“More” is not a number.
Still counting down the days to getting out of Stage Four. We get asked if we still do SEO. Yes, we do. It underpins many of our daily tasks. But what we do differently is place revenue as our number one client target and work back from there. As a site owner you need a revenue target, and “more” isn’t a number.
What I learned
- SEO is still an integral part of the business
- Why you should focus on revenue
- How small changes can have big impacts
- How much do you want to make?
- Treat your eCommerce site as a store
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers. Melbourne’s still in Stage Four restrictions. And we’ve got to wear a mask apparently on a country road, even if we’re by ourselves. So be sensible everyone. I want to talk you a little bit about revenue and the little things. People always ask us, “You still do SEO?” It’s like, yeah. SEO underpins everything. Right. SEO is about a great user experience. It’s about being the most relevant result. It’s being authentic, real, authority, trust all those things. Right?
Are you focused on revenue?
Which is also a good business, also a good brand. Right. So, some of the little things though will work very, very well in increasing your revenue. And if you’re not focused on that as a goal, if your agency or your internal SEO person isn’t focused on that as a goal, then you’re probably going to be looking in the wrong places. And you’re probably going to be doing things with SEO that aren’t necessarily impacting the revenue directly.
So you can do little things that will impact revenue, like this. This is a 20 to 25% decrease in page load time. And it took five minutes to do, literally five minutes to do. And it’s got nothing to do with core web vitals or anything else. It’s simply a DNS change.
And I won’t go into it in this video because we’ve been into DNS in previous videos. But basically these little things that we find, we do them because it impacts the revenue and we have revenue goals to hit. And we’ve made commitments to our clients that we’re going to hit those goals.
Now, most clients, when you ask them and we had one this week, a new client. Welcome. How much do you want to make? And the answer typically is, “More”. It’s like, well, yeah, but that’s not a number. We need a number. Just give us a number. Because it’s just like life. Right. Unless you have those goals, you’re not going to put in a strategy or any tactics to achieve those goals. So, this is just basically one of the tactics is little things like this, that move into our strategy. So speed, little things like 200 milliseconds, can increase conversions. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen conversions go up 25, 30%. Right. Just for a little thing like that. And the reason that we find little things like that, it’s because we’re focused on the budgets, we’re focused on the targets. So this is just a quick screen grab of a bunch of our clients reaching the end of the month. Always exciting for us because, “Ah, did we achieve budget?”
And you can see there, we’re pretty close with… Well, we’re over and above with most of our clients. Let me just stop that recording. So when you focus on those things, it’s because you’ve been driven by a number that you have to hit. Right. So, the way that we work is we set up the budgets. The clients are across. We work with the clients very, very closely.
Is your site a store?
And this isn’t a sales pitch by the way, because we’re about to close the doors I think on a new business at the moment. The other Jim, in the business, who many of you might know is about to shut the door on that one.
But it’s about looking at your businesses differently. It’s about looking at e-commerce differently. In bricks and mortar, even before we had e-commerce, I worked in retail back in the 80s and I can remember back then, as a store manager, I had budgets to hit. And your e-commerce sites are stores. So as store managers, you should have budgets you’re going to hit. And you should understand where it’s going to come from, and you should have some concepts of what you want to spend on. And how you’re going to get that revenue.
Now there’s a lot of things in SEO that won’t impact revenue directly. Truly, that some people do. And I’ve spoken about before, and I’m not going to go into them now, but certainly speed is a big one. Right. But if you’re focused on revenue, you’re not going to go and do those SEO things if they’re not going to directly impact revenue. Or if it’s the law of diminishing returns. You’ve got to put in so much effort to get half a percent uptick or something.
Focus on the revenue first and then work back from there. It’s blown my mind how well and how simple that works. Hopefully that’s helpful. And we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much, everyone. Stay safe. Get your vitamin D. Bye. I am.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
