Posted by Jason Nuss on Wednesday, July 11th, 2012 at 7:31 pm
CATEGORY: SEO Tags: conversions, Pay Per Click, PPC, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing, seo

Let’s get right to it…Are you underestimating the value of organic traffic conversions from SEO? While you focus on your paid advertising campaign, measuring and managing its ROI through smart keyword bidding and goal conversion management, your organic traffic is quite (and quietly) possibly giving you 2 or 3 times as many conversions, or 5 times more as in the case below, than that of your ads.

I’m really just writing this blog to say DON’T.  Don’t underestimate organic traffic conversions. And it’s all about conversions, right? Traffic is great; conversions are greater.

We’ve seen an amazing case of this in the last year with one of our clients.  They hadn’t really focused on organic traffic through SEO, rather they’d focused on measuring and tracking their efforts on the paid side of SEM (search engine marketing).  CPC, CPM, keyword bid management, goal conversions, etc. were all the focus with not much thought about measuring the same on the organic side.

We don’t manage our client’s paid campaigns but I’m going to make a wild guess that they are paying more to Google than they are to us to optimize their site using our SEO techniques, including GapSEO™.  This leads me into my final point.  You can, and often should, pay to send targeted traffic to your site through online advertising, but don’t ignore the fact that you can spend a lot less money to an SEO marketing firm and get more bang for your buck.  Here are the raw numbers for paid and organic traffic conversions for our client in the last 12 months:

• Paid Conversions/Traffic – June 2011 to May 2012: 7,806 conversions from 226,771 visits
• Organic Conversion/Traffic – June 2011 to May 2012: 38,852 conversions from 1,536,338 visits 

So, my recommendation to you is to start, if you haven’t already, by optimizing your site for organic traffic and organic traffic conversions, then jump to the online advertising to supplement your online marketing efforts.

What do you think? Leave a comment below and let’s discuss!