ForceworksGood news: SEO is working, Bad News: SEO is working

Good news: SEO is working, Bad News: SEO is working

 Congratulations! All those dollars invested in your website and SEO have finally paid off and your traffic is through the roof. You spent months with a top web design firm to create an awesome public facing website, and more time still to optimize the site to show up high on the search engines, and of course you planned for success and have a sophisticated system in place for managing all those new leads that are flooding in. Oops, what was that last one again? No problem, your web developer set the contact form to send the inquiries to an email address. Huh?

I often see significant efforts placed in web design and SEO that apparently are assuming failure. They must be assuming failure as there was no plan in place for the possibly of success. While there are certainly a lot of failed efforts in the SEO arena, this is largely due to incompetence, not impossibility. We do not do SEO, but I have witnessed massive failures as well as tremendous successes. It is unfortunately one of those fields where the true experts are hard to find in a sea of well spoken know-nothings. But if you were fortunate enough, or savvy enough to have properly budgeted for one of the real experts, you will indeed have success today. But, as the saying goes “be careful what you wish for”, because if part of your plan does not include a backend to handle this success, you will just fail later.

Let me suggest CRM be included as part of your strategy. Microsoft Dynamics CRM can do an awful lot of things, but for this post I will focus on where it fits into your website/SEO strategy. Simply put, CRM is the enabler, it enables you to convert all that traffic to sales. Unless what you sell is an online product, your website and SEO are intended to generate leads for you to later sell your product or service to; most business fall into this category. Let’s face it, leads are not only the life blood of any business, they are also power. With enough incoming leads you can raise your prices and take a pass on difficult customers thus raising your profitability substantially… who wouldn’t want that. It’s no wonder that billions of dollars are spent annually on websites and SEO, and billions more on every other type of lead generating activity, because we all know leads are power. Power to crush your competitors, power to leverage your suppliers, power to steer your whole damn industry.

There are two-components to power from leads: getting them and converting them to cash. Independently, these two tasks are useless, and yet many companies spend all of their energy on the first one. If you are not efficiently converting leads to cash, you are wasting your time. To learn more about what Microsoft Dynamics CRM is click here. I also wrote a series on how SMB can benefit from CRM which starts here.

To learn more about how Forceworks can integrate the power of Microsoft Dynamics CRM into your lead-to-cash strategy contact us today.