Conversion funnels start on Google

So, your Search Engine Optimization campaign worked great. Your website is ranked in the top 5 on the right keywords. Now all you have to do is sit back and wait for all these new visitors to buy your products online, right? Uhm, no…

When your webpages are relevant to Google, it doesn’t mean your visitors think they are relevant too. Sure Google tries hard to act like normal visitors, especially with their latest “panda” update. But they cannot reproduce the emotionally driven decision of a visitor who has to pick the most relevant search result from the top 10 served by Google.

Google users decide within a tenth of a second to click on one of the search results. Their decision is based on how much the search result matches what they are looking for. But the result might not contain the exact keywords the user searched for. Instead, the title and description match what the user had in mind while searching. Since Google started serving results that match your search, but do not include the exact kewords, it became more important to persuade visitors to click on your link. Therefore the first step in the conversion proces is getting the Google visitor to visit your website.

With this in mind it’s important to make sure your page title and description are in sync with the page content. This is also important for your Search Engine Optimization campaign from te content point of view. It’s equally important to include a great Call-to-Action to persuade the searcher to click to your website. If a searcher decides to visit your website, make sure the landingpage contains enough persuasive elements to lead them to step two of your conversion funnel.

You might also be interested in my earlier post on website performance.