August’s meeting of the SEO Grail Philadelphia brought out a big crowd to discuss web analytics and how it can improve SEO. We had an excellent discussion that featured attendee examples about individual experiences and how many members use analytics to get the most out of their SEO efforts. Get the presentation & notes here: SEO Grail Philadelphia August Meetup Notes.
SEO Basics
It’s easy to get confused by the nature of SEO and the many related disciplines, but at its core Search Engine Optimization is about improving the quantity and quality of traffic. Since all businesses have a limited amount of resources in terms of time or money, it’s imperative to get the best Return on Investment possible.
Focus on Those Most Likely to Convert
To maximize productivity, it’s necessary to focus on those that are most likely to convert rather than trying to serve the masses. To be clear, conversion is taking a desired action and can include purchasing an item, filling out a form or subscribing to an RSS feed. Attempting to serve an overly broad crowd can strain the resources of businesses resulting in poor results, so it’s critical to identify those prospect that are most likely to take the desired action. Web analytics allows you to identify and target those users that are more likely to convert.
Web Analytics Basics
Understandably, to improve results you must start by measuring them and this applies to every website. Therefore one of the first things that any webmaster should do is install a web analytics package – even if they don’t plan on actively using it. The point is that a baseline of performance must be established before you can hope to gain a better understanding of prospect behavior you will have the needed information.
A Sea of Metrics
Perhaps one of the most perplexing aspects of web analytics is wide variety of metrics that can be tracked. Questions like Which ones do I pick? What are the industry standard metrics? and Which ones are most important? are common. To answer these questions, you must understand that the answer is relative to your website.
Understanding Conversion Points
An important concept when using web analytics is that of conversion points. A conversion is when users take a desired action, so for an ecommerce site a conversion point may be defined as a sale; for a blog it may be an RSS subscription and for a lead generation site it may be an email subscription. Needless to say, it can vary based on your goals and there are two types:
A Primary Conversion Point is the action that is the main purpose of your website. Generally it should be your single most important metric.
Secondary Conversion Points are those that can be tied directly to the primary conversion. So if your Primary Conversion Point is obtaining having a user sign up for an email newsletter, possible secondary conversion points could be Bounce Rate (to measure engagement) and Absolute Unique Visitors (measure new visitors).
During our discussion, it was generally agreed that webmasters should do their best to apply the KISS method to adopt a minimum number of conversions points whenever possible. In my opinion it should be 1 primary and 5 secondary, but it can vary.
Low & No Cost Analytics Platforms
There are a number of solid analytics platforms available and we considered three: Get Clicky, Woopra and Google Analytics. I’m going to keep it short & sweet: The consensus from the group was that Google Analytics is more than adequate for most businesses. The biggest exception could be when a website needs real time analytics to measure large PPC budgets ($10K + / Month). Although GA may take a bit of learning, it will be better for you in the long run.
Improving SEO with Analytics
There are many ways in which Web Analytics can be used to improve your SEO and we discussed a handful of methods anyone can use to improve performance, however we started with a big caveat:
Every Website is Different and Therefore Has Different Goals
As an example, we considered four different types of websites: Information, Lead Gen, Ecommerce and Blog. Obviously these are all very different and most sites on the web today are actually hybrids which makes measurement much more complex.
Get Started
Regardless of the complexity level, it’s important to start by selecting and installing an analytics package right away, because without data you can’t make an educated decision. Once you have enough data to establish some sort of baseline, you should then define your conversion points and start tracking them on a regular basis. As the data accrues, you’ll be able to make better decisions.
Analytics Examples to Improve SEO
Once the data has been gathered, it can be used in many ways to improve SEO. During the presentation I offered several examples on how I’ve used data to identify strong SEO opportunities. These include:
Keyword Research – Gather the most popular organic keywords used by visitors to find your site. You may be surprised that with a bit more emphasis on these terms you could improve traffic dramatically.
Content Research – Identify your most popular content. This could be a buyer’s guide, blog post or some other resource. Obviously, you should generally focus on more popular topics and avoid those that receive little traffic.
Most Productive Keywords – I provided an example of how I blend ranking information with web analytics data to identify keywords that are more likely to be productive. This Highly Converting Keywords Report is simply one way to find low hanging fruit.
In short, there is almost an unlimited number of ways in which you can use web analytics to improve SEO. The key is to first understand what your goal is, get started by gathering data, perform some analysis and then act on the results.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Doesn’t the definition of conversion as defined above only fits one of four possible categories; Event.
“To be clear, conversion is taking a desired action and can include purchasing an item, filling out a form or subscribing to an RSS feed.”
What about the remaining three: URL Destination, Time on Site, Pages/Visit ?
RE: Google Analytics answer=1012040
Thanks for your comment & question.
Generally, I was referring to the concept of focusing on a user taking a desired, measurable action and offered a couple of concrete examples. Looking at Google’s description of conversions I think that URL Destination, Time on Site and Pages/Visit can fit under my broad definition. That said, measuring Time on Site and Pages/Visit is a bit less direct, but the point is that they are specific actions being measured.
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