One of the biggest mistakes that many business owners make is assuming that more visitors will always translate into more income. It’s a classic error that is easy to spot – after all, not everyone that walks into a department store is going to make a purchase.

The same logic – that not all visitors will turn into customers – is present on the web. We constantly see SEOs and online marketers making the same mistake as many retail business owners by assuming that more visitors to their website will always bring in more income.

The reality, of course, is that a lot of visitors aren’t worth all that much as would-be customers. Just like certain locations attract window shoppers in the world of offline business, certain search keywords attract online window shoppers, giving you far less bang for your SEO buck than many business owners anticipate.

At a certain point in your SEO campaign, you’ll want to transition from focusing on traffic to focusing on on-site conversion optimization. Instead of trying to get more visitors, you want to focus on generating the maximum possible ROI from the visitors that you already have.

Think about it this way: if your average customers spends twice as much as they used to, you’ll only need half as many customers to achieve the same income. It’s a truth of online marketing that many people mistakenly pass over, blinded by a desire for more traffic and a lack of interest in optimizing their websites.

If you’re struggling to find new profitable SEO keywords to target, try using one (or all) of the following on-site optimization strategies to improve your revenue without having to engage in additional SEO efforts:

• Convert your informational content pages (for example, “About Us”) into pages that are both informational and designed to sell. A great way to get more leads from your visitors is to add a simple call-to-action order form to your informational pages, allowing visitors to contact you after they’ve read your website’s information.
• Split test different website designs. Did you know that ugly websites often convert more visitors into customers than their stylish counterparts? One of the best ways to improve your average revenue per user is to split test several website designs and use the top-performing option. A great free tool for improving your website’s average conversion rate is Visual Website Optimizer.
• Focus on capturing more traffic from your current search impressions. As Adwords advertisers can tell you, your website’s title has a huge effect on the amount of visitors that click through from Google’s search page. Often, a single tweak to your title – adding an action word such as ‘now’ or ‘free,’ for example – will help you score a higher percentage of searchers.

At the end of the day, successful SEO is about far more than just getting as much traffic as possible. It’s what you do with the traffic that matters. Apply these three simple on-site optimization strategies and you’ll earn more income without ever investing in further Search Engine Optimization efforts.