Flickr Image by Jakob Montrasio
What is the objective of SEO? It’s an interesting question because I believe I would disagree with the majority of seo marketers out there. They would say, “The objective of seo is to increase organic search rankings, of course.” For me, they would have missed the point completely.
After all, what good are rankings if no one is searching for the keywords? What good is website traffic if the users are not looking to buy what you’re selling? What good is a website if it can’t convert your traffic into sales/leads? Answer: not much.
I believe the objective of SEO is to generate real sales and leads from monetized web assets. With this objective firmly in place, we can gauge the success of an SEO campaign much better. If traffic is way up and sales are steady, we’ve failed.
This brings me to my central point: less traffic can be better, assuming it’s the right traffic. Given the choice, I’d send 100 users to a webpage rather than 200 if I knew the conversion rate for the 100 is more than twice as good.