You can read lots of articles on how to optimise your website to rank highly on Search Engines They will tell you about the importance of keyword selection, page title, H1 content, link building and a myriad of other things to take into account. However, I would like to talk about something slightly different, it is what I term as the Equation for Web Success, or put more simply:

G = S + D + C

Where:
G = Your Goal, what constitutes a successful visitor to your site? This may be a person who buys from your site, or orders a sales brochure from your site or calls in to make an enquiry
S = SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), gaining high rankings on major search engines such as Google and Bing.
D = Description Meta Tag, the text that web users read beneath your company name in a search engine listing
C = Site content, the words and pictures on your actual site

Most website owners are now savvy enough to know that the “If you build it, people will come” attitude to owning a site is no longer true. They realise that to attract customers to their sites they need to do more than simply have a site. With this in mind many website owners believe that being number one on Google will mean that the traffic will come flooding into their site. Unscrupulous SEO practitioners will happily promise to get you to the top of Google, but will have no interest in whether you see an upturn in your business to justify the fees that they are charging.

Let’s assume for a moment that you are a website owner and you are looking to boost sales through your site. Your SEO specialists has completed their side of the bargain and got you into the top three results for all your chosen keywords on Google and Bing and yet you still see no real increase in traffic to your site, let alone an increase in sales. Why could that be? The answer is that you have only completed the first part of the equation, Serarch Engine Optimisation.

To complete the next stage of the equation you need to look at why people are not clicking through from your search engine listing to your site. This will probably be due to the site description that Google and Bing are displaying. This description is usually taken from the Description Meta Tag, this is a line of code that is invisible to human visitors to your site but that is read when spiders such as Googlebot crawl your site and index it. The description that you spent days crafting so that it describes all the services that your company offers in less than 20 words may be a masterpiece of prose and when stood alone you might well think that everybody is going to want to visit your site, but your text does not stand alone, it stands next to all your online competitors. You need to think about what motivates your customers to click through to a site.

If you are in a market that is price driven then there is no point telling prospectives clients what a great service you offer if all around you your competitors are pushing out a message like “25% off your first order”. Equally if  you are catering towards a luxury market then you need to use the sort of terminology that is aspitational. In short you need to know your customers, and nobody should know your customers and what motivates them better than you do.

OK, we now have the first two parts of our equation in place, you are ranking well for chosen keywords and traffic is coming through to your site, but you are still not seeing the necessary return on investment, this means that you are lacking the final part of our equation your site content. People are coming through to your site but they are not completing the goals that you are expecting visitors to achieve.

Now it’s time to look into your analytics package. Every page of your site should be providing data through an analytics package, such as Google Analytics. If your site is not signed up to an analytics package then please, please, please sign up today. If you do not you will have no chance of working out what is happening when people visit your site. With analytics you can see which pages people visit, which pages they first visit and more importantly which page they are on when they leave your site. This will help you identify which of your pages work and which are not working. This enables you to putting your efforts into correcting the parts of your sites that are not functioning as well as they should be rather than making unnecessary and potentially damaging amendments to sections of your site that are working. Once you have completed this part of the equation then you should find that your conversion rates reach the levels that you had always hoped to achieve.

This process is generally not something that can be achieved overnight and rather than completing this work after you realise that your website is failing it would be far better to plan most of this out before you launch your site. That said the web is a very fluid medium and things can change very quickly, so always be prepared to for change and never sit on your laurels and think that your work is done.

Good luck with your site but remember:

 Don’t hope for success, plan for it.