Does being in page 1 of search engine really pull in more sales?
Being located at page 1 of Google could be regarded as the most profitable cyber real estate. To me personally, position 1 to 4 are the most profitable ranks, followed up position 8 to 10. Somehow if your website is in the middle of page 1, based on my own search experience, there is a higher tendency to ignore those websites around position 5 to 7. Because people tend to look at the top few and scroll down to the last few of page 1, and if they don’t see anything relevant, off they go to page 2. So does it really increase your sales if you are there in page 1?
You can have 1000’s of visitors per day, but if your website isn’t properly configure to convert those visitors into sales, then it wouldn’t make a difference even if you had 1,000,000 visitors a day. That means you still won’t make that many sales.
Let’s evaluate some points regarding pulling traffic to your website.
1. Adwords
Are you going to use pay per click (PPC) marketing like Adwords to drive your website traffic? First check what is the conversion rate on your adwords campaigns for your website? Now compare that with a campaign run for a similar amount of time by being on the first page of Google Search Results.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is much slower than Pay Per Click but if you know the SEO techniques, you can set up your websites to be search engine friendly and you will see your website pulling in some natural organic traffic for free. It’s not going to be instant success as there are many factors governing how search engines work and these factors change all the time. As said, you need to get yourself into the top 3 or 4 positions so as to fare better as that’s what most people will see on their computer screens. Anything beyond that would result in lower clickthroughs.
3. So which one?
If you are debating on whether to keep adwords or to switch to SEO techniques, then I would say you need to utilize both. Because really all this is going to come down to is money spent. Google search results are free. Adwords is not. If you combine the two, you will lower your cost per sale. The natural results will offset the cost of your adwords campaigns.
In the end if you still have a low converting sales page, you still will create more sales by using both. If they see your ad both in sponsored links and on the natural results as well, then they will likely click on your ad or search engine listing.
Even if each type of ad had the same conversion rate, 1% of 1000 + 1% of 1000 is still more than just 1% of 1000.
However, you may want to tweak the landing page for each scenario to get the most out of your clickthroughs for adwords/search engine listings.