James Ward

Your favourite search engine is Google, right? Or is it…

A Microsoft employee (working in his own time) has developed a ‘blind taste’ challenge where you compare the results from three search engines: Google, Yahoo! and the recently launched Bing. You choose your favourite set of results to reveal which search engine they came from. The results can be surprising. In my tests I found that I preferred Bing’s results almost as often as Google’s, with Yahoo! coming in a poor third. (more…)

Whilst watching Comic Relief Does The Apprentice last night, Sir Allan referred to the comment made by “some schmuck on Dragon’s Den”:

“Profit is sanity; Turnover is Vanity.”

It’s exactly the same in the world of search marketing:

“Conversions are sanity; Traffic is vanity.”

It’s easy to be seduced by the ever-increasing traffic that comes to a site as a result of improving on your search engine optimisation or buying clicks on the pay-per-click platforms. But if that traffic isn’t converting to something tangible – sales, enquiries, sign-ups, downloads, etc than you have acquired nothing more than boasting rights.

The moral? Make sure that you always idenity at least one action that you can track as a ‘conversion goal’ within your stats and measure your site’s performance against that. Don’t look just as the volume of traffic.