Opportunity Optimization

Dan Thies was recently interviewed by Pandia. One big thing he stresses is the concept of opportunity optimization, and how many people focused on SEO are missing out:

Beginners have a hard time looking at the rest of the picture. Their #1 problem is probably not traffic, it's conversion, usability, opt-ins, follow-up, pricing, making the right offer.

You can use search engine marketing to help you solve these problems, but if you don't solve them you will eventually fail. Those who make the most profit per visitor have the most resources to compete for rankings and ad placement.

When I speak with someone who wants to improve their rankings, I usually ask if they do pay-per-click. Invariably, the answer is "no, we can't afford that." The bad news is that if your website can't convert well enough to support a PPC campaign, you'll often find that SEO is even more costly, especially in the short term.

To be honest I am pretty guilty of not maximizing monetization per pageview. I struggle a bit with the issue of trying to write about what I find new and interesting when if I dumbed down most of the blog posts to be more fitting toward newbies my sales could probably double or triple.

The people who vote with their link popularity to help boost your authority are frequently not the same people who buy your goods and/or services. What are the best ways you have found to be linkable and target new people without seeming overtly boring, etc? Content in multiple formats? Multiple similar channels? Free email tips?

The low cost of traffic from quality SEO can be as much of a problem as a blessing, because it allows people to get away with being fairly inept in other business fascets to the point that eventually when the SEO techniques they use no longer work that the only solution is to close the business.

link from TW