When a visitor comes to your website and does what you want them to do, that’s a conversion. Conversions should be defined based on your specific goals.
Keeping an eye on your conversions is essential too. If you’re getting lots of visitors, but it’s not leading toward any of your goals, whether it’s a purchase or newsletter sign up, something isn’t right. The problem could be in your SEO, indicating that you’re using the wrong keywords.
Optimizing properly allows you to reach the people who are searching for what you have to offer, which means that if your SEO is working. Similarly to your bounce rate metrics, if your conversion rate metrics are low, try ranking your pages for alternate keywords or subjects.
SEO campaigns can deliver high rankings and an insane amount of website traffic, but if the conversion numbers are low then it will not be a successful marketing campaign. A lot of this has to do with the website content, layout and call-to-action location. It requires a lot of split testing and diving into the numbers in order to fine-tune a campaign to deliver the highest conversion rate. Even after achieving a high conversion rate the campaign must constantly be evaluated, and changes made if needed.
Let's say your goal is to increase leads. With this in mind, conversion tracking may include contact requests, quote requests, appointment requests, or phone calls to name a few. It's also essential to distinguish between conversions from organic search, and conversions from other sources.
Conversions are a much more valuable metric than rankings, backlinks, and traffic, and your website should be designed in such a way as to encourage conversions.
