One of the most prevalent questions that new business owners and NGOs ask is how SEO is going to turn into sales/revenue/donations/etc.
Believe it or not this is the right question but about the wrong subject.
If we think of the process of generating action (be that sales or some other form of engagement with the company) as twofold it runs a little something like the following:
First, a SEO plan should be crafted and implemented.
This encompasses everything from designing a website/blog, picking keywords to target, creating consistent content from said keywords, and then actively using social media to promote and distribute your content. Because SEO can encompass so much, a SEO strategy helps you to work smarter, not harder.
The goal of SEO is to bring you traffic and exposure using high quality content; it alone does not bring customer engagement. SEO is first about building traffic and visibility, and secondly about converting that traffic into sales.
Content is arguably, the most important piece of generating SEO.
If SEO is about appeasing Google, about mathematical and statistical manipulations to optimize your chances of being seen, then content is about making people happy.
Content is to people what SEO is to Google.
So ensuring that your content–everything from the what and how of your blog writing to the formatting of your page–is the best and most accurate representation of your business will tell people that your brand is not just legitimate but worth engaging with as well. SEO brings people to your site but your content is what keeps them there.
When SEO and content work well together, that’s how you can get a high conversion rate.
Keep in mind that conversion rates are generally pretty low. Across industries, the average landing page conversion rate was 2.35%, yet the top 25% are converting at 5.31% or higher.
Before you throw in the towel let’s crunch the numbers: if your monthly budget is 10,000 dollars for Google AdWords (for most NGOs Google offer this to nonprofits for FREE every month through Google Grants), this comes out to $330 dollars a day, with a $2 max click limit is 165 people visit your website daily. That’s ~5000 people monthly. If only 2% of those were sales–that would be ~3 customers daily and ~100 customers monthly. If each person donates $5, that $500 a month.
