For the sack of simplicity, let’s say your end goal is driving up revenue.  There are a lot of factors that can cause it to grow that includes everything from increasing the cost of a product to improving the amount of organic traffic.  The trick is understanding how changes you implement actually make a difference.  In order to distinguish what’s happening it’s best to only make a single alteration at a time.

I decided to up the price of a product from $6 to $9, and here’s the results:

Time to do some calculations…

Average value prior to change: 0.0623
Average value after change: 0.0495
Standard deviation of change: 0.0161
Number of sales since change: 377
Student’s T-Value: 15.46
Probability the change is due to chance: 0.00%

Well all that means is that the increase in product cost did affect the conversion rate.  Big surprise, right?  And here’s the final figures:

Estimated monthly revenue pre-change: $618
Estimated monthly revenue post-change: $927
Estimated increase in overall monthly revenue: $309

That may look all well and good, but it’s not reality.  For this example site, traffic actually dropped to 1/5 of its original level, which means slightly under 1/3 of its original revenue.  The reason for the drop is a decreasing need for the product and some competition popping up here and there.  The good news, at least for you, is that this example is still relevant.

When you’re looking at your goals and evaluating shifts, it is essential to ensure that those changes are significant.  It’s also important to account for the other effects your alterations may have had.  If you have multiple types of conversions on your website, how was each of them affected?  Which one do you value more?

Take a step back, reexamine your bottom line before and after you’ve made a revision, and confirm the significance of a changes impact.

It appears that Google added a snazzy feature to see the CTRs of your top search queries in their Webmaster Tools. Here’s my website’s data for the above query:

So that’s a factor of 4-6 times better than the normal CTRs accepted as the standard in our industry.  How is that possible?  What’s attracting searchers to my search engine listing?  Let’s take a step into the mind of a searcher and examine their thought process.

So what’s working for our website?

• Title of the website matches their exact search query
• Url of the website matches their exact search query
• Description of the listing matches their search intent – They are probably looking for a list of controversial issues and possible further elaboration on these topics
• Url of the website is .org – Conveys a sense of authority and trust among many searchers especially on a query like this
• 1st result’s url is an ip address
• None of the other listings include all of the search keywords in their urls

What’s causing some organic traffic to click on our competitors?

• Sitelinks under the 1st and 2nd listing
• 1st and 3rd listings’ titles exactly match their search and the 2nd listing includes all of the search keywords

You’ve thinking “who cares that your website is a fluke and doesn’t follow the trend?”  Indeed this website is a bit of an oddity, but you should still care.  You now have the ability to see how modifying your title and meta description tag influence SERP click through rates on specific queries and pages.  Yeah, you could have estimated the changes these alterations would have had previously, but there’s a much larger margin of error because of the noise you have to deal with.  Isn’t it about time you reoptimized your page titles and descriptions to take full advantage of organic search rankings by boosting your CTRs well above the norm?

If you were to stumble upon this website, how would you respond?

You are going to be very turned off, and chances are you are going to immediately hit the back button.  It would be interested to see  data of changes in conversions when a website goes from a late 1990′s to a more modern design.  I’d be willing to bet that conversions would see a substantial positive shift after such a change.  10+ years ago it may have be standard for websites to look like this, but website design has evolved quite a bit and webmasters need to take advantage of the powerful design tools at their disposal.

Now if you came across this website, how would you feel about it?

This design and layout displays a environment that is

• professional
• functional
• organized
• easy to navigate

All of these features are something that an ideal design has.  It’s not necessary that you pay a designer to create this as there are numerous free templates available, but a custom design will give your website a unique and individualized feel for visitors.

Now that you have the eye candy part down, visitors will stay longer than a second. This means that they are going to see the content of your site above the fold.  Everything above the fold gives users a glimpse of your website’s goal or aim.  If your homepage lacks clear navigation elements or a hint that your site can satisfies their needs, they will likely continue their search elsewhere.  You need to prove to visitors that your website can provide value within seconds of their entrance.

A good design and content are necessary to catch users.  The design may spark their interest initially, and generally most designs will suffice such that visitors don’t immediately exit.  Visitors will proceed to scan your page for keywords or images that correlate with their end goal.  They might read a sentence or two to gauge the level of depth, knowledge, and angle that you approach subject matter with.  If a user finds something to be astray during this process, then they are going to pass on their way.  Since a homepage is generally the most visited, it is going to be the main source driving visitor to stay or split from your site.  On a blog, your newest posts are going to be representing your entire website.  For this reason a website is only as good as its index page.

Let’s say you go through every single webpage on your site and start doing some on page optimization. You run through the pages and change the tittle, meta, and html tags to be more appropriate; you even revise the content while doing some keyword optimization. All of those images missing alt tags get fixed, and the anchor text of links on pages gets adjusted and refined as well. It’s possible your ambitious enough to do this entire process again just to fix some of the things you overlooked on the first run through.  After you do one thorough or a few quick passes through of on page optimization, you are going to stop seeing benefit for the time you spend and things are going to flat line near that theoretical maximum.

Let’s take a look at link building now.  Maybe your website’s niche is extremely small, and it’s possible that you could tap out the number of links to your site.  That means you would have hit the theoretical cap for links.  Didn’t I say that was impossible?  Yes and no; if a website’s niche is very small and targeted, it is probable (but also very hard) to hit that max.  For the vast majority of people this will not be an issue, but if it does happen to be a problem, don’t worry because it’s really not.  Expand your options and and look at the broader picture; start link building from the more general niche that your website belongs to.  So if your website sells hypoallergenic suntan lotion and you think you’ve hit the link cap, you haven’t.  You just need to look into the hypoallergenic or suntan lotion supplies market.  It’s always possible to take a step back up in your vertical.

When it comes to seo, every other factor aside from links can only do so much.  Although, you are a fool if you only improve upon a few factors affecting your serps because search engine optimization is the sum of these factors.  Yeah, you can build a successful website with pretty much only links or incredible content, but that same site could be substantially more successful if all factors were focused on.  Plus, whenever search engines modify their algorithms, your website is going to be that much more stable in the serps.  That being said once you’ve approached the cap of all other factors, links are the only thing that can take you higher.

Writing for search engines is easy.  You take your knowledge about a topic and simply regurgitate it as text as quickly as possible while including those all important keywords.  If you are a bit lazier you might not even write original and just plain bad content, you’ll take an article already written on the issue and simply rewrite it, so that you trick search engines to think its unique content.  And if you are even lazier, you’ll just take that article, run it through a spinner, and repost it to save yourself valuable time.

The amazing thing is that you can get all of that poorly written, rewritten, or spun content to rank in the search engines.  You can get a handful to thousands or visitors a day (depending on which keywords you targeted and competition) to be directed to your site through search engines.  The fatal flaw with this system is that the end users you care about coming to your website are visitors and not search engines.

After those visitors read a few sentences of your content, they are going to be driven right back to the search engine results page away from your website.  Sure you might hook a few straggling visitors that don’t realize your content is crap, but the majority of these visitors will never return to your website again, and they most definitely will not convert to a conversion.

I guess you could harass your visitors with CPM and popup ads, but really the amount of money you’d make from that is insignificant to what you could generate if you wrote for people to begin with.  Plus in due time, Google is going to realize that you content is not worthy of visitors;  as search engines refine their algorithms, they are going to be able to identify useless content that currently ranks by examining everything from the actual text on page to how many users instantly return back to the serps.

Anyone can write for search engines, but writing for people is an art.  If you are writing for visitors, then you will recognize the challenges presented.  To create quality content you need to

• provide value
• give detailed examples
• say something new
• engage readers
• offer something unique

It is by no means easy to do this, and you still need to link, comment, and network to get your content recognized by others.  Writing for people takes talent, but by doing so you’ll see positive results.

Imagine yourself as a searcher looking for information about cutting the fat off of your web portfolio.  The author need to engage you as a reader which can be done using humor, posing a question, or even taking an unusual stance on an issue.  After this author has your interest, they need to inform you with details and examples about how to go about cleaning out the trash in your portfolio.  If the content fails to be different and say anything new, then you might turn elsewhere or just never be directed there in the first place.

If you provide knowledgeable and useful content for your readers, your chances of a conversion are greatly improved.  A conversion could be anything from getting first time visitors to return back to your website to having a user purchase a product you posted a review on.  The conversion is a multiphase process.  It starts off with getting visitors to a landing page and ends with your final goal, such as a sale or return visitor.  If you are writing for the search engines, then visitors are never going to make it past the first step.  The better content that you produce and push on user, the further you increase your chances of a conversion.

So take a look at the content you’ve been producing or have had produced for your sites.  What are visitors reactions to this content?  Are the majority of them bouncing away?  Maybe that’s not a bad thing.  If visitors are exiting your site after one page view, it could mean you addressed the question they wanted answered.  It could also mean that your product landing page needs work, thus they didn’t proceed further down the path that leads to a sale.  Look at visitor behavior, but look deeper than the basics – get into the mindset of your visitors and see your website as searchers do.  If you do that, then you’ll have an understanding of whether your site is satisfying the needs of your users, but more importantly you can see where change needs to be implemented, so that ultimately your websites serve people and not search engines.