What SEO Can't Do

SEO in its simplest, purest and most wholesome sense is a wonderful thing. A website optimised for search engines is lovely. All tagged up, with your page titles succinct yet informative, weighing in at a feather light 65 characters. Page descriptions honed to a super relevant, not toooooo salesy 140ish characters. Then there are your H1s and H2s, your anchor text, delightfully rapid load times and not a hint of floppy flabby code to confuse the bots. 

Your graphics are nice and compressed, your keyword density is nestling somewhere just under the 3% mark. Files are named and the navigation is a dream. 

Excellent. Everything but everything SEOwise is A1, ship shape and Bristol fashion. And after a while here comes all that lovely traffic. Lots and lots of visitors eager to spend their time mooching around your website finding out all about you and what you do and what you offer before wending their way to your checkouts, arms loaded with products. Maybe you're not actually selling, maybe your visitors are subscribing to your publication or voting or downloading. Hey! It's your business objective after all. 

But hang on? All these first time visitors. Well, it's a bit much isn't it to expect them to do the do on their very first visit? And you find that many don't. They hardly know you for heaven's sake. Would you go all the way at the first time of asking? Probably not. Never mind. There's always next time. 

Except. There isn't a next time. And there won't ever be another time. You've gone to all that trouble attracting, enticing your prospects and well.... you've blown it. The came, they saw, they bounced. 

Why? Because your content doesn't cut it. All that investment in SEO to attract visitors but when it comes to engagement, entertainment, value, the close, you goofed. Maybe they were bored, or patronised or just saw that there was nothing in it for them. Maybe they just didn't quite trust you enough. 

Think about it. All you can realistically hope to achieve on a first visit is to start to nurture a relationship, to build trust. It's only on the second, the fifth, the fifteen visit that your call might be actioned and the sale made or the email submitted or whatever. When your content offers a compelling reason for someone to revisit your site then you stand a chance of building build the necessary trust that will eventually lead to your objectives being fulfilled. 

What can't SEO do? 

SEO can't convert. 

If your content fails - you fail. No matter how.