Black Hat SEO News

This is a post I’m resurrecting from my archives from 2006 because it still applies today the same as it did yesterday! The number one mistake all beginners make including “black hats” is thinking traffic is every thing! Traffic is certainly important! But conversion is more important then traffic! What good is your 100,000 hits if you can’t even get one sale from that?

Target your traffic! Get better conversions! Think conversion first then apply your seo skills afterwards! Done right, you can increase your profit margin 200%!

Internet marketers think getting traffic is the most important thing - it's not.
In fact the biggest mistake web owners make is thinking that it's all about GETTING MORE TRAFFIC.
The term 'web traffic' gets over 43,000 searches per month - that's over half a million queries a year! And that's not including the related searches like 'web site traffic', 'get more hits', 'increase web traffic, etc.

Of course this is understandable. If you don't have traffic you can't make sales right? So getting more web traffic is essential.
However it's not the most important thing. Not even close.
There's another factor that's even MORE important than having a well designed website or getting more web site traffic. What is it?
It's called Web Conversion.

Web conversion is basically how well your website converts visitors into sales. It's the ratio of sales to visitors to your website. So for example, if you get 100 unique visitors to your website and make 1 sale, your conversion rate is 1 / 100 or 1%.
Increasing your web conversion rate is 10 times more important than getting more traffic - in my humble opinion.
Want proof? Look at the numbers.

Let's say you're getting 100 unique visitors to your website per day and that you make 1 sale per day (or per 100 visitors). So your conversion rate is 1%. Let's say that each sale nets you $100. So you're making $100 a day or $700 a week.
Not bad right? But let's say you want make more money so you decide to get more traffic. You run some pay per click ads and get 50 more unique visitors a day. (Or maybe you hire a SEO expert and pay thousands of dollars to get higher rankings, or maybe you buy some high-ranking links, etc.) Regardless that's a 50% jump in traffic.

Pretty impressive. But you've definitely put out a LOT of effort and even money to get more traffic. Was it worth it?
Well, you're now making an average of 10.5 sales per week (150 hits per day x 7 days x 0.01). That's approximately $1050 per week - or an extra $350 a week.
That's pretty good. But it did cost you depending on how you got that extra traffic.
Now let's look at a much EASIER way to increase sales.
Let's say you do some research on web conversion and how to build a better-converting website. You do some tweaks here and there, test it, take out some text, test it, write better copy, make your website cleaner, test it, make the product benefits stand out...and voila your conversion rate goes up to 3%
(That's not hard to do, some websites even have a 20% conversion rate).
Now let's look at your sales. You haven't gotten any more traffic but at 100 unique visitors a day and 3% conversion rate you're making 100 x 0.03 = 3 sales or $300 a day. That's $2100 per week - an extra $1400. Wow.

And did you spend thousands of dollars to get better rankings and more traffic? Did you spent $50-$200 a week on pay per click traffic? No - you just spent some time learning and tweaking your site to increase the conversion rate.
See how much easier that is? Now obviously it's a little more complicated than that - you have to test and track your results to see what works and what doesn't work.

But in the end you have a high-converting website that just keeps making money for you while you relax and go on vacation. You don't have ongoing costs to your SEO expert or the pay per click search engines either. Considering how much easier and profitable it is to focus on increasing your conversion rate over getting more traffic, you'd think that most webmasters and marketers would be more concerned with conversion.
Want to know the shocking thing?

They're not! (Ok, the really smart ones are, but most of the other ones are trying to increase traffic).
Remember how we said above that the term 'web traffic' gets over 43,000 enquiries per month? Guess how many searches the term 'web site conversion' gets? Only 316! How crazy is that? That tells you that very few internet marketers are focusing on improving their conversion rate. Most of them are spinning their wheels trying to increase traffic!

If you've been wearing yourself out trying to get more web traffic, realize that there is an easier way to increase web sales. Focus on improving your web conversion rate and you'll be miles ahead of the competition - probably for years to come.