I have a client who who runs a plumbing business. He purchased a SEO Starter Package to help increase traffic to his site. This was a few months ago and at first he was reluctant. He asked me, "how long it would take and how much traffic could he expect?" I replied that there are no guarantees and too many variables to make an accurate estimate but he could expect to see some kind of improvement. The cost of the package is less than what he would typically spend for one of his advertisements (space ad) running in a local paper for one or two weeks.
A few months have gone by so I went into the back-end of his site to look at the stats. I compared the month of June in 2012 with June 2011. I also compared June with the month of April from this year.
From June 2011 to June 2012 the hits to just the index page went UP 75%. Overall in that time span the traffic for all page hits increased 41%.
For comparison reasons I checked and found that the jump in previous years from June to June was only 37% for the index page. So 75% is a big jump.
I know that some people would argue that perhaps the weather played into the numbers. His business does a fair amount of HVAC work and air conditioning repair, installation and maintenance. The months of June in the previous years were actually warmer in New Jersey (2010 averaged 74.4 degrees, 2011 averaged 72.6 degrees and 2012 averaged 70.1 degrees). So the slightly cooler temps would not increase but possibly reduce the HVAC and AC business.
I compared April 2012 with June of 2012 the increase was 23%. So the immediate effect was 23% more hits to the index page in just a few months. I looked at the two previous years and found that in 2011 there was a DECREASE of 7.2% and in 2010 an increase of 13.9% from April to June.
The percentage increased a couple of months after the SEO Starter Package was in place. So now what? One of the interesting things about increasing traffic is being able to look at the stats and note which pages the site visitors are most interested in looking at and how long they stay there. More page visits do not automatically equate to more business! But it is a critical part of your overall marketing process.
You can have more site visitors but it is the conversion rate that matters. What are you doing to keep those visitors interested in your website pages? Do they have a reason to come back to the website? Are they contacting you or downloading more information? Are they checking your credentials on various directories or looking and connecting with your social media efforts such as Facebook, LinkedIn or your Blog?
A complete marketing plan must be in place to help convert those visitors into customers. SEO is an important part of your website in terms of potential presence. Your website is a piece of your marketing just like advertising, social media, blogging, email campaigns, directmail and print collateral pieces too. A strong marketing plan will interlock all of the pieces to strengthen your brand image and drive visitors back to your site over and over or entice them to make a call-to-action.
Contact us for a free web site evaluation so we can help you improve your business. Call (551) 265-8762 or visit Uson Consulting.
