Search Engine Traffic and Lists

It makes sense that if you’re optimizing your site for search engines that you also get the most you possibly can out of your search engine optimization. And if you’re not optimizing your site for list building, you’re only doing half of the job at best.

You see, getting a lot of traffic isn’t meaningful if the visitors that come to your site aren’t directed anywhere in particular. There’s no need for you to do so aggressively if that doesn’t work for your site, but it IS necessary that you build a path from search engine visitors to, at minimum, signing up for your newsletter.

Let me give you an example.

If you’re getting 1000 new visitors that typically result in ten $100 sales, and you’re not making any special effort to capture visitors, you may think you’re doing just fine.

And you are. That’s a one percent conversion rate from visitors to sales, slightly below the average, $1000 for every 1000 visitors.

But if your rate of getting subscribers from 1000 visitors is 10 percent, or 100, even if the conversion rate is the same, that’s still a 10 percent increase in sales from the same 1000 visitors.

That’s a modest example, because subscribers are often more likely to buy – they often sign up to remind themselves to buy an item after researching, or closer to payday. It’s much more likely to produce a ten percent increase in sales, which would be ten more sales, and that would be double the sales, or $2000!

Now, that’s not always the case, but on the occasions that it is, that’s reason enough to incorporate a list optimized site into your search engine plan.