What your Search guy is basically telling you....

Most products & services that are marketed online leverage some kind of search channel. With some kind of SEO/SEM initiatives always being dubbed "the best source of traffic" or "the life-blood of our online traffic."

Here is an article that gives a couple of excuses why you should just not bother with any other forms of online advertising. Apparently if your genius Search Director can't make your online marketing work, it's no one else's fault but yours. Your content sucks, or your design sucks, or the best is...your product sucks and you should close the company. Read below...

Don’t Beat Up Your SEO for Slow Sales

When you finally reach that point where you want to introduce search engine marketing and optimization in your overall marketing strategy it is important to understand how SEO fits into your overall marketing equation. Even though there are many different approaches and SEO service providers out there, it is important to understand that SEO is a form of inbound marketing.

If your website visitors do not convert you have to realize that this is not a direct problem from SEO service provider. Remember you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink. If your website is set up poorly than all the SEO in the world will not help you become successful. Unless you hired a firm or a person to do more than just search engine optimization this should not be looked at as the problem. The problem is most likely many other factors.

Take a look at the following factors that might be affecting your website conversion:

1. Design: When was the last time your website has been updated? Is the design on par with your audience? Put yourself in their shoes for a moment and try to anticipate what you would like a website to look at. Does yours look this way? You cannot not be in denial here, if you are targeting a young demographic and your website hasn’t been updated since 2001 than it might be time to freshen things up a bit. Good design elements keep people engaged and wanting to know more.

2. Conversion Aspects: Does your website traffic need to figure out how to use your website? If your website makes a visitor work on how to contact you than you are already loosing the race. If you are an e-commerce site you have to make multiple entry points into your store from every single page. If you are a service based business you should have a phone number and lead form located almost everywhere so that you pave the way for that visitor to create some sort of action. The goal of your business needs to reflect immediately in your design otherwise you might lose that visitor forever.

3. Products: Everyone wants to think their service or products are the best but at some point you have to ask yourself if people really want what you’re selling. It might just be that your product isn’t cutting it. If this is the case you are better off to realize this at an early stage than spending a lot of money marketing a product people might not really be interested in.

4. Content: Remember your content should be written for the visitors that come to your website and should not just be written for the search engines. If your website content is poorly written (with weak call to action) then this could be a major reason why people are leaving your website and are not converting.

To close out here, make sure you take a moment to properly analyze your website if you start to see organic visitors (from your SEO efforts) are not converting as much as they should.