That’s right I said it, search engine optimization is not as important as you may think to have a successful website.?I have had many clients who spend so much time worrying and “tweaking” their sites to “Improve their SEO” that they miss the point and actually make their site less effective than they could be. I am not saying search engine optimization is not important, it is important, but it is only one aspect of a successful website and it is often over emphasized.
Here is an example: I have a client who does home repair. This client has spent hours reading and researching what are the best tricks and techniques to get better search engines results. He has also subscribed to several services that promise him top ten Google listings. He has spent hours and thousands of dollars to increase his visibility and still never gets any jobs from his website.
He hired Scottidesign and we examined his website, traffic and search engine results. He told us how hard he was working and how he “had to get into the top ten search results for his industry.” What we found was that he was getting 98% of his website traffic from search engines, he was ecstatic, but he was still getting no business through his website.?I felt strongly that having 98% of his traffic come from search engines was his problem. He needed to spend his time increasing traffic from referring sites  and direct traffic from users typing his domain in directly and to stop spending so much time and money on search engines.
A referring site is another website that includes a link to your site. We contacted all of this clients suppliers and any organization that he belong to and ask them to link to his website and almost of them were happy too.
We used a little common sense to get users to go directly to his domain. He had overlooked putting his website on his trucks, yard-signs and advertisements. His newspaper ads had a fax number but not his website or email.
On his website we added a “Free Quote” button and made sure that links to his contact page were in several spots. We made sure his contact page had a form, email addresses, phone numbers and more. We even changed his contact form from having 10 fields to 4 “Name” “Email” “Phone” and “Comments” that all.
In one week had his first job ever from his website. Over the first 6 weeks of our changes he was shocked that he was now getting a steady stream of new customers from his website.
This clients website traffic was now an almost even mix from search engines, referring sites and direct traffic.
Search engines are only a part of your online marketing don’t focus only on SEO and ignore everything else.