Imagine you had a farm and you had a few hens that laid eggs.  These hens were super amazing and every once in a while, one random hen would make an egg that was gold and you would sell it and make a ton of money.  Pretty soon you would start doing everything you could to get all of your hens laying golden eggs every single day, right?  Maybe you start by feeding them more – it costs more money to buy so much food but it works, at least partially.  You end up getting a lot more eggs but alas, no more gold eggs than before.  So instead you try buying more hens, but the hens you buy are apparently not awesome – they also lay eggs but no golden eggs.  With a resigned feeling, you write out a sign and post in near your farm for brown medium free range eggs – 12 for $3.

Often companies come to Sharp Guys’ wanting to increase their website traffic and are treating website traffic like a farmer looking for more golden eggs.  When they say their only goal is to get more traffic to their website or show up for certain keywords on Google, what they almost always really mean is that they would like to get more leads that lead to revenue.  Unfortunately, that’s a very different thing and there are many agencies out there that won’t tell them the difference.  More traffic is easy, more leads that lead to revenue is often times much harder.  And one does not always correlate with the other, in fact in often doesn’t.

I have had clients that hired SEO companies before working with us.  These other SEO agencies increased the client’s search traffic by 700% in a 6 month period.  This seemed outstanding until the client realized that the new web traffic was coming entirely from outside of their market area and was useless for them.  That’s why instead of just driving traffic, think of search terms that your potential visitors would use that show buying intent.  So if you sell hydraulic cylinders, instead of simply trying to pop up for the term ‘hydraulic cylinders’ as if you were Wikipedia (good luck beating them on any term), try creating content for ‘buy hydraulic cylinders’ or ‘hydraulic cylinder manufacturer’.  Not only will there be less competitors smart enough to go after those terms like you are, making it easier to show up and be clicked on, the searcher’s buying intent means you’ll also be a lot closer to getting a lead that leads to revenue.  And leads and revenue is how you get your hens to lay more golden eggs (and give your boss/owner something to get excited about).