engine Optimisation is not all about positions but its true. Real business focussed SEO is about making money and all too often too many people get lost in a war for a position and lose sight of using natural optimisation to generate cash.

How many of you optimise your homepage for the most competitive natural search terms – come on get your hand up I can see you getting a little bit uncomfortable. Everyones done it at some stage fixed the homepage content, developed links, fixed the technical aspects on your server, tidied up your HTML and you rank and the sales don’t appear.  You’ve got the traffic but not the sales.

It’s likely this is because you’ve optimised the wrong page!

Are you getting your message across in SEO?

SEO delivers the right message at the right time to your customer base. If you send this traffic to an inappropriate – not conversion focussed page – you’ll see conversion being weak. Your visitors can hit the back button – why should they make another click in the hope that you’ll fulfil the desires you said you’d satiate by clicking on your website to get to the place they need to get to.

Your homepage is a segmentation page – its job is to get prospective customers to the information they need quickly. Its going to be hit with brand traffic – that you have no idea of what they’re looking. That above the line campaign you’ve been running has delivered new interested visitors but you dont know what they want as there is no intent within the keyword.

You know through generic keywords, and the longer tail that falls from these, that people have an interest in a product, group of products, so why send them to a generic page. With mixed messaging and multiple offers. Get them to the page most appropriate.

Take a look at a simple search like “heathrow airport hotels” in Google. The site rankings fourth is currently the homepage pf the Premier Inn site – as the drop down contains heathrow airport as a location. If you compare this to the pages at Holiday Extras or the Heathrow Airport hotel page at Ramada Jarvis – where you get info about the location, the hotel etc.

These deep pages are money pages – as they play to the needs and desires of the audience and will convert better. Its simpler to change an iumage and start optimising for conversion with these pages. A small content unit added here, a simpler booking process there. Far simpler than optimising your homepage for a product that delivers traffic and no sales.

Reducing the SEO campaign priority of a homepage and directing traffic to a deep page may take longer but the business benefit is worth so much more.

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Comments (2)

Bill Marshall said on 23-07-2009

Absolutely agree about clients that get hung up on positions and forget about the real end result. I am sometimes surprised at how often Google seems to rank the home page above a well-targeted internal page though – sometimes even when there is little or no mention of the search term on the home page. I would suspect this can only be PageRank related similar to the supplemental index problems that sites often run into, but it’s damned annoying!
Colin said on 23-07-2009

There’s more to life and business than positions on Google.

Get individual domains for each location, it makes sense.

Not every location is found the same way, someone fishing in Aberdeen doesn;t search the same as someone going to a conferance in London. and you can target every additional phrase for the target term. Like, cheap,discount, book, etc. You can;t do this in a single location as each hotel only has one main page.

Target 20 terms for each hotel rather than 1

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