I'm awed by the SEO community, but I think they're missing the point. Most of their effort is aimed at creating innovative strategies and tactics to get web pages ranked highly which ultimately drives traffic. The more enlighted ones align their compensation with performance. "If you don't rank you don't pay," or even better, "We'll increase your traffic - Guaranteed." But is this really the goal? No buisness survives on website traffic. What a business really needs is traffic that  converts to a lead and ultimately a sale.

Far too many SEO firms take their clients half way to their goal (sales growth) and say "good luck, hope it all works out from here," when what they should be doing is optimizing not for traffic but conversions. Even when the focus moves to conversion, too often they are still thinking within the box of the website. They ask, "What can we do to get return visits?" But it's not ABOUT the website. It's about engagement through whatever means best serves the customer. That may mean getting people to Friend us on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter or ask for our free report or attend our webinar or call us. And it may mean all of these things at different times.

This broader focus calls for a completely different set of skills. Developing lead nurturing strategies, creating content that engages and adds value all the way up to and beyond the point of sale, and integrating  web, e-mail, direct mail, personal follow up and other inbound and outbound marketing methods. Tactics that get web visitors to jump forward, identify themselves and request more personalized communication. In sum, the ability to coordinate and automate a collection of marketing messages so that the right one gets to the right prospect at the right time via the right medium.

Driving traffic to your website is a critical piece of the marketing puzzle that requres a skilled SEO expert to do right. But it is only a piece. To grow your business, you need the rest of the conversion puzzle, too.