Chicken, egg, horse, cart…

We had an interesting discussion recently with an e-commerce business owner who asked whether they should be concentrating on driving traffic to their site or improving conversion rates.

This really is a chicken or egg type question, if you think about it. One the one hand, e-business owners don’t want to invest heavily in driving traffic visitors to their site if the people they attract are leaving dissatisfied in high numbers. On the other hand, conversion rate analysis and optimisation doesn’t come cheap, and so e-businesses owners can be reluctant to spend thousands in this area if they don’t have sufficient numbers of people coming to their site.

In an ideal world, you need to work on both. You need a cart and horse to be connected properly and working together to move forward and the same applies to e-business websites. Your site is likely to be a significant, if not the primary, channel for your products and services, and failure to reach your market and convert people into customers simply means that you’ll be running well under full steam.

The crux of the matter really comes down to budget and return-on-investment (ROI). If you already have reasonably high traffic numbers you should concentrate on improving conversion rates, and here you should achieve a fast return on investment. If you don’t have the traffic numbers, though, then it becomes a budget question, as any expenditure on conversion rate optimisation is unlikely to have a short term yield, and should be seen more as a longer term investment. In other words, putting the foundation stones down before the bricks arrive.

For customers who have low visitor numbers and low conversion rates and lack budget, you should consider spending your money wisely in both areas. Some SEO basics can achieve some significant increases in visitor numbers at fairly low cost. Check out Michael Brandon’s 3 Simple Secrets at SearchMasters for simple stuff that works (if you can’t attend his courses, then I think you can just buy the notes). Whatever you do here is going to take a good few months before you’ll notice the effects and you should use this time to optimise your site’s online experience to increase conversion rates. Once you’ve done that and you know that your site is now converting better, you should then consider investing into targeted pay-per-click marketing such as Google Adwords to drive qualified traffic to your site. This will help to boost visitor numbers whilst the SEO work is kicking in.

So, in conclusion, it’s really important to see the value of a combined approach and how you invest your time and money really depends on your primary issues (visitor numbers, conversion rates or both), and your ability to budget and invest for longer term gain.