Profit-Optimizing Your Website: SEO for Visitors, Video for Conversions

There’s a lot of talk online about monetizing your website. But monetization isn’t the point — it’s one part of the goal, but it’s not the whole thing. For those of you who don’t recognize the term, ‘monetization’ simply means ‘adding one or more elements to your website that produce money when visitors interact with them.’ The most basic form of monetization is Google Adwords or other context-sensitive text ads. The most complex form is probably along the lines of “being eBay”. But no matter what your form of monetization is, it’s useless if you don’t have two other things going for you.

The first is traffic. No matter what your website, SEO is the best answer for getting long-term, targeted traffic that’s ready to buy. An established SEO firm that has a reputation for great keyword research is your best bet, for no other reason than that targeting the right keywords will determine 50% of how successful your SEO efforts are. No other part of the SEO process is as mission-critical as excellently chosen keywords.

That’s because targeting the wrong keywords can make you go wrong in 3 different ways. You can target keywords that have so much competition that you won’t ever achieve a first page placement on the SERPs. You can target keywords that are easy to dominate, but have so little traffic that no one will notice that you dominated them. And you can target keywords that are low-competition, high-traffic, but happen to be used mostly by people looking for free stuff and not willing to pay anything (a startlingly high percentage of surfers.)

The second problem is no conversions. In other words, you could be getting traffic that is ready to buy, but something about your page fails to capture that urge and turn it into a sale. That’s where on-page video comes in. Offer your visitors a web presenter to tell them all about the benefits of your product or service. Or a flash video banner that goes over, in short, your company’s mission and how you’ve implemented it.

Regardless of exactly how you do it, it’s proven that videos lead to people sticking around, and people who stick around are more likely to buy. Attach the video and the SEO to a clever, monetized site — THAT’s the goal.