Search engine marketing success should be measured with sales

One of the major misconceptions that businesses have about search engine optimisation is that the end goal is ranking highly on Google - or other rival search engines.

While this is undoubtedly one of the main aims of search engine marketing, it is not the be all and end all. There is another far more important consideration - the actual number of sales leads and conversions created by an SEO campaign.

According to industry expert Stephen Chapman, one of the major concerns that SEO agencies have is that businesses often get hung-up on a set of very specific keywords that will rank highly but are unlikely to be searched for by internet users.

While it can be easy to get obscure phrases to the top of Google search engine results pages, if no one is actually looking for those specific keywords then the effort is wasted.

Writing for ZDNet, Mr Chapman claimed that while generating leads is not the responsibility of an SEO agency, it should be something that is raised with clients that are adamant on ranking for very obscure key phrases. This can be done with three simple words - return on investment.

Companies can end up wasting a lot of cash if they stick to their guns and push ahead with a search engine marketing campaign that doesn't generate leads.

"Unfortunately, there are those who will always attribute total SEO success to the ranking of a keyword that they’ve grown personally attached to," Mr Chapman wrote.

He added that equally unfortunately, there were a huge number of unscrupulous SEO companies out there that would happily take businesses' hard-earned cash and get them high rankings for perfectly useless keywords.

"That's not how your approach to SEO should be, though. If you have a bunch of keywords that someone gets you ranked for but they do nothing to help you, you're going to think SEO just didn't work," he concluded.

His comments come hot on the heels of industry expert Ray Comstock's suggestion that businesses should work closely with their chosen third-party SEO agency to ensure their search engine marketing activity is offering concrete results.

Writing for SES Magazine, Mr Comstock claimed that the insight and experience offered by SEO experts should not be overlooked.

Mediarun is a search engine marketing company in London providing search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising and social media services to clients with quality traffic.