2 Schools Of Thought
In my opinion, SEO tends to focus on one of two areas;
- Optimizing for traffic, or
- Optimizing for conversion
Most SEO's (and dare i say internet marketers) fall victim to optimizing too heavily for traffic, and not conversion.
It's not necessarily bad to optimize for traffic, it depends on your goals; if you're in e-commerce or a service based business it is more valuable to invest your resources in making sure you rank well for the terms that are most likely to lead to a sale; optimize for conversion, not just to gain the visitor.
Where as if you are in the advertising or publishing business, where your revenues are directly correlated to the number of visitors and pageviews, or in other words the volume of eyeballs, then optimizing for traffic is going to be a better strategy.
Like any good SEO campaign, your optimization strategy should be dictated by your campaign goals. If your top level goals are straight-forward, such as increase revenue, then decide which optimization path is going to be the most effective based on your business:
- Does more traffic directly imply more revenue?
- Or do you need to make sure you are acquiring more traffic for specific conversion-focused keywords?