Two years ago, Giovanna Villanueva was a ghost on the Internet. Despite her professionally designed website that showcased beautiful custom-built kitchen cabinets, she simply wasn’t getting any web traffic from Google or the other search engines. At her wit’s end, Giovanna finally turned to an SEO company for guidance.
Today she’s pulling in $10,000/month and her inbox is swamped with more emails than she can handle! The simple trick, according to the SEO company that serviced her, wasn’t exactly rocket science, but more a matter of using certain keywords and orchestrating link exchanges with other qualified businesses.
With all the minimalist free SEO tools on the Internet, not everyone will choose to hire an SEO company. However, Search Engine Optimization has grown into a $4.1 Billion industry and choosing an SEO company will likely show you some tricks you may not have thought of before. For instance, John Howard, CEO of Carrot Ink printer cartridges, hired an SEO company to test out various online ads he had created to see which one drove more site traffic. With some vigilance, the SEO company reported that a headline of “Find Your Cartridge” and an image of carrots sprouting out of a printer resulted in an 18% increase in sales, compared to the other ads. “We can do 6 million in annual sales. If I can get even a 1% increase in sales, [the SEO company] pays for itself,” Howard explains.
Jakob Nielsen of Nielsen consultant firm says that the best strategy is to sit and watch the site for a day. Your chosen SEO company would be happy to monitor your site carefully, tweaking subtle elements to find the winning combination. “You might change a button on your site from red to orange and see your conversion rate go up by 0.01 percent,” Nielsen says.”But maybe you could double your conversion rate if you had better product photos. Automated methods don”t tell you what’s going on in the customer’s head.”
