SEO Horror Story #7
A few years back we were in a meeting, discussing upcoming campaigns and projects for the e-commerce site, when the President walked in. By his side was a SEO consultant he had hired to increase traffic to our website. The pres has listenend to our conversations about needing to increase traffic and that SEO was a good place to start. So now we had an SEO expert to work with.
So over the next few weeks and months, we did see traffic increase. Substantially increase; but revenues were not increasing. I started diving into the analytics (using web logs) and noticed an unusual pattern. Everyday about the same time, our website would get hammered with traffic. 98% resulted in single page traffic, a few would navigate a few pages and one visitor actually placed an order.
I researched the referrer and eventually figured out that our SEO expert had paid a source to send traffic to our site. When challenged on the ROI of the investment, he commented that he’d been hired to send traffic – which he did do!
