This afternoon I saw something that just ticked me off. So now I’m going to rant about SEO and why most of you think you’re doing a good thing when what you’re really doing is wasting your profits.
Here’s the something that caused this rant: an image I saw on social media from an SEO company bragging that they had increased organic traffic (which simply means someone sent from a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) by over 90 percent to a dealer’s website in the first year.
At first glance this seems incredible. Naturally, they don’t mention what number of visitors they started from and where they got them to…but I digress.
Let me lay this out for you. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you drive to a dealer’s website. If you took your website right now and all of the sudden Google began to send 1,000 more people to it every day, you are still going to get mediocre results.
Why do I say that? Three words: no conversion strategy.
Conversion strategy, in a nutshell, is a path or a reason to get people to do something more than simply take a look at your website. It is a download, an infographic, a checklist, a comparison—designed and written to speak to a specific persona. To build rapport with someone based on the knowledge of how they like to communicate (visual, video, detailed specs), you have to know it.
Don’t believe me?
Does your top rep walk into the largest real estate broker in your area, sit down, and say, “Our security solutions effectively ensure that you will be HIPAA compliant with everything you do on our MFP”?
Do you train your reps to walk into a hospital and start talking about how you can use your MFP for Bates Stamping?
That’s just the verticals.
Do your reps sell the same way to a CEO that they do to a procurement director? Do they present the same information to the office manager that they would to the CFO?
The answer is, of course they don’t. Because those different companies and those different employees care about different things and speak different languages.
If you can’t speak their language, they will not understand you, let alone trust you. So your website is speaking French when your visitor speaks German. They will be able to make out a few words because they’ve heard it somewhere before, but they won’t feel like they are understood or that you have the ability to speak to them.
Drowning in the Sea of Sameness
So the first real issue is that without a strategy to speak the language particular to your site visitor, you will not communicate with them in a meaningful way. When you don’t do that, then you are the same as every other site out there. Your digital voice will be saying the same things that everybody says: Great service, fast response times, you are great at everything. Blah, blah, blah.
Without thoughtful, persona specific content, you are continuing to dive deeper into the Sea of Sameness.
But Pulley, we have many strategies and ways for visitors to give us their information!
I’m going to rip the Band-Aid off now…
A contact us form is not a strategy.
A free document assessment is not a strategy.
A free technology review is not a strategy.
Wish I had a megaphone for those who are spending thousands of dollars a month to drive more people to their dealership’s website, which sounds like everyone else and speaks French when your visitor is German.
This is where the rubber meets the road in my assertion that 1,000 more visitors a day will bring you mediocre results. The number is irrelevant.
It could be 10,000 a day. Without a path designed to walk them towards information that appeals to them in a way that will get them to give you their name, company, email, and/or phone number, they will not be valuable to your dealership.
Trust me, I spend all day looking at copier and MSP websites. Most of the sites in our industry have a “contact us” form and/or a “free assessment” form. Those things are not bad in and of themselves.
However, they are not a strategy.
What Does A Strategy Look Like Then?
Having a legal administrator show up on your site who can quickly find the legal page under “Industries we serve” in your main menu is the beginning of a strategy. Seeing articles in the sidebar about “Bates Stamping with Your MFP” and “How Document Management Impacts Case Preparation” is a strategy. Clicking on that blog and finding a call-to-action with an eBook that outlines the “12 Technologies That Law Firms Use to Increase Billable Hours” is a strategy.
At this point, your German visitor is being spoken to in German. They see clearly that you seem to understand their firm and their day-to-day issues. Now when you put something in front of them that they have to put in a name and email address for, they believe that this will be valuable for them. Now you can get some information that will be helpful to your sales team.
Now you actually have a strategy!
Unless this is the case on your website, you can have all of the visitors in the world, but your results will be mediocre at best or horrible and profit wasting at worst.
My advice to you … invest in a real strategy and not just additional visitors to a Sea of Sameness website that won’t impact them or influence them to see you as anything other than another copier dealer.
There are those out there who understand this and are investing for growth. There are agencies that are crafting this vision into a reality. Find them and learn from them.
Rant over.
