Your conversion ratio is how many people per 100 unique visitors perform the specific action you desire when they visit your optimized website. Studies show that most people that visit your site will "bounce" (leave your web site) within 2 to 6 seconds. You have 2 to 6 seconds to give them what they want.
One of the first things an SEO Expert can do to lower your bounce rate is to examine your traffic. You need to know what the apache logs say. I start by writing a simple php script to parse the logs and extract the data and put it in a basic mysql database. Using the structured query Language we can write a couple of basic queries to get the answers we seek.
Seth Godin is a marketing genius and he gave a great lecture that directly relates to conversion called "Sliced bread" and it got me thinking. How do we apply that in real life? So I looked around for a couple of my favorite examples of the "Purple Cow". Richard Branson holding up a styrofoam space shuttle with the Virgin logo on it looking a bit crazy up at the sky? Google Richard Branson Space Travel and you will see a man holding up a half a billion dollar aircraft right?
Wrong. What would the viral componant be if Branson pointed the model not to the heavens, but rather the earth. Or perhaps with a less enthusiastic facial expression? My point is we can take that rather successful viral photograph apart point by point until there would be nothing viral left. Improving your conversion ratio is the exact reverse of the aformentioned.
Every mouse click you put between your product and your visitor can cut your conversions in half. You could read SEO for idiots or simply decide not to send your precious visitors on a proverbial easter egg hunt for information. In order to convert vistors into sales you need to know what they were looking for when they performed the search in the first place. Long gone are the days when you could say some one would most likely be interested in SEO when they searched for SEM. You really need to get inside the intent of the person submitting a particular query at Google. It does not help you to know how many people search for a given phrase, it means everything for you to know what they want when they do.
