In SEO in Pittsburgh: Understanding Search Industry Jargon Bl-Co, we discussed several key terms related to internet marketing in Pittsburgh and beyond. This included questionable tactics used by unscrupulous search marketers, a brief explanation of bots, the important of bounce rates and the meaning of content. In this installment we'll detail a number of other critical parts of the search industry, including the importance of contextual relevance, and what conversion rates mean in regard to web traffic and sales. SEO in Pittsburgh can actually be used to dominate a global marketplace, so understanding this industry jargon is vital for businesses that intend to stay ahead of their markets and niches.
*Contextual Relevance
If you're working with a potential Pittsburgh SEO company and they tell you they'll put links to your fabric supply website on sites related to NASCAR and Xbox, do you think Google or any other search engine is going to find that link relevant? The answer is easy – of course not.
Contextual relevance in the case above would be putting backlinks to the fabric supply site on a blog about knitting or a website that offers patterns. Essentially, the search engines know that people move from one page to another and one link to another when they are related and do not impede the current "search trend" that the user is on.
This data is measured on-the-fly in some cases, such as banner ads and other search marketing strategies like Google Adwords, which serve ads related to what the user has been looking for recently. Contextual relevance means that your site or page is related to the source where the backlink or other reference point is found.
Contextual relevance also refers to the content on your site and the content on the sites that link to you. This means that if your site is all about wooden shoes but you have pages or posts related to steam engines, then that might causes some problems with both search bots and users. Additionally, if the sites you link to feature similar contextually-irrelevant issues, that could affect the link juice passed to your site.
*Conversion Rate
Good SEO can result in getting tons of website visitors to your page, but this alone isn't sufficient enough to result in an actual business transaction. A website must be deliberately setup to convert traffic to paying customers. The type of conversion you'll need will depend on your products, services, and the consumers that buy them, but can include a direct purchase, to sign up for a newsletter or email list, to enter demographic information, request information, to play a game, take a test, or some other action.
The conversion rate is a measure of the percentage of visitors that come to your website and are converted to a "sale." The higher the conversion rate, the more efficient your website is. Conversion rates are often directly correlated to bounce rates – if people are finding what they are looking for on your page and buying, then that means they’re digging deeper into your site and are therefore lowering your bounce rate. In lay terms: if done right, paying customers help to improve your organic SEO efforts.
SEO will only work for your website if it is setup to convert. To find out if your site is ready to have a massive amount of traffic driven to it, click here for a free consultation with a professional SEO firm. Otherwise, the next article in this series will discuss industry jargon such as CPC or cost per click, domain age and domain names, grey-hat SEO, hyperlinks and HTML computer programming language. To get information about these topics right now, simply call the number at the top of your screen.
