Okay, so in actual fact, it’s not really bullshit, but it’s probably bullshit for your website.
Why would I say such a thing? Simply because if you’re website is not optimized in the way it handles purchases, client interaction, etc. it’s pointless having your website ranked number 1 on search engines and getting 10,000 visitors a day.
Let’s say out of those 10,000 visitors, 10 wants to buy something from you, and out of those 10 only 2 understand what they must do on your site to buy the product. If you’re working on a profit of R100 per sale, that’s R800 that you just lost because people don’t understand your site.
So, you build on your client interaction, make it easier for them to purchase, and 10 of out 10 people that want to buy, buys your product. Great, you made your R1000. Are you up selling though? Are you getting those people to buy from you again? If you had a product that people could buy, and purchase again within a few months, do you have an automated process whereby those people get reminded by you again? It’s a lot easier to sell something to someone that has already bought from you, and that already knows you are trustworthy.
I’ve been playing with online businesses for a couple of years now, and have made a lot of mistakes…. PLENTY. But I’m not worried about those mistakes, I have learned from them. I actually like making mistakes, because when I do rectify them, it works so well that I can hardly believe it.
Now, back to how your website is currently doing things, and how it can do it better.
I’ve got this one website where people can do credit checks on themselves. I’ll get into why we started this on another day. From the get go, the website did very well, anything from 2-5 requests a day. This was still in my early days as an internet entrepreneur, so that was a lot to me 
It had basically been running for the last year and a bit without any changes to either the backend or the front. Ok, that’s a lie, I did do a front end change a couple of months ago, which actually did increase the number of people signing up to receive their report.
The whole time though, I knew something was missing, and I knew exactly what I needed to do to implement it. Because each time I thought of this, I didn’t really think it would make such a big impact on the business, so I never got around to it. Until about 3 weeks ago I decided to get off my ass and just do it. It took me a total of 6 hours to implement the changes, but I think that could potentially increase the amount of business we do by almost 100%.
What was it that I did? Simple. I noticed we were getting a lot of people apply for their report, and then just not paying for it. Ok, we weren’t losing money in the process, because we only supply the report once they’ve paid, but we’re losing out on sales. A lot of sales in fact. A LOT. When I ran the figures, I got upset that I never did anything about it. In the beginning we would follow up manually to remind people to pay, but the number of requests per day increased so much that it was difficult to implement a follow up plan. So what is the obvious thing to do, change the processes within the website to automatically remind people to pay. And obviously, the number of non-paying clients decreased a HELL of a lot.
What is the other thing I did? Also very simple. Initially we’d sit every couple of months, and email everyone saying that perhaps it’s time to checkup on their credit report again. But because this was also a manual process, and we just started running out of time to do this, it sort of faded away to the background. Now the processes on the website emails people every 3 months to tell them to check up on their report again. But not only is it a reminder, we’ve also build a specialised link that when they open it in their browser, their form is automatically filled in with the details we have of them in our database. This gives them the chance just to verify everything, and click a button. So it’s made extremely easy for them to use and request another a report, which in turn means another sale for us.
Only time will tell how much difference this will make, but logic tells me it should make a big difference.
Therefore, check if you have the following on your website:
- website simple to understand, and navigate
- make sure people know how to buy your product
- keep a database of people buying from you
- follow up with them to upsell
And no, SEO is not really bullshit, you HAVE to HAVE it, just make sure your other things are sorted out first.