Considering how changes affect traffic and sales

Customers often wonder what affect SEO, or mobile optimization, or design changes will have on their traffic and sales. Let's consider these scenerios in more detail.

SEO CONSIDERATIONS

SEO optimisation is a long term game. If you make a few changes on your website, then this won't have an overnight effect. Sometimes a change on your website will produce a short term boost for a keyword phrase, then later it may even be lower than before your changes, and in the long run (after a few months) your page will gain it's default SEO position. It's a fools game to keep tweaking content in the hope of a short term boost. The best time/cost strategy is to target a broad range of keyphrases, with good SEO techniques. The traffic you gain from SEO optimisation is still only going to be as good as the traffic volume for a given search phrase. Not all phrases are popular as each other. People might just not be interested in what you are targeting. The traffic you gain will also be dependent on your position. If you are on page 2 or more, you won't get hardly any traffic, but the close you are to position 1, the traffic may almost double for each position gained. Please keep in mind, that whatever you can do to optimise your website, so can your competitiors. If your competitors have a bigger budget than you, then they will likely more successful. You should consider Adwords if you really want to test a market for a given phrase, as everyone will have to pay the same price for the click, and hopefully you can still make a profit on the sale. 

PLATFORM CONSIDERATIONS

Some CMS platforms may have negative affects on your SEO. If your platform does not have natural URLS, customisable filenames, and customisable meta tags, then you will be missing out on those SEO benefits. That said, a platform change won't produce exceptional traffic increases. It is just 1 part of a larger SEO strategy to be using the right platform. But don't be using the wrong platform. Many website owners think the website or platform provider is required to deliver them new customers. The amount of traffic you get to your website is based on the popularity of your keyphrases, and the position you rank in google. If you are in an industry with low search volume, you should be finding other ways to promote your business. If you are in a competitive industry, you will have a hard fight to reach the top. Your choice of platform should be dependent on it ticking the required boxes for SEO compatibility, but it won't be the golden egg by itself. 

MOBILE OPTIMISATIONS

There is a lot of talk that mobile optimisations will give you more traffic and sales. Yes it is true, that if a google user searches on their mobile device, that google will rank websites in a different order than on a desktop search. However, you might only see a 5% real boost in traffic, as may other factors are important to search engine optimisation. 

WEBSITE DESIGN AND CONTENT CHANGES

It is a good idea to have a professional looking website, as it gives your customers a sense of your professionalism and increases the trust factor for new customers. Website design changes should increase sales conversions, however it won't increase traffic. 

In order to fully test if web design or content changes are having the desired effects, you first need traffic. You need alot of traffic to consider if minor changes to your website have been positive or negative. If you have less than 100 visitors a day, it's going to be hard to judge if any time you spend is not simply producing a result within the margin of error. 

GAUGING SUCCESS REQUIRES TRAFFIC 

You first need to have sufficient traffic so that you can quantity and gauge the success of your efforts

• Adding a call to action button to my home page or template, caused an increase in enquiries of X, but reduced Y 
• Promotion of a product at checkout, increased it's sales by Z% 
• Investment in SEO for a specific phrase increased traffic to the targeted landing page. 
• My loyalty points scheme encouraged an 5% increase in sales, but cost us 2% in redemptions.
• My affiliate referal scheme generates 10% of our sales, or increased our sales by 5% over all, but cost us 1% of total sales in referral discounts.

GETTING TRAFFIC 

If you don't have traffic, you need traffic. The fastest way to get traffic is to pay per click for programs like Google Adwords. 

Via Adwords, you can target