Are you a believer? For years experts have told us you can't do better than get your site listed high on search engines. Get in top five listings and you will pull thousands of visitors, they say.Naturally, thousands of visitors should produce at least hundreds of sales. Or, even on a bad day, you should get a few sales.
But search engines rarely deliver what we expect. In this article I tell you why and show you simple ways to fix problem.
Strike one: Let me give you a recent example from my own experience. I got one of my sites listed high on Yahoo, number one search engine. Friends told me you can expect a giant flood of visitors. Yup, if you consider twenty hits a week a flood, I guess I was all wet.
Strike two: Next, I decided to purchase a high ranking on some of top pay-per-click search engines. The bid rates were low on NetFlip.com and my site had no problem ranking number one for several popular keywords my customers use most.
Yikes! The hits poured in. I got 400 visitors a day. That's not thousands of visitors larger sites get daily, but 400 people searching for a site like mine should contain at least a few buying customers.
Not so. After several weeks of being welcome mat for NetFlip's hordes, my site didn't sell a single thing. Could be a case of lackluster copy or a bad product. But an identical offer using exact same copy was selling like gangbusters on my other site.
Strike three: Ok, so smaller pay-per-click sites just don't deliver PAYING customers. Maybe they're all folks trying to earn a penny to two by surfing from one site to next, I don't know.
I figured if you want BIG results you have to get on BIG search engines. GoTo has a deal where if you get in top three listings on their site, you'll be listed at top of page on such major search engines at AltaVista and HotBot.
By hook or crook, that kind of listing is as good as it gets. Expensive, but probably good. The plan produced a steady trickle of visitors. Once in a while one buys.
The problem. Here's what I firmly believe is problem with search engine traffic. People search for a site like yours and get a list of 10, 20, or 200 links. Even if they click to your site and like it, visitor knows there are dozens more waiting for them back on search engine page.