SEO has many adverse effects but they also have beneficial effects. Researches quote more adverse effects than positive effects. Sometimes websites receive even a very small share of traffic even after using SEO techniques. SEO employs certain strategies like eye-tracking, a device that reads the movement of eyes with respect to the head of a person, to develop optimization techniques. These eye-tracking studies show that a person visiting an SERP from top to bottom and from left to right side. Hence website developers try to employ techniques that place their site on the top of the results page. But visiting a website merely does not guarantee high conversion ratio. The ratio of profits obtained by the visitors to their visiting count to the website is called conversion ratio. SEO is not just a single strategy that can be employed to improve the website profits. There can be many other ways of enhancing profits. The user’s requirement goals can be achieved by many other marketing strategies. A website can use paid advertising on its site, improving the content quality, discussing techniques which help the site to be crawled or indexed, analysis of the success of other websites etc, to improve the conversion rate. As SEO may not guarantee continual visitors, a business that merely depends on SEO techniques may face a grand loss when the search engines do not ensure number of visitors to that website. Hence SEO can be believed as a part of developing rate of return and accessibility of the website but cannot be totally relied for the profits.
The following are some statistical proofs to show how far the SEO techniques are responsible for a website’s conversion ratio. Google was successful in covering 75% of search engine results in 2003. This was in USA, whereas it was much larger outside USA. Google has been popular and predominant search engine till 2007. It has covered 85-90% of the results in Germany where there are only 5 SEO companies other than Google. This shows a market share can be hit even without the help of SEO. Google lags behind only in few parts of the world such as China, Japan, South Korea, Czech Republic and Russia where local markets are pre-dominant. Thus an optimization to become successful must have translation of web pages, web hosting provided by local IP address and domain name linked with top level domain of the target market.
