Quantity versus Quality: SEO Tradeoff
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about getting visits to a website from organic search results right? Yes….and no; SEO is also about the quality of visits to a website. Whilst the primary objective of SEO is to get visits, the secondary objective (and often equal in relevance and importance as the primary objective) is ensuring that the visits are of a certain quality. The quality element may usually be measured in terms of the percentage of visits from which a sale is made, or an enquiry is lodged etc.
SEO for Quality and Quantity
A trade-off is necessary when considering quality of visits. Focusing on the quality as well as quantity of visits will almost always mean a lower volume (quantity) of visits and more time invested in getting SEO right. As an example of this consider; if a client were to instruct me, as an SEO consultant, to get as many visits to a website as possible and not consider quality at all then I could manipulate the keywords and content of the website to focus on popular search terms irrespective of whether they have anything to do with my clients business. But this strategy will seldom offer benefits to my client and usually will prove an expensive lesson in futility; the client’s brand will be diluted, queries will be made to the client which will have no real prospects of a sale and if black hat / black box SEO methods have been used then possibly the clients website will be ‘blacklisted’ by the various search engines.
Focusing on quality means communicating to the search engines, via SEO, exactly what the clients business is about. If the clients business and product is seldom searched for then there are going to be fewer visits from Google, Yahoo and the other search engines. By concentrating on quality however at least the visits from these search engines will likely be genuine prospects of a sale (or whatever the other objective of the organization is). Focusing on quality
Fewer Visits but Better Results
As an SEO consultant it can be challenging when clients are interested in the number of visits alone rather than the quality of visits. A lot of the hype surrounding the importance of the number of visits to a website has been effectively promoted by less than desirable online operators (the ones who guarantee certain results). The impact of SEO based purely on quantity does more damage than good. It is essential for clients to understand how important quality is when considering SEO.
