SEO conjures up ideas of free traffic and a never ending supply of potential web site visitors. The premise of search engines bringing targeted visitors drives businesses to gain an advantage over competitors or just merely survive in the market. This topic has been discussed by many others, so I wanted to present my own perspective.

Is SEO traffic all it’s touted to be?

Unfortunately, it’s often a gray area - if only the traffic is considered.

To automagically receive all the online visitors your business has been dreaming of - you’ll be required to invest resources in search engine optimization. This front end cost to online marketing is often glossed over.

On-page factors such as Titles and keyword placement take resources to create. More challenging are the placement of off-page links that drive Google search engine rankings. If you haven’t tried, this is very labor intensive and tedious work. And certainly all links are not created equal.

So what is the Go Factor for SEO?

If your website is not tracking the right analytic data, it’s going to be very difficult to make the Go decision for SEO. Google Analytics can be configured to track e-commerce conversions - so money keywords can be easily identified. This initial data can at least be utilized to target known converting keywords for search engine optimization.

The challenge is speculating - How much SEO traffic will be needed to justify the cost?

This is truly a challenge for SEO companies and their clients. Wordtracker 24 hour estimates are such a small sampling of the world wide web traffic patterns and Google’s Adwords’ keyword tool only provides a 0 to 1 scale for search traffic volume. How can a sound business decision for SEO be made without knowing what percentage of the traffic your site is going to get?

This is where on-going testing of different Titles for click thur rates along with on-site testing of conversion factors is going to play a part in the risk/reward of SEO.

There are no guarantees that any online marketing will be a success - but risk can be minimized. With known money keywords and on-going gathering of analytic data, the risk will be greatly reduced.

IMPORTANT: The analytic data only helps if someone is actually looking at it and making adjustments to your site!

Don’t just settle for having a web page optimized for a keyword phrase. At least understand how that particular keyword phrase qualifies for the SEO Go Factor. Getting traffic from the search engines may not actually be free - but the visitors SEO can bring should at least be targeted as higher converting traffic.