One of the frustrations of helping other people market their product or service on the web is, often times, a lack of control over the way that product or service is presented on the website, the website design — or even the product/service itself.
There are some things that search marketing can accomplish, like helping your site achieve better rankings for relevant keywords and a growing channel of valuable traffic, but long term success depends on turning those new visitors into actual customers (hopefully over and over again). If the site and/or product lacks the ability to turn those new visitors into long term customers, even the best SEO isn’t going to help much.
A lot of internet marketing consultants, myself included, have begun to make site usability and conversion optimization part of our list of services. However, many companies are resistant to those suggestions when they’re coming from the “SEO guy.” I guess for a variety of reasons (which I’ll probably save for another post).
So, here are a five site issues that SEO/SEM can not fix — that will affect the long term success of your online business:
