Is your website delivering the SEO results you want?
Every prospect I speak to knows exactly what they want their website to be doing for them but very few have a handle on exactly how successful their site is at achieving these goals.
First you need to be clear about the goals you have for your site and second, you need to be measuring them. Only then can you see what’s working and what isn’t so you can take action.
What you need to do to get your site on track:
- Define your business objectives for your website
- Define goals and funnels in analytics to gather data
- Define your KPIs and measure them month on month
- Know what to do with the data you gather
Points 1 to 3 ahould be fairly easy but point 4 is where the gold is. If you know what the data is telling you then you know exactly what to do to to get better results. You need this business information to make informed choices otherwise you are just guessing so don’t do it, measure it and know for sure.
Let’s look at these points a little closer:
1 Define your business objectives for your website
This is probably very simple and most likely to be one or more of the following: more sales, more leads, more visitors, better relationships with prospects/customers, brand building.
2 Define goals and funnels in analytics to gather data
You probably already have Google Analytics installed but if you don’t go do it now. Then set up your goals, analytics has a good help system to show you how to do it but first decide what your goals might be – these are likely to match your business objectives by measuring a successful completion. For example, you might have a goal for a completed sale, a completed lead form, a completed registration for a newsletter or download. Whatever your goals are they should mark something that you want people to do on your site
If there are several steps involved in a successful goal completion then set up the funnels too. If you have 4 steps in your checkout that people have to follow in order to buy something then make each step a stage in your funnel. When data collects here you will see if you have unexpectedly high fallout from steps in your processes. Making changes will allow you to measure before and after so wee if you can make improvements.
3 Define your KPIs and measure them month on month
You can set up custom reporting in analytics to produce a KPI report month on month. KPIs would include your goals but would also include other crucial measures. For example: traffic from organic search, traffic from specific referral sites, number of keyphrases used to find your site, total revenue, number of transactions. The idea of KPIs is that they are measures that should be increasing every month – no excuses (except for seasonality of course but definitely year on year!)
There are other measures you can use that are useful to track that will have thresholds and so won’t increase indefinitely but are worth keeping a close eye on, such as: average transaction value, conversion rate, bounce rate, average time on site, number of pages visited per session.
4 Know what to do with the data you gather
This is the key to making this work and this will make your website make you more money. Having all of this data available is crucial for you to be able to see what is currently working well for your site. Watch out for paralysis by analysis identify some key reports to watch. You need to know exactly where your sales are coming from and where you might have problems with your site that you can take action to fix.
Lets look at a few examples of what you can see now you have all this wonderful data
- See which key phrases are bringing the most traffic (easy)
- Looking at this same report but clicking on the goals tab will show you which convert best
- If you have an ecommerce site, look at the ecommerce tab & see which phrases make the most money
- Look at which landing pages are popular and have the highest/lowest bounce rates – why might they be high?
- You can see which phrases brought traffic to which page & then how well that worked out for you
- See which referral sites bring the best quality traffic, can you get more traffic from them or other sites like them?
- If you run PPC Campaigns look at the same reports for your PPC data – Adwords will show a conversion but analytics will show you the value of that conversion.
- Look at Funnels for you various goals – is the fallout disproportionate at any particule stage in the process
- If you see “problems” make an improvement on your site, make a note of the date then compare your data before and after that date.
- Analytics lets you compare this week with last week, September with June & this quarter with the same quarter last year – any time period you want.
- This is great if you have seasonality as you want to compare with last year, not last month.
- Note that not all data will behave the same way, for instance your bounce rate for direct traffic will be lower (better) than PPC traffic because people know your site & have bookmarked it or know exactly what they are looking for.
- Bounce rates for contact us pages could be high because people find the details they want quickly – that doesn’t mean the page is performing badly.
Get to know your data and your visitor behaviour so you can interpret your data to get the best results.
Strategy use these methods to define goals and measure success so that we can get the best results for our clients. By working together to define goals and set up KPI custom reporting on your analytics this provides transparency for the way we work. If there is anything you want to measure and you are not sure how, we will work with you to set this up.
In addition, we work on results so your success is our success. Find out more about our exclusive 100% Pay-Per-Results SEO Service and our new 100% Results Based CPA SEO.
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