"Fortunately for me search engines are only a very small %age of my traffic. And no, that does not mean I could be doing a whole lot better if I hired you"
No, but increasing your number of search engine visitors would increase your revenue would it not?
One of the main tenets of SEO is that everybody will profit from traffic from search engines.
Very few people actually take the time to see if that statement holds true for their site.
The major keywords that my site is found on indicate that the users that come through that route are freeloaders, eating up bandwidth and never ever signing up for the premium package.
I can't blame them, I wouldn't either but that's a different story.
Targeting different keywords would be possible but it would require unethical behaviour wrt to building links and I don't go for that. My competitors do, I wish them best of luck.
The users that support the site are not in the hit-and-run category, they've found the site because their buddies are on it, and they stick together.
So, that's why more search engine traffic wouldn't help much, if at all. After all, if (increase-in-sales - (cost-of-acquisition + cost of freeloaders)) leaves you with a net loss then there isn't much point.
And if it would, then I probably would still find using SEO an unethical thing to do.
Maybe that's strange and maybe I should be going all-out to squeeze every last penny out of the internet but I prefer to get my users through references.
He walked into that one, but the fact is, there are many sites that DO get most of their traffic from search engines, and they make a lot of money off of it.
(Spoken as a former SEO who could prove his clients' ROI was well in excess of his substantial consulting fees.)
So, if that were the general case then ALL seos should be able to prove to their clients that their ROI exceeds the consulting fees, in which case they can all work on a no-cure-no-pay basis.
The problem is proving that any change in sales is due to SEO activity and nothing else - "you say our 100% up turn is due to your optimisations but my wife reckons it's my new toupe, now those cable ads are drawing them in droves to the website ...".
If your sector fell by 10% but you only fell 5% did they do a good job?
Without meaning to cause offense, if you get paying customers via referals but not via search engines then i'd argue that theres probably issues with your sales copy. It's your job to convince search engine visitors that your service is worth paying for.
No, but increasing your number of search engine visitors would increase your revenue would it not?